It is no secret that human trafficking is a major problem in Nepal. What many people do not know, however, is that over the past decade trafficking has become risky and often an unprofitable business for the traffickers in Nepal. This is what Sabin (name changed) learned from his personal experience after he was arrested and sentenced to ten years for trafficking in 2012. Sabin had got involved in trafficking several years before through his interactions at dance bars in Kathmandu, and had expected that he would earn a lot of money from it. He would travel to Nuwakot and lure young women with the promise of a job or marriage before handing them over to another trafficker across the Indian border. Although he did earn some from it, he ended up spending the money as quickly as he made it, and when the police eventually caught him, he was just as broke as when he had started. He now says that he never would have got involved if he had known how little he would make and how severe the penalties were for trafficking. Sabin’s story is not uncommon judging by the findings of a recently published study entitled ‘Imprisoned Traffickers in Kathmandu Valley’ which surveyed 160 traffickers in five prisons.

Traffickers are a surprisingly understudied population around the world given the level of interest there is towards deterring human trafficking, and this appears to be the first time that multiple studies with a gap of time in between have been done on imprisoned traffickers in the same location. The first study of traffickers in Kathmandu Valley prisons was completed in 2006 by Shyam Pokharel, and it served as a baseline for comparing the results of this more recent study.

Cost-benefit trade-off

The results of the new study show that penalties for human trafficking have increased significantly over the past decade in the country. Sabin’s sentence of 10 years is actually below average, and the proportion of imprisoned traffickers serving sentences of 15 years or more has nearly doubled from 21 percent in 2006 to 37 percent today. Similarly, the proportion receiving fines of at least Rs100,000 has more than tripled from 20 percent to 76 percent over the past decade. These penalties are the result of the 2007 Human Trafficking Transportation and Control Act (HTTCA), which prescribes up to 20 years imprisonment and Rs200,000 for a single offense. Not only have penalties become more severe, but the average number of convictions since the HTTCA was enacted by the government has grown from around 50 per year to more than 80. To put these figures in perspective, 84 percent of the countries in the world have less than 50 human trafficking convictions each year, and India, where trafficking is believed to be even more rampant, has half as many convictions per capita as Nepal.

Another interesting finding was that the study participants estimated the likelihood of getting caught at a surprisingly high 38 percent. This may be an overestimate resulting from the fact that they themselves got caught, but it is worth noting that a similar study in the UK found that imprisoned traffickers there still assessed the likelihood of getting caught to be much lower. It was evident that most of the traffickers imprisoned in the Kathmandu Valley did believe that the risks were lower when they first got involved, and also expected to make a lot more money. About 11 out of 12 of them were only involved in the recruitment or early transport stages of the trafficking process, which appears to be not very lucrative. Based on all this, it appears that many of the traffickers incorrectly calculated, or simply failed to calculate, the cost-benefit trade-off of becoming a trafficker in the first place.

Behavioural economics

So, if trafficking really has become a high-risk, low-profit enterprise in Nepal, why is it that trafficking does not appear to have declined? One possible reason has to do with perceptions among traffickers, who form their beliefs about the risks and benefits of trafficking in much the same way as the general public. If traffickers, or immoral individuals who are considering trafficking, believe that it is a high-profit, low-risk undertaking, then it is not surprising that they would choose to traffic people. There is a popular viewpoint in the anti-trafficking community, described in detail by Siddharth Kara in his book Sex Trafficking, that the key to reducing human trafficking lies in an inversion of the cost-benefit calculation that favours trafficking. In other words, in places where human trafficking really is a high-profit, low-risk business—which is thought to be most of the world—changes need to be made in laws and their enforcement until trafficking becomes a low-profit, high-risk business for traffickers. This certainly seems to be a good idea, but is it sufficient for reducing trafficking in places where popular perceptions do not reflect the underlying reality?

The field of behavioural economics has shown that people frequently make mistakes while doing cost-benefit analysis, leading to outcomes that sometimes are not in their best interest or rational as predicted by neoclassical economic theory. If this can happen to ordinary people even when they have all the information needed to make good decisions, how much more might outcomes for traffickers deviate from personal benefit, especially when traffickers often come from poor backgrounds, are undereducated, and possess far from perfect information about the risks and rewards of trafficking? We might still expect them to respond rationally to market changes if they are operating within large, organised, and hierarchical networks, but the available data also do not support this popular view of how traffickers are structured in Nepal. Instead most trafficking cases appear to involve opportunistic individuals, or small, loosely connected networks of up to five or six people. These individuals and small networks are less likely to be aware of, or responsive to, changes in the broader cost-benefit reality.

Greater awareness among potential traffickers of the high risks and low rewards of trafficking is not going to eliminate the problem of human trafficking in Nepal. Many different responses must continue to be implemented at different stages of the trafficking process, including at the source, the destination, and in transit. But increasing awareness among potential traffickers of what have now become the high costs and low benefits of trafficking in Nepal is an approach that has not yet received consideration and may have the potential to help reduce trafficking.

The study cited in this article can be found at http://csk.org.np/imprisoned/

Hudlow is a researcher with a master’s degree in Global Security Studies from Johns Hopkins University, US