What must change before traffickers reach children

In April, Devika (name changed) was rescued from a cramped room in Bihar. She was one of several girls forced to dance in orchestra troupes at bars every night before drunk men who filmed her, groped her, and used the videos to keep her from resisting. A trafficker had lured her away from her home in West Bengal with a promise: a job, a wage, a way to help her family. There was no job. There was only that room.

I have heard these lies and promises too many times to count, but one telling has never left me. In 2013, the Justice Verma Committee, constituted after the Nirbhaya case to reform India’s laws on crimes against women, heard from only one trafficking survivor, a girl produced before it by yours truly.

She was from a poor family in the eastern part of the country, and had gone to school believing an education would widen her possibilities. A man known to her family promised her a job in Delhi. She was put on a train, sold to a placement agency, and subjected to repeated rape, violence, intimidation, and confinement. Escape was impossible. What unsettled the committee was not the cruelty, but how ordinary it appeared at every stage. It convinced them that the trafficking of young girls is among the largest, most hidden forms of rape in our society.

Devika and that girl never met. More than a decade separates them. Different traffickers, different States, the same script: a family’s poverty, a stranger’s promise, a room with no way out. Nothing about the crime has changed. Only its methods have become more organised, more invisible and more efficient.

Trafficking, in law, is not one act but a chain: recruiting, transporting, harbouring or receiving a person, by force, deception or the abuse of vulnerability, for the purpose of exploiting them, whether through sexual exploitation, forced labour, servitude, forced marriage or begging. India has not always understood it this way. In 2011, a case I argued persuaded the Supreme Court to define trafficking in line with the UN Protocol against it, a definition that would shape the offence eventually written into our criminal law. It is worth stating plainly now, because it is the same definition hiding inside both Devika’s story and that testimony from 2013: not a single crime committed once, but a chain of hands passing a child from vulnerability into exploitation.

The scale of the crisis

As the world marks the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons on July 30, the 2025 U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report found governments worldwide identified 1,02,027 victims in 2024 alone but secured only 7,975 convictions, barely one for every 13 victims identified. India’s own National Crime Records Bureau recorded 2,135 human trafficking cases in 2024, involving 6,018 victims, including 2,297 children, and these are only the ones registered as trafficking; many more remain hidden inside missing persons reports, child labour rescues, forced marriages and cases filed under other laws altogether. Child trafficking is not a crime that survives in the shadows. It is an organised criminal economy operating in plain sight.

India addresses the crime of trafficking through provisions scattered across the Constitution, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the POCSO Act, the Juvenile Justice Act and other laws. Each law does its part, but no one authority owns the whole chain from prevention to prosecution to rehabilitation, and that fragmentation is where accountability quietly disappears. What India needs is one law that unifies prevention, protection and prosecution into a single architecture, strong enough to deter traffickers and to carry survivors all the way through rehabilitation and reintegration into society.

The Supreme Court has strengthened this response through two key judgments. In Pinki v. State of Uttar Pradesh, it ordered trafficking trials fast-tracked, rescued children readmitted to school, and survivors compensated as a matter of right. In Prajwala v. Union of India, it went further, mandating a Victim Protection Plan that treats rehabilitation and reintegration as central to justice, not an afterthought to rescue.

Organised response

No single institution can stop trafficking. It requires a whole-of-government response, policing, labour administration, railways, local government and the judiciary acting as one system, and equally a whole-of-society response, in which families, communities and civil society treat a child’s safety as everyone’s responsibility.

That responsibility begins long before a child disappears, and the law already says so. Section 33 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) requires any person aware of trafficking, an offence under Sections 140 to 144 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), to report it to the nearest Magistrate or police station. Section 34 of the BNSS extends this duty to panchayat members and village residents, who must report any non-bailable offence, including trafficking, occurring in or near their village. This is not a policy recommendation. It is a standing legal duty that most villages do not know they carry, and almost none are held to.

Schools need to report absenteeism before it becomes a disappearance, and link vulnerable children to the scholarships and schemes that might keep them home. Welfare entitlements have to reach families before poverty pushes them toward a recruiter’s promise, and enforcement agencies across source, transit and destination states have to coordinate the way traffickers already do.

When prevention fails, rescue cannot be where the state’s responsibility ends. A child pulled out of exploitation but left without protection remains exactly as vulnerable as she was before, to the same networks that exploited her the first time. She often arrives bearing both physical injuries and psychological trauma, and Child Welfare Committees must respond immediately: medical care, trauma-informed counselling, legal aid, and the compensation already guaranteed to her by law.

Recovery also rests on three pillars: school, skill, and scheme. Children must return to education, gain livelihood and skill-development support, and access the welfare entitlements that reduce the very vulnerabilities traffickers exploit. None of it holds while traffickers remain free. Fast-track courts must finish trials within a defined timeframe, because every delay prolongs trauma, exposes survivors and witnesses to intimidation, and lets organised networks keep operating with impunity. Judicial accountability is not separate from the criminal justice response; it is the response.

In India, NGOs and law enforcement agencies have rescued more than 1,50,000 children from trafficking in the last three years alone. Most of these children are still waiting, for their trials to begin, for compensation the law already promises them, for a life put back together, and yet they hold the single clearest account anyone has of how these networks actually operate.

Trafficking is a borderless crime that demands a borderless response: intelligence sharing, joint investigations, extradition, mutual legal assistance, and financial investigations that follow the money across borders, backed by an international registry of convicted traffickers, so a man who traffics a child in one country cannot simply cross a line on a map and do it again in another.

Prevention through disruption

Trafficking is, at its core, an economic crime. Every organised trafficking network survives because someone profits and someone pays. Commercial sexual exploitation exists because there are buyers who want to access children. Forced labour exists because there are employers willing to benefit from exploitation. Demand finances supply. There is no innocent link in this chain. The customer is the crime. The employer who looks away is the crime. Dismantling the network, and confiscating its proceeds will do more damage to organised trafficking than arresting one link in a very long chain.

A Viksit Bharat will not be defined only by economic growth, technological innovation or world-class infrastructure. It will be measured by whether every child grows up protected by the rule of law, and by institutions that reach her before organised crime does.

Bhuwan Ribhu is a child rights activist and founder of Just Rights for Children, which has rescued over 1,50,000 children from trafficking. The views expressed are personal.