"NEPAL'S STOLEN CHILDREN" PART 2

We showed you yesterday the first part of CNN's documentary "Nepal's Stolen Children," hosted by Hollywood star Demi Moore.

Today we'll follow the actress to the border between Nepal and India to witness the efforts of local activists in their fight against human trafficking.

Today I'm with Anuradha at the Kathmandu airport boarding a plane for India.

Or to be precise, to take me to the border Nepal shares with India.

It's across that border that thousands of Nepalese girls are trafficked each year into brothels of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and other Indian cities.

This journey is difficult for Anuradha.

She's so fearless when facing human traffickers, and yet has trouble facing up to her own fear of flying.

As she puts it: "On the ground, I'm a lion; but up in the air, I am a mouse."

Back on solid ground, Anuradha finds her feet once more, and we're soon on our way to one of the 26 official border-crossings along the two and a half thousand kilometer frontier between the two countries.

I'm not allowed to cross into India without a visa but Nepalese and Indians are free to pass without showing passports or ID cards of any kind.

"I'm actually amazed that they don't do some kind of card that had to be shown. For people who do work and have legitimate business going back is...not to keep people going back and forth, but there has to be some better system."

In just four hours at the border, I saw several thousand people crossing over.

Anuradha introduces me to Maiti Nepal's own border guards.

Their slight appearance belies an intense determination which is born from their own experience.

All of Maiti Nepal's guards were themselves trafficked into brothels.

There are fifty guards working for Maiti Nepal across ten checkpoints.

Everyday at the border they would intercept on average twenty girls at risk of being trafficked.

"Can you explain to me, like, how it exactly works?"

"What she says is every girl they watch, and they watch the men also.

They watch and as soon as they catch a suspect, they keep the...one...she takes the girl and she takes the boy.

And then they cross-question.

After cross-questioning, if they find that whatever they are saying is not true,

then if it is a boy, they hand over the boy to the police station.

And then they take the girl and go to the transit home."

"How do they have the authority...like...if they, say, see a rickshaw coming,

They can just stop it or they have to get the police to stop it?"

"Because of the uniform, everybody recognizes and they say 'they are girls from

Maiti Nepal, we should stop there.'"

So then they need to show me, like how it works.

She's asking for the identity card of hers.

It's a daunting task at such a busy border-crossing, like looking for a needle in a haystack.

"This is her grandfather, and the father is working in India.

I told her to read this, and again father also saying:

'I told you not to eat anything people give you.

So don't eat anything if anybody gives...'"

Offering young girls food or drink laced with drugs is a common ploy of the traffickers.

When Anuradha has any suspicions about travelers she's forthright in her questioning.

"He's such a liar. He said he was going for shopping, and then she...

now she took out the whole thing. They're all going to India..."

"She's saying that this is her mother, and this is her daughter.

She has holiday. She's going to India to meet her father.

But she told us lies that she was going for medication.

And now actually I phoned her brother and then he said that..."

"So everything is okay?"

While in this instance there seemed to be nothing wrong, any inconsistencies in the stories raised the suspicions of Maiti Nepal.

The police act largely as onlookers during these encounters, they will respond when Maiti Nepal guards believe they've found a trafficker but simply don't have the resources themselves to actively look for offenders.

Maiti Nepal estimates it's rescued more than 12,000 women in its 20-year history.

Ironically, that's the same number of Nepalese women and girls believed to be trafficked to India every year.

While we are filming a group of four women recently rescued from brothels in India make it back across the border after a forty-hour journey.

Some of the girls asked not to be identified, terrified that the stigma of their ordeal will make them social outcasts at home.

"Four girls have come back home, and they are very happy to be home."

Happy, yes, but also traumatized.

The youngest is fifteen. She was twelve when she was trafficked and the brothel owners force her to take hormones to prematurely develop her young body into that of a woman.

Maiti Nepal has a transit home near the border where rescued girls can begin to recover from their ordeal before being transferred to the main rehabilitation center in Kathmandu, and in some cases face their trafficker in court.

"Every time, you know, every week or every fifteen days,

you have to go to the court with the girl.

So it takes one to one and a half years for one case to be finalized.

So during that period we have to keep the girls with us.

So we console the parents and say that the girls will stay with us.

And during their stay with us, they do some trainings for their life skill and

that is how we re-integrate them into the society.

But society isn't alway ready to accept them back.

"She is frightened of the stigma.

She's saying: 'Please do not tell my husband that I was in Maiti Nepal in India or Maiti Nepal here.'"

It's believed there may be as many as 35,000 Nepalese girls work in Mumbai's red-light district alone.

"I have a son who's seven years old, at my in-laws.

So I would like to go back to my in-laws.

She says my in-laws will also not take me if they know that I have come from working like this."

"I swear on my son I will never do all this kind of work again.

But please don't say that I've come from there."

Another pain inflicted by the trafficker's cruelty, a mother desperately wanting to see her son again but terrified that her family will turn her away when they find out what she's been through.

Being shunned by loved ones is not an uncommon reaction, but what tips the balance from acceptance to rejection?

The answer for one trafficked girl, recently rescued from a brothel, lies in a remote mountain village six hours from Kathmandu.

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