Bengaluru: Social media has come as a blessing in disguise for sex traffickers who are now profusely using the medium to exploit young girls, blackmail them and entrench them in sex trade.The issue was discussed threadbare at a symposium here with Cybercrime experts, legal minds, techies and NGOs exchanging notes on technological challenges that are faced by law enforcement agencies to curb such nefarious practices and possible solutions to arrest the trend.“Websites, social media and chat rooms all are used by traffickers to groom their victims and sell them,” said Adrian Phillips, Spokesperson and legal head at Justice and Care, an anti-human trafficking NGO.
“Internet penetration into rural India also has its repercussions. Our case work of over 10 years shows that increasingly, these traffickers who are keeping pace with technology are exploiting it to trap young girls and expand their illegal businesses,” he added.In 2016, a total of 8,137 cases of human trafficking were reported from across the country, a jump of 18 per cent over the 6,877 cases reported in 2015 as per data released recently by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).
The motive behind over 7,670 cases was sexual exploitation and prostitution, while 162 cases were for child pornography. The ILO, in a recent study, estimated that a staggering 40 million people worldwide are enslaved through human trafficking, making an estimated USD 150bn in profit annually.
Mr Phillips said that one of the challenges case workers face is that traffickers who once recruited gullible victims in person, today have easy access to online groups, social media, apps and chat rooms. The use of technology in trafficking is not extensively documented. However, experiential, and anecdotal evidence shows that internet and other digital technologies, mobile phones or communication technologies are being used for the same,” he added.
“We want to develop a way forward to implement the innovations and necessary tools to make the fight against human trafficking more effective. The idea is to generate a closer-knit partnership between academia, corporate India, Public Sector and NGOs in the fight against human trafficking,” he said.Technology can and is being used to accelerate the reach and diversify modes of trafficking with increased challenges for prevention, investigation or prosecution. Therefore, the need is to understand its usage by criminal networks and to build capacity of society and institutions to also deploy technology as a solution to effectively combat trafficking.(UNI)