Uprooted and Unprotected: How Displacement Incites Trafficking of Women and Girls
Forced into a white van, detained at a military checkpoint, or called in for questioning at a police station and never seen again – this is what women and girls have been facing as a global issue for decades. Whole families have vanished without a trace, including tiny children whose grandmothers now grimly display their photographs. Mothers sit in encampments where they face harassment and intimidation from the security forces. Regardless of any small victories, these families have lost what little faith they had that their government might provide truth or justice for the crimes committed against them.
This reality is reflected in Kate Cronin-Furman’s work with survivors of systematic abuses. Survivors carry the evidence of their victimization with them: photographs of the missing, news clippings, and police reports. Her work, along with Roxani Krystalli’s documentation of survivors of human rights violations in post-war Sri Lanka, Colombia, and elsewhere, shows a pattern – families left alone to piece together disappearances that states refuse to acknowledge.
Yet despite these stories, internal displacement remains a growing crisis throughout South Asia. Displacement and economic migration affect millions of women and girls, exposing them to trafficking networks that prey on instability. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Southeast Asia is a major origin, transit, and destination region for human trafficking. Displaced individuals—refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and climate migrants – are among the most at risk, targeted for forced labor, sexual exploitation, and increasingly, coerced online scamming. It is time to act now and save these women and girls.
To understand this crisis, we must recognize how displacement and migration create moments when traffickers exploit women and girls who are vulnerable, desperate, and unfamiliar with new environments. This issue is intersectional: poverty, discrimination, weak governance, and insecurity compound one another, leaving people with few options. Armed conflicts and insurgencies across Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and parts of Bangladesh continue to push families from their homes. When violence escalates, they flee quickly, often without documents, money, or community support – conditions traffickers know how to weaponize.
Climate change adds another layer. Extreme weather and disasters hit women hardest due to long-standing gender inequalities in mobility, information, and access to resources. After disasters, women and girls often struggle to access relief, making them even more vulnerable to exploitation. A vicious cycle begins: each crisis deepens the risks of the next.
Ethnic-driven violence also forces women and girls to flee. Adivasi, Rohingya, and other minority women face intersecting discrimination, and when persecution targets their communities, they have few safe avenues for protection. Traffickers know these groups are less likely to receive police support and more likely to be coerced or abducted.
In India’s Northeast and central tribal regions, women displaced by insurgency or large-scale land acquisition migrate to cities like Delhi or Mumbai, where unregulated “placement agencies” push them into domestic servitude or exploitation. Many disappear because they travel without paperwork or formal contracts. In 2019, the Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs issued a directive under the Nirbhaya Fund to set up and strengthen Anti-Human Trafficking Units (AHTUs) in every district, and to provide financial assistance to States, UTs, and border guarding forces. But without consistent implementation, traffickers continue to operate freely.
A similar pattern exists in Nepal. Girls from districts affected by poverty, caste discrimination, or political instability are brought to Kathmandu or trafficked across the open border into India. Traffickers pose as job recruiters or romantic partners, targeting girls working in brick kilns or construction camps. The border remains porous, and exploitation continues with little oversight.
Across the region, trafficking is treated as a border or security issue rather than a gendered one. Unregulated recruitment agents operate openly, especially in India and Nepal. Families lack safe, legal pathways for migration and are pushed toward informal brokers. Police rarely investigate missing girls who migrate for work, and shelters and rehabilitation programs remain severely limited.
There is still time to act. Governments and international organizations must regulate and monitor recruitment agencies through licensing and strict inspections. Safe migration centers for women and girls seeking work in cities are essential. Programs similar to the Shakti Vahini Anti-Trafficking Initiative, which supports rehabilitation and works alongside police during rescue operations, should be expanded across the region. And local police must be trained to treat missing migrant girls as potential trafficking victims, not runaways.
The patterns are clear. The evidence is overwhelming. And still, women and girls continue to disappear while officials issue statements and committees draft plans that never reach the ground. South Asia can no longer afford this indifference. Trafficking thrives because governments refuse to confront the gendered nature of displacement, refuse to regulate recruitment agents, and refuse to invest in protection systems that actually work. The question is no longer whether the region understands the crisis – it is whether it has the courage to act. The lives of millions of women and girls now depend on the answer.
