Missing children in India is among the most serious issues in child protection. National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) notes that 59,262 children went missing in India in 2020. With 48,972 children remaining untraced from the previous years, the total number of missing children went up to 1, 08,234. Human trafficking, especially targeting children has worsened due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Shuttered schools and jobless households have conspired to increase the risks to children and are unknowingly pushing children into the trap of traffickers. A significant lack of reliable data on trafficking in India makes it difficult to create informed programming or push for policy and systems change.
World Vision India’s Anti-trafficking project conducted a survey with 80 child survivors of trafficking who were trafficked from the state of West Bengal and rescued under difficult circumstances and various places across the country. Survivor champions from the project Survivor’s Network spearheaded and conducted interviews to collect the data and shared the finding during a program organised recently at Kolkata. The situational assessment survey focused on three aspects – examine patterns of abuse of child survivors of trafficking for sexual exploitation; analyze the challenges service providers face in assisting children survivors and assess prospects for integration of child survivors into the wider society.
