In 2022, I was part of a police raid where I met a 26-year-old girl who was rescued from an illegal spa operating in Delhi. She said that she was originally from Sindhupalchowk. In fact, her family, which included an ailing father and two younger siblings, was still based there. In 2015, right after Nepal was shaken by one of the worst earthquakes in its history, her family had lost everything. All their savings, livestock and even their house were reduced to rubble. The responsibility of rebuilding came upon her, and in her quest to provide for her family, she was recruited by a group of traffickers posing as well-wishers offering fake promises of a better life.

Her story is not unique. It is one witnessed across almost every house in Sindhupalchowk and Nuwakot, with some villages having no young people left. It has been 11 years since the land under their feet shook both literally and figuratively, unleashing a decade-long suffering and putting thousands of lives at risk of trafficking for forced labour and/or sex work. Theirs is a story you might never see in newspapers, as the ordeal only begins once the cameras shift their focus away from the survivors.

For a country vulnerable to climate-intensified disasters, the greatest dangers begin after the shaking stops and the waters recede. The scale of the recent Bhotekoshi disaster took me back 11 years, when I had just started my research on trafficking and visited Sindhupalchowk and Nuwakot after the earthquake. The survivors’ account was traumatic: first an earthquake, then a landslide, and eventually, the most intimate aspects of human suffering and tragedy came in the form of forced migration and trafficking. I feel that it is of utmost importance that we talk about the plight of those at the receding end of human trafficking, and the fact that it goes hand-in-hand with climate change and its impact on ecosystems.

A disaster has two avatars. The first is the disaster itself. The one we photograph; the relentless search for the missing; the bodies, the helicopters, the tarpaulins, the relief convoys—just to name a few. Then, notwithstanding the adequacy of the actors’ accountability—the relief, the help and the well wishes that follow the ordeal of separation and loss imply significance indeed.

The second rendition is neither documented nor photographed as much, and it opens with a much harder question: How do we restart our lives? The land is gone or unusable. The livestock is dead. Twenty years of savings went with the house. The road that carried goods to the market is somewhere downstream. And the cameras have left. Eleven years on, as I still walk into the villages in Sindhupalchowk, that question remains unanswered. Youth carry stories of disaster behind their hustle and a new breath of yearning as they start their new base in Kathmandu, India, the Gulf, or Malaysia.

Concurrently, an influx follows in the form of volunteers, local organisations, humanitarian staff and others. Most come to help, and their work matters, but the disaster creates opportunity for those with a sinister motive, and they travel the same roads, in the same convoys, wearing the same clothes. Traffickers do not announce themselves. They watch. They notice someone who has lost a husband; whose children have dropped out of school; who has no income yet has a loan to repay; or someone who is simply desperate enough to leave. They may present as recruiters, employers, contractors, family friends, relatives or romantic partners.

Gender is not an antecedent here, and more often than not, they are someone the family already knows. They rarely begin with force. They begin with kindness, buying food, paying for a bus ride. They know of a factory looking for workers, a room a young woman can stay in, or a school that might be interested in enrolling a child. In a community trying to rebuild from scratch, these offers do not immediately look suspicious. They look practical. They look generous. Sometimes, they look like the only opportunity available.

Trust is built through such unsuspecting, seemingly humane acts and mundane gestures, often long before any exploitation unravels. By the time the real motive surfaces, the person could end up in a rabbit hole, far away from home and separated from the community that once protected them. This is why waiting for cases to be reported should not be the first warrant for action. By the time a case is reported, the harm is already done.

In a country like Nepal, where migration from rural areas to metropolitan cities is common due to unemployment, and where seasonal and long-term migration occurs, including during natural disasters, it is natural to see large numbers of people migrate to restart their lives.

The perils of natural disasters and calamities come like a double-edged sword to the affected. There is seemingly an almost curated web of favourable conditions laid out especially for the traffickers—first the disaster, then the displacement, debt, uncertainty, and the lack of any pertinent alternative. The ground report during the course of two months after the 2015 earthquake substantiated this stance. UNICEF counted 245 children pulled back from traffickers or from illegal placement in children’s homes. The number is far from what the ground reality is. The UN’s appeal that year put 40,000 women at immediate risk of sexual violence. The two figures measure different things and should not be added together. What they share is that both were published in advance, and both read as background noise.

Rebuilding, therefore, is not only about houses, roads, schools and bridges. It is about people’s ability to make safe choices. Beyond the tangible aspects, it is about reinvesting in people’s lives and potential, with a sincere commitment from those in power. Ensuring basic safety for women should not be reduced to a moral obligation and tokenistic protective gesture. The very audacity of unscrupulous actors like traffickers capitalising on the lack of it is a reflection of an overall collapse of the nation and the society’s social fabric and political order. Just because we may want to feel we are unaffected, we must not shy away from the responsibilities on our part too. We owe it to ourselves and to society to ensure its overall growth and security.

Trafficking is one of the many symptoms of a cycle of violence in a patriarchal system that begins much closer to home, within the domestic realm, and is sustained through the structures and behaviours we continue to normalise. Addressing that domestic sphere, therefore, is not peripheral to the fight against trafficking. It is part of dismantling the cycle itself. Since the Nepal case illustrates the intricate relationship between trafficking and natural disasters and calamities, climate-change scholars, policymakers and commentators must position trafficking within the broader discourse on climate change and disaster vulnerability.