Every year, thousands of men, women and children fall into the hands of traffickers, in their own countries and abroad. Almost every country in the world is affected by trafficking, whether as a country of origin, transit or destination for victims. Trafficking in persons is a serious crime and a grave violation of human rights. We are members of the human family and so everyone is related in some way, precisely because they too belong to the same human family. Not potatoes in a sack! To be sold at a price!
Today we find ourselves confronted with a gigantic task of undoing or rather redoing what has already been done. It’s been encouraging to know about the Anyay Rahit Zindagi, which is the nodal NGO for integrated anti-human trafficking unit of Goa police has been enunciated in a study conducted on human trafficking of Bangladesh. Not only once in a year, declaring “World Day Against Human Trafficking” is enough and resolutions taken to declare that such a day is necessary to raise awareness of the situation of victims of human trafficking and for the promotion and protection of their rights. We must fight tooth and nail every day against the irresponsibility and immaturity of some people.
Recently one of the local dailies published about the modus operandi and the journey of deception and agony for unsuspecting women from Bangladesh that begins in a village and ends in hotel rooms, in Goa and brothels in other parts of India. What has gone wrong with us human beings? What betrayal of human trust! Human vulnerability! We are our brothers and sisters keepers, not destroyers.
We are worthy of our name as human beings when we have opened our hearts to all, and our goodness is to be measured by our capacity for communion with others.
Fighting against human trafficking, the challenge is loud and clear; people are waking up to the pain and suffering of these victims and to the reality of human cruelty. Cruelty of selling and buying human beings is what happens when we humans have no compassion at all, when we lose all feelings for others ,when ego reign supreme, when the heart is hardened. There is a saying ‘behaving worse than animals”
Pope Francis on human trafficking and slavery says. “No to children, women and men treated as discarded material. It’s our own flesh that’s at stake here! It’s our own flesh that’s being sold! The same flesh I have, that you have is on sale, and you are not going to be moved for the flesh of your brother or sister. Every human being is worthwhile created to be the crowning beauty of all creation, having a complex relationship with the world we live in being children of the earth, not junk! Many are made into prostitutes and exploited each day
There are two types of men, those who take care of pain and those who pass by. We all of us have in our hands, the responsibility and also the possibility of making the world much better and safer for our children our women.
