Arrests follow CMS anti-sex trade drive

Ruby Rumjon, Anjali Guptra and Hasna Khatun, working for CMS, act out the role of prostitutes at Greenbelt 2005.
[Photo ©CMS ]

The first arrests of sex traffickers in an area of Bangladesh notorious for illegal smuggling of women and drugs have followed the launch of a CMS-backed project to eradicate the trade.

The wave of arrests came at the end of June in Meherpur District - a border area in the east of the country where the CMS project is based.

It followed an education drive in the capital, Dhaka, run by the Church of Bangladesh Social Development Programme which is advised by CMS mission partner James Pender.

The seminar was attended by more than 100 Bangladesh élite including the district commissioner, senior police, border patrol officers, and journalists.

The woman running the work in Meherpur, Juliate Malakar, has been addressing crowds in Britain at events such as the Greenbelt Festival, to raise awareness and backing for the scheme.

“This is just the start,” she said. “We are hoping for a kind of ripple effect, as we implement further actions.”

The project monitors the amount of trafficking, publicises international legislation that exists to prevent it, and helps with information and skills training for women in the villages, who are traditionally regarded as male property.

The rise in HIV/AIDS in India means that employers of sex workers in Middle Eastern countries and even in India itself prefer to use women from Bangladesh where HIV is still relatively uncommon.

It is believed that more than a million have been trafficked over the last 30 years. The figure is now 20,000 a year, many through the Meherpur area.

A girl can be sold into prostitution for just 1000 takka (£10). Dalals - pimps - the most dangerous of whom are women themselves, get around the border controls, and sell the girls on to Mumbhai, Rajasthan, and Bihar in India. The recent arrests were of a couple living in the same village from which girls are trafficked.

Until recently, India’s ritual prostitutes used to work behind grilles, in cage-like cells so they could be seen, but could not escape. CMS believes the cage is still a relevant symbol of the captivity of Asia's sex slaves among some of whom Partners work today.

‘Setting Captives Free’ is the name of a broader CMS focus on modern forms of slavery that began with a campaign against child soldiers in Northern Uganda in 2003. It will climax in 2007 with a planned national tour of African Snow - a play by award-winning screenwriter Murray Watts about a former West African slave Equiano Olaudeh.