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

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.