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Misery of the dark world: assessing risk of young women trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation in Darjeeling Himalayas using fuzzy TOPSIS

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Abstract

Today’s world is gravitating with one of the most decisive forms of atrocities i.e. “Human Trafficking”. In the past decade, such atrocities have fluttered to such an extent that it becomes the world third largest form of ‘transnational organised crime’ after firearms and drugs. Darjeeling Himalayan Region (DHR), the northernmost physiographic divisions of the border state West Bengal, India has been considered as one of the major source regions of trafficking. For its strategic geographical location as well as socio-economic dispossession, this organised crime extent its wings and put the poor women and minor girls into the high risk of threat and ruined the basic human rights. The present study tried to apply FMCDM (Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making) approach to understand the most significant socioeconomic and physicalenvironmental risk factors of trafficking for the most targeted age groups of women in DHR using fuzzy logic. Therefore Fuzzy-TOPSIS has been applied to evaluate the criteria weights and rating of alternatives. The results reveal that the most targeted age group are the young women belong to 16–25 years and less than 15 years. Acute poverty, low level of living, illiteracy, misuse of social network, backwardness, lack of skills among peoples, unemployment, disruption family life, improper patrolling, neighbours insecurity, lack of amenities, porous border, natural barrier etc., are the most significant factors that put women to take high risk decision to migrate and thus trap them into trafficking. Finally Pareto Analysis has been performed based on defuzzified weights of criterion value derives from fuzzy TOPSIS analysis to highlights the most significant factors which produce maximum overall effect. This risk assessment would help the stakeholders to identify the most significant factors responsible for trafficking in DHR and help them to take necessary initiatives by adding threat visualization and minimisation the rate of such organised criminal consent not only for this area but for border regions also.

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Notes

  1. Though, young boys from West Bengal are also trafficked by the racketeers to other states of India and foreign destinations, especially to the Middle East for camel jockeying, begging, bonded labour, and other filthy jobs. Even literature also reveals that men are also victimized to trafficking yet most of the trafficked victims are women and children (Miko and Park 2001). Each year, thousands of young women across the world are allured, abducted, or sold into forced prostitution and involuntary marriage (UNODC 2012a, b). Based on a survey, UNICEF identified that more or less three million women in India work as sex workers, and 40% of whom are minors (Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2009). Henceforth, in this present study, the researchers primarily restricted the analysis to understanding the rising issue of trafficking in women and girls in the study area only.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to give our hearty gratitude to Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR, File No. Sc-2/ICSSR/2016-17/RPS) for funding this research work. We are also thankful to the students of Geography department, Vidyasagar University for their great assistance during intense survey.

Funding

Author Biswas, P. and Das Chatterjee, N. declare that this research work has been funded by Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR, File No. Sc-2/ICSSR/2016-17/RPS).

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  1. Department of Geography, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, 721102, India

    Priyanka Biswas & Nilanjana Das Chatterjee

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  1. Priyanka Biswas
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Author Biswas, P. & Das Chatterjee, N. declare that they analysed this work very profoundly and try to visualize the crime scenarios in the study area.

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Correspondence to Priyanka Biswas.

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Biswas, P., Das Chatterjee, N. Misery of the dark world: assessing risk of young women trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation in Darjeeling Himalayas using fuzzy TOPSIS. SN Soc Sci 4, 82 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-024-00878-w

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