‘Bangladeshi women engaged in forced prostitution in India’

Bangladesh government today (June 17) claimed that four lakh women from the country were engaged in forced prostitution in India as it admitted that their trafficking was a “rapidly growing problem” despite massive social and police campaigns. “Every day, 50 Bangladeshi girls are lured across the Indian border and sold,” Home Affairs Adviser Major General (Retd) Abdul Matin said, as Bangladesh opened a new police unit to crack down against women and child trafficking. Citing an official report, Matin said 90 per cent of the trafficked women were “forced to engage in prostitution.” He claimed that four lakh Bangladeshi women were engaged in forced prostitution in India. Besides, an “estimated 40,000 female children are exploited in Pakistani brothels,” he said. The special police unit was constituted amid intensified campaign by women and child rights groups and newspaper reports on human trafficking while the adviser asked NGOs and rights groups to supplement government’s intensified security vigil in the frontlines. “Bangladeshi girls who are trafficked to India by organised networks usually end up in brothels in Kolkata or Mumbai (as) Bangladeshi traffickers have built up bases in the border districts of India in West Bengal and Assam,” he said. In a statement, the senior government official also alleged “many (trafficking) victims are raped by the traffickers or by Bangladeshi and Indian border patrol guards.” Bangladeshi courts in the past several years handed down death penalties to eight human traffickers while 134 others were awarded life imprisonment, officials said. (With inputs from PTI) ( This post is from an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by APakistanNews.Com.)