An insidious epidemic is hiding in plain sight in Nepal with more than 20,000 women and girls trafficked out of the country every year into horrific circumstances.
But it’s an epidemic an Australian charity — and a group of Australian YouTubers best known for performing wild stunts on video — are determined to shine a light on.
The horror centres on young Nepalese girls and women, desperate to find a way out of poverty.
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The human trafficking scheme begins at the Indian border, where women are promised a better life, as long as they cross over into India.
What the girls, all snatched from vulnerable situations, tragically don’t realise is that when they jump on the backs of motorbikes or into the cars of human traffickers is that their freedom is no longer theirs.
After crossing the border into India, the girls are tricked into working in “dance bars” and forced to meet their never-ending “quotas” in brothels across the country.
CEO of Every Daughter Matters Ross Nancarrow, the charity working to help stop human trafficking, spoke to 7NEWS.com.au about some of the confronting stories his team deals with on a daily basis.
“Just a week-and-a-half ago, I was talking to a young girl who had started to be raped by her father. It was just a horrific situation,” Nancarrow said.
“She was trying to get out of there. She was 11, 12 years old at the time.
“We later intercepted her at the border. She’d run away from home. She was just trying to get a shot at a bit of life. But she was vulnerable. And no doubt she was about to be trafficked.”
Her story, and the thousands of others like her, is what drives Nancarrow.
“She’s now in one of our safe houses, we’re providing care for her, education in human rights, legal rights, all of those sort of things,” he said.
“(We’re) trying to prepare her for a future where she can enter the workforce at least, perhaps pursue her education.”
The incredible work Every Daughter Matters does also resonated deeply with How Ridiculous — a Perth-based YouTube group best known for mind-blowing stunts that they film and upload to the video platform.
The team from How Ridiculous has teamed up with Every Daughter Matters to raise awareness and much-needed funds to support the fight to save as many girls as possible.
The YouTubers recently spent a week in Nepal to work with the charity.
Every Daughter Matters has rescued more than 4000 girls from human trafficking and intercept more than 140 girls every single month.
After being intercepted by a team of eagle-eyed spotters, girls are interviewed and, if required, taken to a safe house where they can be cared for and counselled.
The How Ridiculous team were able to hear the stories from some of the girls in the safe houses.
“Sitting in the rooms with these girls and hearing their stories and hearing the darkness that they’ve come from, it does break your heart. And it sits with you in a way that you can’t really describe,” Herron said.
“But the flipside of being in there, in that room, is that they now have hope.”
Reflecting on the trip, How Ridiculous member Brett Stanford told 7NEWS the work was about fighting the causes that put people at risk.
“One of the biggest indicators for girls to be at risk of trafficking is often they’re uneducated, they’re really poor. They don’t have a lot of opportunities in life. So they’re more desperate for a way to get out of this situation,” Stanford said.
How Ridiculous has built a reputation for its crazy stunts and larger-than-life personalities.
Their success online has led to them garnering 23.9 million subscribers on YouTube with billions of views on their crazy stunts and epic challenge videos.
“We just have fun being three Australian guys and … we have a team vibe and just enjoy each other’s company and come up with crazy ideas that we try and pull off,” member Derek Herron said.
But putting aside their crazy YouTube videos, the group say their recent work in Nepal has had a lasting impact.
“It was a story that we’re really passionate about telling and something that we thought was worthwhile for our channel to share the story on, despite it being absolutely nothing like what we normally do,” Herron said.
“We’re three good friends that feel called to do this as a living, and then be so blessed with the platform that we built.”
Herron said their channel had never been about just them.
“It’s about the stories we can tell, the people we can impact. And we know we impact people just with our craziness, but we knew we could impact people on a deeper level through sharing this story that no one probably would have seen coming from our channel,” he said.
How Ridiculous member Brett Stanford said their work with the charity had impacted them all on a personal level.
“After hearing some stories about what [the women] went through, we just felt really led to do more. So we had the idea of, ‘let’s go and see what it’s like on the ground and make a video of it’,” Stanford said.
“Hearing some of these stories of how girls have just gone through hell — it was full-on and really impacted me even more so because I’ve got three daughters of my own. I know the love I have for them.
“To imagine that these young girls, who are someone’s daughter, going through this stuff just really breaks my heart because I imagine what would it be like? What would I feel if my daughters went through that?
“If they were trafficked, if they were stuck in this sort of abuse and slavery and in brothels … it actually makes me so sick. It makes me so horrified to the depths of my soul.”
Nancarrow will never completely lose the heaviness of the situations he encounters in Nepal — but said he uses the tragedy as his motivation.
“It certainly affects me … but it’s also the driver. It’s also the thing that says to me, ‘oh man, we can do more. We can stop these beautiful, innocent girls being trafficked and these horrible things happening to them. We can do that’,” he said.
“And unless we take a stand where it’s happening in these places like Nepal, be assured … if we don’t stop it there, it will come here much, much quicker.”
How Ridiculous and Every Daughter Matters partnered together to launch a GoFundMe with the goal of saving 5000 girls from a life of bondage and oppression.
The teams have also worked to produce custom clothing, with all the proceeds going directly towards helping fund the work of Every Daughter Matters.
Reflecting on the project, Stanford spoke about how many people were naive to the prevalence of human trafficking saying “it’s not always in the ways you think”.
“There’s a lot there’s a lot more darkness in the world than you think,” he said.
“But also, there’s a lot of people doing a lot of great things about that. And, when you find causes, you really respond well to and are passionate about …. go all out. We’ve got a great opportunity in this life to help others.”
