Child Trafficking on the Rise in India

Bangalore: The gore reality of children going missing in the country is a nightmare, to which one wakes up each day. Most of these children are trafficked or sold and some are recovered from placement agencies or elsewhere.

Child trafficking is a serious national and international concern. A large number boys and girls are affected by trafficking each day and it violates the basic right of a child to grow up in a family environment. It steals them of their life of dreams and possibilities depriving them from learning, playing and being loved.

In some cases children and their families are enticed by better job offers and living options, others are just nabbed form the streets. These children are exposed to a wide range of danger which includes violence, neglect and sexual exploitation.

The child victim of human trafficking is accounted to approximately 6 lakh to 8 lakh yearly, smuggled across the international borders. Human trafficking is the 3^rd largest lucrative immoral industry run worldwide. The trafficked children are used for prostitution, forced into marriage, used as cheap or unpaid labour, illegally adopted, used for sport and organ harvesting. Some children are recruited into armed groups.

As per UNICEF a victim of child trafficking is “any person under 18 who is recruited, transported, transferred, harboured or received for the purpose of exploitation, either within or outside a country". It is one the hardest crimes to record and investigate, for this reason it’s hard to get the accurate data. However the latest number is estimated to 1.2 million children across the world as per childlineindia.org.in