Exploring the Link between Gender, Migration, and Human Trafficking

Migration has always been part of human life – people move for work, marriage, education, or simply survival. But for millions of women and girls, the journey from a home village to a distant city or country does not end in opportunity. It ends in deception, debt, and exploitation. The line between voluntary migration and human trafficking is often thinner than we imagine, and understanding how the two intersect is essential to grasping one of the most pressing human rights challenges of our time.

Understanding trafficking and migration 🔗

Human trafficking is not the same as migration, but the two are deeply entangled. The internationally accepted definition comes from the UN Palermo Protocol of 2000, which describes trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of persons through threat, force, coercion, fraud, or abuse of power, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation may include sexual exploitation, forced labour, slavery-like practices, servitude, or the removal of organs.

Migration, in contrast, is the movement of people across regions or borders, usually voluntary and often driven by hopes of better employment, marriage prospects, or escape from poverty and conflict. The problem arises when this movement is intercepted or manipulated. A woman who leaves a Bihar village for a domestic job in Delhi, or who boards a flight to the Gulf for work as a housemaid, may begin her journey as a migrant and end it as a trafficked person – her passport withheld, her wages unpaid, her movement restricted.

Historical patterns and regional flows 🔗

Trafficking has long followed the geography of inequality. Within India, around 90% of trafficking is interstate, while only a small fraction is international, making internal corridors the dominant pathway. Women and girls from poorer states such as West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, and Assam are routinely transported to wealthier urban centres like Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, and Bengaluru. Internationally, Indian women have historically been trafficked to the Middle East for commercial sexual exploitation and domestic servitude, while women from Nepal and Bangladesh are trafficked into India through porous borders.

The 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report notes that climate change, sudden-onset disasters like floods, and slow-onset events such as drought have intensified large-scale displacement, further exacerbating vulnerability to traffickers. Cyclones in the Sundarbans, droughts in Marathwada, and floods in Assam have all been documented as triggers for distress migration that ends in trafficking.

How migration turns into exploitation 🔗

The transition from migrant to trafficked person rarely happens through dramatic kidnapping. It usually begins with a promise. A relative, neighbour, or middleman offers a young woman a job as a maid, beautician, or factory worker in a city. Sometimes she is told she will be married. Travel is arranged, debts are advanced for transport, and on arrival, the terms change entirely.

According to the US State Department’s 2025 report on India, many Indian migrants who willingly seek employment abroad are forced into construction, domestic work, factory labour, and other low-skilled sectors, especially in the Middle East and Malaysia, often following recruitment fraud and exorbitant fees. Indian women working as domestic workers in Gulf countries consistently report indicators of forced labour, including non-payment of wages, contract violations, and physical abuse. Some are also exploited in sex trafficking while migrating for jobs.

The role of recruitment fraud and debt bondage 🔗

Unregistered labour agents play a central role in this pipeline. They charge migrants high “placement fees”, which then become debts that workers must repay through years of labour. This is the foundation of debt bondage – a slavery-like practice that traps workers because they can never earn enough to clear what they owe. The Tamil Nadu spinning mill industry’s Sumangali scheme, where young women are promised a lump sum at the end of a multi-year contract for dowry or education, has been documented as a setup that frequently amounts to bonded labour, with some women also subjected to sex trafficking.

Gender-based vulnerabilities 🔗

Why are women and girls disproportionately affected? The answer lies in the layered inequalities they navigate from birth. Trafficking does not strike randomly – it concentrates where patriarchy, poverty, and weak social protection overlap. Studies suggest that women and girls account for roughly 80-90% of victims trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation in India, and they are also disproportionately pulled into domestic servitude, forced marriage, and unpaid care work where abuse is hidden inside private homes.

Economic inequality and limited livelihoods 🔗

Economic exclusion is a powerful push factor. India has one of the lowest female labour force participation rates among major economies. When families face distress, daughters are often the first to be pulled out of school and sent to work, and the first whose marriages are arranged in haste – sometimes to strangers in distant states who turn out to be traffickers. Poor families, unable to provide for all their children, may send their daughters away in search of opportunity, unknowingly handing them to traffickers.

Discrimination, education gaps, and skewed sex ratios 🔗

Gender discrimination compounds economic vulnerability. Limited literacy reduces awareness of rights and restricts a woman’s ability to recognise fraudulent job offers. Caste, religion, tribal identity, and disability further deepen risk – Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim women, along with women with disabilities, are over-represented among trafficking victims. India’s skewed sex ratio in certain northern states has also created a market for “bride trafficking”, where women from eastern states are bought and transported to Haryana, Punjab, and western Uttar Pradesh to fill the shortage of brides – a practice that often disguises sustained sexual and domestic exploitation as marriage.

Weak social protection and migration bans 🔗

India still maintains restrictions on the migration of women under 30 and over 50 to certain countries, mostly in the Gulf. The intent is protective, but observers, including the US State Department, have repeatedly noted that such bans increase the likelihood of undocumented migration, pushing women into unregulated channels where traffickers thrive. When legal pathways are closed, illegal ones expand. Without safe, regulated migration routes, women who choose to move anyway lose the protections that documented status offers.

Case studies of trafficked women 🔗

Statistics convey scale, but case studies convey what trafficking actually does to a person. The patterns below are drawn from documented cases reported by anti-trafficking units, courts, and civil society.

The Gulf domestic worker 🔗

A 32-year-old woman from Hyderabad is recruited by a local agent who promises a salary of fifty thousand rupees per month as a housemaid in Riyadh. On arrival, her passport is confiscated by the employer. She works eighteen hours a day, is not paid for months, is denied food, and is physically assaulted when she complains. She cannot leave the house. Her case surfaces only when a relative in India contacts the Ministry of External Affairs through the Pravasi Bharatiya Sahayata Kendra helpline. This pattern, repeated across thousands of cases, illustrates how legal labour migration can collapse into forced labour the moment a worker crosses the border.

The interstate “marriage” 🔗

A 17-year-old girl from a tea garden in Assam is offered marriage to a man from Haryana through a middleman. Her parents accept a small payment. Upon arrival, she discovers she has been “married” to multiple men in the household and is expected to perform domestic and sexual labour for all of them. Cases of this kind, frequently flagged by organisations working in the Northeast, sit at the intersection of bride trafficking, forced marriage, and sexual exploitation.

The trafficked girl from a flood-affected village 🔗

After the 2020 Assam floods, a teenage girl from a displaced family is approached by a woman who offers her a job in a Delhi beauty parlour. She is instead sold into a brothel in the GB Road red-light district. NCRB data analysed by Child Rights and You shows that in 2022, more than 172 girls went missing every day on average and another 170 were kidnapped – a hidden population from which traffickers continuously draw.

Forms of violence faced by survivors 🔗

Across these cases, the forms of violence are remarkably consistent: physical assault, sexual abuse, restriction of movement, withholding of identity documents, non-payment or under-payment of wages, denial of food and medical care, threats against family members in the home village, and psychological coercion through shame and stigma. Even after rescue, survivors face social stigma, family rejection, and difficulties in reintegration, which can push them back into the same networks – a phenomenon known as re-trafficking.

The human rights lens 🔗

Trafficking violates a constellation of human rights at once: the right to life with dignity, freedom from slavery and forced labour, freedom of movement, the right to health, and the right to work in just conditions. The Indian Constitution explicitly prohibits trafficking and forced labour under Article 23, and a network of laws – the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code (now Section 143 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita), the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, and the Juvenile Justice Act – together form the legal scaffolding. Yet enforcement remains uneven, conviction rates hover near 10%, and Anti-Human Trafficking Units across states remain under-resourced.

A gender-sensitive response, then, has to do more than rescue and rehabilitate. It has to address the conditions that make exploitation profitable in the first place – economic exclusion of women, child marriage, low literacy, weak social protection, and unregulated labour recruitment. It also has to listen to survivors, who often understand the architecture of trafficking far better than policymakers do.

What do you think? Should India lift its restrictions on women’s overseas migration in favour of stronger regulation of recruitment agents, or do such bans still serve a protective purpose? And how should we balance a woman’s right to migrate freely with the state’s duty to shield her from exploitation?

References

1. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/protocol-prevent-suppress-and-punish-trafficking-persons
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_India
3. https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-persons-report/india/
4. https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/india/
5. https://borgenproject.org/causes-of-human-trafficking-in-india/
6. https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-trafficking-in-persons-report/india
7. https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/the-gone-girls-of-india-cry-report-on-ncrb-data-on-missing-girls-says-situation-grim
8. https://medcraveonline.com/JHAAS/human-rights-and-trafficking-in-women-and-children-in-india.html