Afza’s father had one condition if he were to allow her to return home: that she leave her child behind. A survivor of sex trafficking who became pregnant during roughly two years at a brothel, Afza was eventually found by police in 2015 and reintegrated into her family without her baby. She was only 13 years old when she left her two-month-old son at a child care home. She was married off a few months later. “I could not handle him because I was so young myself,” Afza said. “But I could not bear the thought of giving him away. After returning home, I did not speak for months.”
Now 19 and a mother of two other children, she has almost forgiven her father. The stigma of her having given birth to a child because of rape would perhaps have been too much to bear for the family, she says, and would certainly have made it much harder for them to find her a husband.
– Cyclone Aila transformed a mainly self-sufficient agricultural society in the Sundarban into a market-based one, but without the tools needed to survive the change.
– This transformation encapsulates how India’s Sundarban region is changing, and is being forced to change, due to the overwhelming effects of climate change.
– One particular effect has been an uptick in child trafficking, which experts say is the result of the state’s focus on flagship projects over the needs of the people.
Thousands of girls like Afza go missing in West Bengal every year, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau. About a third of those missing officially come from Afza’s home in the Sundarban. The world’s largest mangrove rainforest sprawls across India and Bangladesh and forms a natural border between the Bengal delta and the Indian ocean. It is one of the most climate vulnerable locations on the planet.
Climate change has taken an enormous toll on the rainforest in recent years. Cyclones, floods, river erosion and soil salinisation – the result of saltwater from the Bay of Bengal encroaching further and further into the low-lying Sundarban – have repeatedly uprooted families and decimated the incomes of residents who have traditionally relied heavily on agriculture and fishing for their livelihoods.
Multiple UN agencies such as UNICEF and the UN Development Programme have warned that climate change will increase exploitation of minors, including trafficking. This fear is already reality in the Sundarban. The Fuller Project and The Wire have interviewed a dozen child trafficking survivors, as well as over a dozen activists, lawyers, environmental experts and government officials, who describe how repeated natural disasters and environmental changes have created a highly vulnerable population that is increasingly at risk of participating in or becoming victims of trafficking.
Like Afza, many face a challenging reintegration into a collapsing society where they remain vulnerable to exploitation, often in the form of child marriage or re-trafficking. Eight of the 12 trafficking survivors The Fuller Project and The Wire spoke with were impregnated as minors.
For several climate experts The Fuller Project and The Wire spoke with, the experiences of these girls highlight critical gaps in climate policy, which they say falls far short of meeting the scale of the needs and focuses far too much on flagship infrastructure projects that fail to address the root causes of trafficking or the complexities of the social upheaval taking place in climate vulnerable regions such as the Sundarban. “When the climate is affected, it immediately creates ripple effects. The minors are on the fringes,” said Barun Kanjilal, a health economist who has spent the past 10 years conducting research in the Sundarban.
A new kind of slavery’
Like the other survivors, Afza requested to be identified by a pseudonym. Her voice was resigned yet steady as she recalled an all-too-brief childhood. She grew up in Lebukhali village in a mud home repeatedly destroyed by floods. Around the time she should have been entering primary school, she was sent off instead to become a domestic worker in Kolkata by her family, who were struggling to make ends meet.
One day in 2013, she met a neighbour from her village while boarding a train from Kolkata to Lebukhali to visit family. He kidnapped her by spiking her drink. Afza would end up spending months in a brothel in Pune, about 1,650 km away on the other side of the subcontinent. She was only 12 years old at the time. When police found her during a raid and brought her to a child care home, she discovered she was four months pregnant.
Nervously toying with a plastic orange necklace around her daughter’s neck, she snaps back to the present. “When my husband sees me crying he says ‘Let’s go and get him back if you know where he is.’ I ask him, ‘How will I ever know where to find my son?’” Afza and her family lost their home to Cyclone Amphan in 2020, along with thousands of others. Her in-laws provided her family of four with a makeshift space, but following a feud, they now insist her family vacates that space.
Most days, Afza worries about the lack of livelihood opportunities, the dwindling rations, and a canal that floods her home when it rains. Her husband worked in Andhra Pradesh’s paddy fields but returned home during last year’s lockdown. In the Sundarban, there is barely any work: the crops suffered too much damage in the past year. In this pressure cooker economic environment, it’s becoming more and more common for increasingly desperate people to consider trafficking their neighbours and even family members. The number of girls recorded missing in West Bengal have climbed up steadily in recent years, from 5,986 in 2016 to 6,640 in 2020. While there is no breakdown of the data specific to the Sundarban, the two districts that encompass the Indian side of the forest account for 32% of cases involving sexual offenses such as trafficking – despite being home to less than 20% of the state’s population.
Anti-trafficking activists and climate experts told The Fuller Project and The Wire that the official figures capture only a fraction of the scale of the trafficking in the region because most cases never get registered with the police. Families can be hesitant to file a case in the first place due to the stigma, and when they do, police often refuse to register them due to pressure from well-connected traffickers.
The Sundarban districts of South 24 Parganas and North 24 Parganas were the hardest hit by both Cyclone Amphan in 2020 and Cyclone Yaas in 2021. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said the impact of Amphan, which cost the state an estimated Rs 98,100 crore, was worse than that of COVID-19. The tropical storm turned into a devastating super-cyclone while passing over the Bay of Bengal, where the water was 2º C above normal as a result of human-induced climate change.
Amphan and Yaas hit a population still reeling from the effects of Cyclone Aila in 2009. A World Bank survey five years after Aila found that only 6% of the population had fully recovered from its economic impact. Human trafficking in the Sundarban is not a new phenomenon, but the impact of Aila made it dramatically worse. Kanjilal, the health economist, said that Aila transformed a mainly self-sufficient agricultural society into a market-based one, but without the tools needed to survive the change.
“Climate change is paving the way for a new kind of slavery,” Kanjilal said. “A huge population is still living on the river banks. These people have the potential to become climate refugees whose rights go completely missing…