It all began with a friend request.
‘There was a man who used to chat with my sister on Facebook’ Chandani* explains ‘he added me and started messaging. He told me he could get me a well-paid job in Iraq. I never met him. One day, he sent someone he called his “brother” with a visa and a passport.’
Just over a year ago when this stranger added her on Facebook and slid into her DMs Chandani, who is now 35, became one of the women who are trafficked every single hour in Nepal, which isone of the world’s top ten trafficking capitals.
While there are no official statistics for how many young Nepali women have been targeted by traffickers on social media, all over the world from Europe to the United States, social media stands accused of helping traffickers and people smugglers (known as didis and dalals in Nepali) to target people they know are in desperate situations.
WATCH MORE: Find out how people traffickers have been utilising social media in Nepal in our exclusive short film...
Today, Chandani sits opposite me in a quiet room at a safe house run by Shakti-Samuha (a non-profit organisation which works to help the survivors of human trafficking). It is located on a side street, in an unmarked office building, tucked behind a busy petrol station serving a gridlocked main road.
Through the window, yellow dust combines with rain and low clouds. You can barely see the Himalayas which run along the northern edge of the green valley containing Nepal’s capital. Sujata Singh, my translator, explains that the dust is coming from construction work to rebuild the city post-earthquake.
The news cycle has moved on since 2015 but in Nepal, the aftereffects of the catastrophic 7.8 and 7.3 magnitude earthquakes that struck the country are still visible. At the time headlines and warnings from NGOs predicted a humanitarian disaster in the making but, as the news cycle moved on, Nepal’s earthquake stopped making front pages. In fact, if you google “Nepal trafficking” right now, the first story that appears is this one about baby chimpanzees.
Natural disasters are good for the people-trafficking industry. Nepal’s earthquakes boosted the country’s already prospering modern slave trade, because they left people vulnerable, separated from their families and in need of work.
According to a recent report by border guarding force Sashastra Seema Bal, the number of trafficking victims has risen by 500% since 2013, and according to NGO Plan International UK, more than 8000 women and girls are trafficked in Nepal every year. Combined with the rise of social media as a tool for targeting people, Nepal’s earthquakes created the perfect modern operating conditions for traffickers.
Leaving the country for work is not unusual in Nepal, and the number of male economic migrants has been increasing year on year for some time. But for young women, the allure of a new life comes with an added risk.
Chandani’s situation is case in point. Like many young women who grow up in rural Nepal, she had long been frustrated by her lack of options when opportunity arrived in her inbox. ‘Everyone in my family works on the farm’ she says ‘it is hard and I don’t enjoy it’. According to a recent UNESCO report, she has good reason to feel dissatisfied with her lot. Despite the fact that the legal minimum age for marriage is 20, 37% of Nepali women marry before the age of 18 and 10% are married by the time they’re 15. Knowing this all too well, Chandani didn’t want to get married. ‘I don’t see many women doing well in married life,’ she laughs, ‘I see men cheating.’
The agent slid into her Facebook messenger inbox shortly the earthquakes - which saw her family living in a temporary shelter. While she had never met the agent, she already had a vague connection to him, he had been messaging her sister on the site about ‘work opportunities abroad’ for a while. This meant he had been able to establish a bond of trust with them both. He had groomed them.
After a few months of DMs, the agent sent Chandani a passport and said a job was ready for her as a housekeeper in Iraq. He then arranged for her to be escorted to Delhi by his ‘brother’ who, it turned out, was a dalal. Once there, instead of boarding a flight to the Middle East as promised, she was locked in a hotel room with 18 other girls against her will for several weeks.
Chandani looks away when I press her on the details but says she knew she was about to be sold because tales of trafficking are everywhere in Nepal. It’s a known risk and one she had taken willingly in the hope of changing her fortunes. She says she eventually succeeded in convincing another girl to lend her their phone and managed to get a message to Shakti-Samuha, who got the ball rolling for her rescue.
As Chandani prepares to leave the safe house (she has to be back at work tomorrow), we say our goodbyes. Before she leaves, she confides in me that she will try to leave Nepal again ‘I will go anywhere I can make good money’ she says defiantly.
While many women and girls in Nepal are still trafficked by people they know - friends of friends, relatives and spouses - social media grooming and the rise of mobile phones are generally acknowledged as a growing problem despite the lack of official data on the scale of their role. Charimaya, the safe house founder, tells me that, as with much of our lives, trafficking is increasingly moving online. ‘Technology is one of the biggest challenges we face when it comes to stopping human trafficking’ she says as we sit down in her office. ‘We are seeing girls trafficked after receiving a cold call, we are seeing boys adding girls on Facebook, marrying them, gaining their trust and then selling them’.
Mobile phones are so popular in Nepal that the number of subscriptions now actually outnumbers the population.
In the 90s, Tamang herself was trafficked. She was drugged, abducted and taken to a brothel in India. Technology, as she sees it, has given the trafficking trade a new lifeblood. ‘Social media has really helped the agents a lot’ she says ‘nowadays they don’t have to go out to the rural villages to find girls, they can search for potential targets online and just send them a message with one click.’ Indeed, Wired has repeatedly reported on tech’s role in enabling traffickers globallyand criticised giants like Facebook for not doing enough to help.
For Laxmi, now 23, it also started on her phone, with something almost as mundane as Chandani’s Facebook message: a cold call. ‘I told the man calling that I didn’t know him’ she says ‘but he kept calling and eventually we started talking’. The person on other end of the phone called himself Raj, and over time, he groomed Laxmi. She was 15 at the time.
Laxmi, grew up in the small village of Nuwakot. ‘I don’t know how Raj got my number but I trusted him’ she says ‘I could never ever get work in my village…I felt like this was my chance’.
Raj invited Laxmi to travel to Delhi with his sister, promising her that she would have her pick of jobs. After a long bus journey from Nepal to India, it quickly became clear to Laxmi that the woman with her was a didi and that she had been trafficked to a brothel. ‘I was locked in a room’ she remembers ‘everyone was speaking in Hindi which I couldn’t understand…I was given make-up and dresses, told to wear them and get on with the work’.
Eventually, Laxmi was rescued during a police raid of the brothel. The owners had tried to force her to go into the basement and hide, as they always did, but she refused and the police found her.
Laxmi does not share Chandani’s desire to leave Nepal again. Now living in Kathmandu. She works in a beauty store and is determined that soon she will open one of her own. One day, she says, she might even have a chain of them. ‘It’s important for women to have businesses’ Laxmi tells me ‘we have to do it, to show others that it can be done on our own terms…this is how we get our independence’. On her phone, she shows me pictures of the products and jewellery she wants to stock.
Some say that change could be on the horizon. Politically,Nepal is at a critical juncture because of local political devolutionand agrowing number of young women speaking out to call on politicians for more protections against trafficking and, crucially, better opportunities for women in Nepal.
I ask Charimaya what thinks about this - is her country at a turning point? She says ‘it’s all very well and good’, but it means nothing if society’s attitudes to women don’t also change.’
The rain has temporarily stopped. We go up to the roof of the safe house, Sharmila, another survivor, is laughing and joking. She takes out her phone, starts listening to music and dances. ‘I used to wish I was born a boy’ she tells me ‘maybe then I could have helped my parents financially without trying to go abroad’.
Sharmilla is determined not to keep quiet about her ordeal. She sees speaking out as a way of ending the silence, shame and stigma that she thinks prevent change.
‘Change has to come’ she says ‘we always hear that women are being exploited...all over the world. We have to ask ourselves why? One voice is not enough, we need global awareness, we need to be united together.’
The Internet has brought us all closer together and made the world smaller, but it’s also a tool which has enabled those who want to exploit others to thrive. We are more connected than ever, but our attention spans are short. How much do we really know about what is happening to women, like us, elsewhere in the world when their stories are no longer make headlines?
*names have been changed to protect identities
This report was supported by Plan International UK and Plan International Nepal
Do you want to help end trafficking of young women and girls in Nepal? Find out more about Plan International’s campaign here.