By Matters India Reporter
Jashpur: A 15-year old tribal girl, who was trafficked, was rescued by Jeevan Jharna Vikas Sansthan (JJVS), an NGO of the Sisters of Franciscan Missionaries of Mary (FMM) based in Jashpur, Chhattisgarh last night (July 9) after a great ordeal.
The girl who supposed to get admission in 8th Grade along with her friend was reached to Mumbai from Chhattisgarh. Her friend handed over her to her friend’s sister who is already in Mumbai trafficking (buying and selling) girls in a racket.
“Once I got the news that she is taken to Mumbai, immediately I contacted the girl who had taken her to Mumbai, and urged her to bring the girl back, or else face police action. So immediately she spoke to her sister who is in Kalyan, near Mumbai and send along with a boy to the village in Chhatisgarh,” Sister Anne Jesus Mary Louis, directress of JJVS, told Matters India on July 10.
“After the girl reached to her friend’s house in Chhattisgarh, JJVS rescue team and I went to receive the girl but the family did not hand over her to us. They lied, hid the girl and kept on demanding for money from us,” said the nun, a pioneering frontline social worker and human rights activist who is embedded in a rural Chhattisgarh helping those who are most vulnerable.
The accomplice’s parents of the trafficked girls also arranged some Gundas (thugs) to threaten the nun and JJVS staff.
“All were drunken young boys but I stood up and spoke to them. Then with much difficulty they handed over the girl otherwise, we would take further actions with the police,” the nun described.
They were shouting and yelling even with filthy words at JJVS staff. But Almighty power stood rescue team’s side and won the girl and brought her to JJVS center.
“The village is the border of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand states. It was a very thick forest in between. Just got out of their house, within a kilometer, wild elephants were passing in front of us, but with the grace of God, nothing happened with us. It was night around 9.30 pm on July 9. So it was really a miracle for us,” Sister Anne said.
Since 2010 to the present, JJVs has rescued 143 girls and 68 boys from various forms of human trafficking and other forms of slavery and exploitation.
Chattishgarh, like many other tribal states in India, faces the sex trade with a supply chain.
JJVS works in a rural area of Chhattisgarh—among tribal people who are very vulnerable to this exploitation. Its location, and so many other rural locations like it, is the origins of the sex-trade supply chain. The people JJVS serves have very little. They have very little money. The standard of education is very poor. Access to sanitation is healthcare is sparse.
They are hundreds of miles from the nearest city. There are no NGOs in the vicinity.
Traffickers know all of this. They know that the parents of children in the area are easily deceived, and sometimes so desperate that they will sell their own children.
These traffickers use age-old means of deception to draw women and girls away from their homes. They often promise opportunities in cities. Sometimes they dress up their evil in benevolence, pretending to offer education in return for work or money.