CHENNAI: Human trafficking gangs pushing young women into sex trade are making use of social media, including Whatsapp, to recruit victims as well as solicit their exploiters, a study done as part of a PhD thesis of a candidate of the University of Madras’s Criminology department has found.
The study by M Premanand, who successfully defended his thesis on Friday, surveyed 76 survivors (all women) from government homes in Chennai, Madurai, Tiruchy, Salem, and Coimbatore, and 85 convicts and under-trials lodged in prisons across Tamil Nadu, half of whom were women. Half of the survivors were from Tamil Nadu, 25% from West Bengal and Bangladesh, and the rest from other states.
The study found traffickers advertised the women through WhatsApp, websites, and social media sites like Facebook. The survivors reported being contacted by traffickers through social media and other online channels, apart from references through friends and other victims.
The study found the exploiters, mostly from Tamil Nadu, included law enforcement officials, military personnel, politicians, and members of the judiciary.
To avoid getting caught, 30% of the traffickers interviewed said they bribed policemen, 23.5% said they befriended the personnel, while 17.5% said the officials themselves became customers. However, hiding the women and the services were the most cited method to avoid enforcement officials.
The researcher has also recorded that 41% of the women, the majority of whom were under 30, had to engage with eight exploiters every day. More than half of the surveyed women were engaged seven days a week.
The research found 70% of the survivors were below the age of 35, while half of them were either divorced, separated, or widowed. A majority said they were deceived by promises of better earnings, while 47.4% said they entered voluntarily, pushed by poverty, needing to pay off family debts, or medical emergencies. Almost two-thirds of the traffickers were people known to the victims and exploited their vulnerable position.
Professor M Srinivasan of the University’s Criminology department and Premanand’s guide said enforcement officials need to be equally, if not more, equipped with modern technology to trace such ads on social media platforms and weed them out. He also stressed the need for sophisticated investigation to crack these cases, as it was not a routine policing job.
“The issue of trafficking for sex trade could only be prevented at the community level by providing livelihood and employment opportunities to vulnerable women,” Srinivasan added.