Antislavery Usable Past

Maya

2015 (Narrative Date)

There are an estimated 171,000 people living in modern slavery in Nepal. Within Nepal, bonded labour exists in agriculture, brick kilns, the stone-breaking industry, and domestic work. Sex trafficking of Nepali women and girls increasingly takes place in private apartments, rented rooms, guest houses, and restaurants. Nepali and Indian children are subjected to forced labour in the country, especially in domestic work, brick kilns, and the embroidered textile, or zari, industry. Under false promises of education and work opportunities, Nepali parents give their children to brokers who instead take them to frequently unregistered children’s homes in urban locations, where they are forced to pretend to be orphans to garner donations from tourists and volunteers; some of the children are also forced to beg on the street.

In 2015, two massive earthquakes hit Nepal, killing nearly 9,000 people and injuring tens of thousands of others.

Maya and her family were left vulnerable after an earthquake and a woman attempted to traffick her from Nepal to India.

Everyone shouted “Earthquake!” All the houses collapsed and the entire village became dark. All the water sources dried up, there were many landslides.

For around three, four months we six siblings lived together on our own. A woman approached us and said, “You don’t have enough to eat, you are living in such poor conditions.” She said she would get us employment in a hotel and asked us to go with her. At the time there wasn’t enough food, living in a temporary hut was difficult, it rains so much in our village, our roof used to leak. She was an old woman I did not think she would harm me. I trusted her.

[The woman attempted to traffic Maya to India, but she was intercepted at the border. She now lives and works at a shelter.]

I want to do this, I used to do farm work in my village, this work feels the same.

Narrative and image provided by UNICEF

Country

Theme

Type

Narrative

Tags

Natural Disaster

VOICES: Narratives by Survivors of Modern Slavery

This is the world's largest archive of modern slavery survivor narratives. Across more than a million words spoken or written by survivors of modern slavery, we can see why slavery persists in particular hotspots, analyse patterns in trafficking routes, identify vulnerabilities, understand more about the challenges survivors face in liberation, and discover new antislavery solutions. These narratives offer the chance to systematically design new antislavery strategies based on the experiences, ideas and solutions of enslaved people themselves.

The database is searchable by country, name, theme, and narrative date. Narratives can be viewed in list or map form. A short introduction provides context to each narrative. Narrative provenance appears after the main narrative text.

For ideas on how to use this database, please see our accompanying guide.

Project Lead: Zoe Trodd. Team Members: Andrea Nicholson, Lauren Eglen, Rosemary Pearce, Olivia Wright.

Project Funders: AHRC Antislavery Usable Past grant (2014-19), ESRC/AHRC PaCCS Modern Slavery: Meaning and Measurement grant (2016-19), and AHRC-GCRF Antislavery Knowledge Network grant (2017-2021).

For any queries about the collection please contact: rightslab@nottingham.ac.uk. If you wish to cite a particular narrative, please acknowledge the survivor’s name, the provenance of the narrative and cite: Voices Database, the Rights Lab, University of Nottingham.

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