Disaster and Human Trafficking

The book highlights the root cause of human trafficking and analyses how factors of vulnerability affect the marginalized, especially during and after a disaster. Human trafficking like other studies on disaster research, needs to be tackled from various perspectives such as empowering the vulnerable people, creating awareness, strengthening the disaster risk reduction measures and creating a common platform to fight the vicious circle by breaking its continuity and making strategies victim centric and people friendly.

The book adapts a multidisciplinary approach embedding concepts from political, social, economic and anthropological perceptions. The discourse in the book revolves around the emotional and psycho-social stress factors including weak implementation of laws and policies at various levels. The content weaves around three themes -- magnitude and interlinks between disaster and human trafficking; policies and protocols on disaster risk reduction and human trafficking and community participation and institutional support. Through these themes, the volume works on identification of the vulnerable areas which are not in compliance with the Sendai Framework of Action, 2015 in the backdrop of the Disaster Management Act of India, 2005. The volume will be of immense interest to a wide range of practitioners, researchers, academicians, policy makers, political leaders, gender experts, international organizations, disaster management authorities, civil society organisations, and scholars working in the area of human rights in general and trafficking in particular.

 

Note: This research was funded by Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR).

Human Trafficking is complex, layered and lies at the intersections of multiple vulnerabilities, gender being among the most significant ones. This gets exacerbated during both natural and human made disasters.  Any attempt to either understand oraddress it will be fraught with challenges if women and girls' unique vulnerabilities, as well as their needs, voice, choice, agency and safety is not centre-staged in any effort. Mondira's book does exactly that...it succinctly and in simple words explores the compounding discriminations, including structural inequalities, that cause and result in women and girls differential gendered vulnerabilities to being trafficked during disasters. Once this is understood, the solutions can be specific, gender responsive, and sustainable.

-          Anju Dubey Pandey, Gender Responsive Governance and Ending Violence against Women Specialist, UN Women, New Delhi, India

With teaching and research experience spanning over four decades, Mondira Dutta has been the Founder Chairperson of the Centre for Inner Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. Her research focuses on gender studies, disaster research and human security, collecting varied experiences from her widely travelled field visits among the various remote areas of South Asia including Afghanistan, Central Asia and other parts of the world. She has been an ICSSR (Indian Council of Social Science Research) Senior Fellow at the Special Centre for Disaster Research, JNU and has been the India Chair under the Indian Council of Cultural Relations at  Dublin City University, Ireland in 2019. She was awarded the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’, at the International Congress of Women for Justice, Equality, Peace and Progress, sponsored jointly by the United Nations Information Centre for India and Bhutan. As a Consultantto UN Women, her work on Human Trafficking is widely acclaimed. Her most recent study as a Consultant cum Senior Researcher to the UN Women was on the ‘Socio Economic Impact of COVID 19 – Gender Perspectives’ in collaboration with NITI Aayog, Oct 2020.