Bride Trafficking: An Untold Crime

INTRODUCTION

“Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.” Words of Sir Edmund Burke discern slavery as a weed which should be snatched out from soil otherwise it will spoil your main crop and whole of your hard work. If we parallelize the same with female trafficking and slavery in India which are being brought and sold for the cultural validation practices and under the shed of marriage.

Understand by this: Almost in all underprivileged families there must be almost 4-5 kids among which at least 2 or more are girls, with almost no possible source of income as they live in distant villages of an underdeveloped Indian state. The economic burden of marriage is definitely not a liability these families can afford, yet marrying off the daughters is an aspiration it has long nurtured and is duty-bound to comply with, in such cases if a potential suitor appears and offer money for marriage instead of its demand then, such suitors become a god. Hence, from here the cycle of her sale started.

TRADE OF BRIDE

In a society with low female sex ratio grooms are allowed to pay for their brides. This would inevitably be a society more prosperous and less progressive, in such manner that here money enables the audacity of nurturing orthodoxy by practicing female foeticide and infanticide at such scale and intensity that there remain hardly any women to marry their men. As a result of which regions remain with low females and hence unmarried males deprived of nuptial bliss desperately and therefore, use their economic powers to enable their frail societies. This is the scenario where one region’s economic constraints become the cure for another’s cultural sickness through an arrangement. Eastern states are mostly the seller states while Haryana, Punjab and West Uttar Pradesh are the buyer states in such arrangements.

At many places, people don’t even know that doing these kinds of acts or indulging in such practices is a crime because they involve themselves in such practices out of courtesy and part of their custom in good faith seeing the present scenario before him that is less number of female in the society.

After considering the real-life scenario’s it is important to note that the trade of women for marriage is just one aspect of this depraved practice as first-time buyers are often not the last ones. As a bride who has been ‘bought into marriage’ from what is considered, is never accepted as a “Laxmi” of the house in the groom’s family because the main objective behind such marriages is:

• Mainly use them for childbearing; or
• As a servant in the house

Once, the object is fulfilled her buyers sell her off to another prospective buyer and this spirals into a deplorable life cycle of sexual, physical and psychological violence for such woman continues till her last breath.

There are several reported and unreported instances of horrific and heinous acts that trafficked brides are put through, even as their buyers quit trading them to prospective buyers. This practice of buying and selling a bride is known as Bride Trafficking. The most shocking part of the scenario is that such activities are still not identified and covered under the definition of crime.

According to the oxford dictionary meaning “, Bride trafficking is the illegal industry of purchasing brides as a property for due consideration”. Organized traffickers and family members sell girls and women as brides without their consent who are victims of abuse, exploitation, and slavery. Bride trafficking is, undisputedly, a result of the increasing male population in relation to the female population. India is home to a rather massive, organized and lucrative bride trafficking network be it Haryana, Assam or Rajasthan, the Indian “Bride Bazaar” predominantly flourishes in parts of the country because of low sex ratio and an increasing number of poverty striking families as are incapable to spend on the dowry and marriage of their daughters. More specifically, according to the National Crime Records Bureau Report of 2016 (1), over 33,835 girls and women were kidnapped and abducted for the purpose of marriage in Indian and the number is increasing rapidly every year.

Unfortunately, in India, there are no significant laws and policies for identifying an act of bride trafficking is a crime and also for the protection of their human rights. Though the Indian Constitution strictly prohibits all forms of trafficking, wistfully comprehensive laws that specifically prohibit and penalize such practices are not in existence by now. India is a member to both the human rights conventions which explicitly prohibit forced marriage, namely the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women 1979 (“CEDAW”) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 (“CRC”) but the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act, 1956 solely focuses on prostitution and fails to focus on the burning issue of bride trafficking. The proposed Trafficking Persons (Prevention and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018 is plagued with multiple legal and policy issues. Section 366 of the Indian Penal Code which prescribes punishment for “kidnapping, abducting or inducing a woman to compel her into marriage” is the sole remedy perhaps, which may come to a trafficked bride’s rescue. However, it has no legal provision for repatriation, rehabilitation, and reintegration of victims. Evidently, in the absence of a concrete legal and policy framework, the problem of bride trafficking skillfully persists in India.

AVAILABLE REMEDIES

‘The Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection, and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018’ is plagued with multiple legal and policy issues. Even as Section 31(v) of the Bill stipulates ‘trafficking for the purpose of or under the pretext of marriage’ as an aggravated form of human trafficking, still it is incapable of resolving the issue of bride trafficking by relying solely on its criminalization. Further, the point of ‘rehabilitation’ of the victims has not been even taken into consideration because once, the women are being rescued then there must be someplace to keep safe and treat them as they have been faced with a high degree of mental and physical torture because their families will never accept them back. Thus, the absence of a purposeful rehabilitation mechanism will only make things worse for the victims.

In the recent case of 2017 in Independent Thought v. Union of India (2), the apex court narrowed the scope of Marital Rape and held that “sexual intercourse with minor brides is a criminal offense. In this case, the Court read down Exception (2) to Section 375(3) of the Indian Penal Code. As per the aforesaid exception, rape of a married girl child (below 18 years of age) by her husband was treated as an exception to the crime of rape itself”. This case provides us with a view that as the crime of Marital rape is also unknown in Indian laws, therefore, leading to increasing the rate of heinous practices like bride trafficking by the chain traffickers without any fear.

[The author, Pratibha Bansal is a final year law student at Banasthali Vidhyapith, Rajasthan]

1. Ministry of Home Affairs, National Crimes Record Bureau,(March 16, 2020, 4:00 PM), ncrb.gov.in/StatPublications/CII/CII2016/pdfs/Crime%20Statistics%20-%202016.pdf

2. (2017) 10 SCC 800

3. The Indian Penal Code, 1860, Universal Publication, 164-65