Through this handbook, effort has been made to facilitate every actor’s understanding of their role and course of action while working on the issue of child trafficking, as well as develop their understanding of the substantive and procedural laws that often come into play. Victim protection too forms an integral part of the handbook, focussing on the protection rights of the victims as laid down in the domestic law and established through international guidelines.

The handbook is a result of two years of developing an understanding of the domestic law and international definitions and guidelines on child trafficking and testing various drafts of the handbook before arriving at its present and final state. Initiated by HAQ: Centre for Child Rights when it hosted the National Secretariat of the Campaign Against Child Trafficking (CACT), the handbook is also part of the series of IEC and training materials developed by CACT, with support from BMZ and terre des homes (Germany) in the year 2005-06.

While the campaign had planned two separate resource guides on national and international laws respectively, in the final outcome, national and international laws have been merged together in this handbook itself as and where necessary, in order to build a holistic legal understanding on the issue. The first set of inputs for the handbook came from Maharukh Adenwalla, a Mumbai based child rights activist and lawyer. We thank her for the same. We also thank Nandini Ramchandran for her legal inputs and suggestions before the finalisation of the handbook.

View the handbook