The Chairperson of India’s National Commission for Women (NCW), Rekha Sharma, has said that human trafficking increased by 15.56 per cent in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, last year, as compared to the 2021-22 financial year but it is “just the tip of an iceberg”.
Rekha Sharma in a media interview ahead of the anti-human trafficking workshop organised by the NCW here, said: “In the last few years, we have seen in Kashmir also that women are getting targeted. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data shows that it has increased 15.56 per cent last year compared to 2021-22. And this is just the tip of the iceberg because the data does not give the true picture.”
She said the purpose of holding the workshop in Kashmir was to make people aware of the menace of human trafficking. “We must now work to save our daughters and our children. This is the main purpose of making it (workshop) happen in Kashmir,” she added.
“Human trafficking is a serious crime and it does not have boundaries whether it is Kashmir or Kanyakumari. This is prevalent everywhere. And sometimes, the victims of the trafficking do not even know that they are the victims,” Sharma said.
“The main problem is due to lack of awareness. This is our first of its kind programme in Jammu and Kashmir where all the forces —commissions, NGOs — are together to make people aware, especially the students, that nobody is out of reach of this problem,” the NCW chief said.
Sharma said the women were being trafficked under the pretext of being provided well-paying jobs. “They give false promises of jobs here, or elsewhere in India, but they don’t get paid properly and are abused. Even in Kashmir, trafficking through marriage has increased. Women are coming from West Bengal for jobs but then they are married forcibly to somebody who sexually abuses them,” she said.—KMS
