Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 1999

NEPAL: Debating the Difference Between Trafficking and Prostitution

Trafficking - the selling of women and children for monetary profit, most often leading to bonded prostitution - is one of the most visible topics in South Asia. The media is saturated with stories of women and children sold into sex slavery, where they are deprived of their most basic human rights. Social movements in the sub-continent are now actively working with this issue. The debates, however, still see no clear-cut division between trafficking and prostitution. As the phenomenon of large numbers of women working as sex workers in urban areas continues to increase, this issue must be taken beyond the discourses of trafficking to include larger issues of the economics of migration and labor and the difference between forced and voluntary prostitution. For our first discussion on Bol!, we have invited Meena Poudel, the Programme Coordinator of Oxfam Nepal and a longtime activist, to discuss what the South Asian activist networks have been doing on the issue.