The
majority of the world's trafficked people are in Southeast Asia, and about half
of those are forced into sex work.
The life of a sexually trafficked woman in
Southeast Asia is almost unimaginable. The majority are tricked into leaving
their homes, even in foreign countries, by the promise of a conventional,
well-paying job that would allow them to support their families.
What happens next is something they could
probably never expect.
Their identification and travel documents are
taken by the traffickers, and the women are told they owe the traffickers for
all travel expenses - except they are not going to be serving food or cleaning
houses - they are forced into commercial sex work.
Some 1.4 million (or 56 per cent) of people
trafficked worldwide are in Southeast Asia, according to the UN Global
Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT).
The majority of victims are between 18 and 24
years old. About half of those trafficked are forced into commercial sex work -
of which 98 per cent are women and girls. Sexual trafficking is the most common
form of trafficking in this region - UN.GIFT found that "internal
displacement due to conflict, unemployment and poverty" all contribute to
making them more vulnerable to trafficking.
In many countries in Southeast Asia, it is the
girls who are expected to bring in money for the family - and it doesn't matter
how.
Mental
and physical hell
Sexually trafficked women are often forced to
have sex with as many as five to 15 men each night - and in most places they
are not allowed to refuse potential "clients" for any reason.
Many of the women become addicted to drugs, so
that they can endure what is being done to them - meaning what little money
they are given by the club owners is split between drugs and paying for their
own food and clothing. Often, they don't earn much from the industry at all.
"Liza", a sexual trafficking
survivor from the Philippines, explained that, one night, the owner of the club
she worked at forced her to dance on the stage - despite the fact that she had
just returned from a trip to the hospital for severe bleeding (which had turned
out to be a miscarriage).
"That night there was a Chinese
businessman at the club. He was a friend of the owner and told him that he
wanted me to be his girlfriend - exclusive to him. I was brought to his
apartment and handcuffed to a chair," Liza told Al Jazeera.
"I was brought to his apartment and handcuffed to a chair... he made
me his sex slave." - Liza, sex trafficking survivor
"He made me his sex slave", she
continued. "Finally I was able to gain his trust and he began to leave me
un-handcuffed. That is when I was able to escape."
"Victims of sexual trafficking are
subject to physical and psychological torture. The traffickers will threaten
them, that they'll kill their family if they don't work," said Aimee Torres,
president and founder of Majestic Dreams Foundation.
These women usually have poor health due to
the physical, sexual and emotional abuse; as well as the drugs and poor living
conditions. The risks for sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy depend on
the woman's age and level of exploitation.
The number of adults registered as commercial
sex workers is around 70,000, based on reports from the 2009 Human Rights
Report: Thailand, produced by the US Department of State. However, many
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) believe this is a massive underestimation
- they believe that there are probably more than 300,000 engaged in commercial
sex work.
Exploited
children
The same report estimates that there are as
many as 60,000 children involved in prostitution in the country. However,
accurate numbers are impossible to get because of the underground and hidden
nature of the business.
Child exploitation has recently gone even
deeper underground - making it difficult to combat the abuse of these children,
according to Patchareeboon Sakulpitakphon, programme officer for End Child
Prostitution Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual
Purposes (ECPAT).
"[The children] now tend to be delivered
directly to abusers in hotel rooms through a pre-arranged agreement that may be
made by staff of entertainment establishments," explained Sakulpitakphon.
Children end up in this work for different
reasons; one of the most common is being trafficked illegally. Or they might be
forced into sex work "if there is a burden placed on them to assist in
helping the family financially... While the traffickers make a good profit from
the selling of children, the child earns hardly anything," said
Sakulpitakphon.
Fighting
back
The injustice of sexual trafficking is being
fought in many ways: Rescue missions, education, rehabilitation, empowerment,
the creation of new laws, better coordinated law enforcement and most
importantly, prevention.
"That's what we call a 'hard mission' - where we go in and anything
could happen."- John Curtis, president of The Grey Man
The Grey Man, an organisation based in
Australia, carries out rescue missions in southeast Asian brothels - looking
specifically for children and underage sex workers. The group's president, John
Curtis - along with the other members of The Grey Man - has a background as a
Special Forces commando in the Australian military.
For raids on brothels suspected to have
underage children, they first send in young men from the group to the brothels
posing as Western paedophiles looking to have sex with children.
"When they find them, we get all the
information on covert cameras and then we let the police know if we're going to
do an operation ... That's what we call a 'hard mission' - where we go in and
anything could happen," Curtis explained.
A 'soft rescue' is where "we talk to
girls and see if we can get them out using a social worker ... or tell them
we'll provide them with an education as an alternative," Curtis added.
Rehabilitation
When Liza escaped from being held as a sex
slave, she didn't leave commercial sex work. She went from working in one club
to another. "I didn't think I could go back to Iligan (her home village)
after everything that had happened," Liza explained.
During this time, Liza found out about the
Coalition Against Trafficking in Women-Asia Pacific, and received support and
counselling. This eventually allowed her to help form a new coalition named
Bagong Kamalayan ["New Awareness"] with other women who had survived
sex trafficking.
"I am happy that I am able to help other
women, when before I wasn't even able to help myself," Liza said.
Like many organisations working with sex
trafficking survivors, CATW-AP focuses on the "empowerment of survivors
... the focus is on healing and supporting their self-organising," said
Executive Director Jean Enriquez. "We focus on a bigger perspective of the
problem of trafficking. We support training of the survivors so they can become
better leaders and advocate against the roots of the problem - unemployment,
sexualisation of women and the power of men over women in society."
Programs like these are essential to keeping
survivors from falling back into the same type of work, or deciding never to
try to leave in the first place.
"Many of the women and children go back
to the brothels because the programmes provide only basic education and job
skills - like maybe being a housekeeper. And you think about it ... you're
pretty much saying you can either be a prostitute or some other kind of
servant," explained Torres.
Tomica Baquet, the vice-president of Majestic
Dreams Foundation, continued: "The other difficult thing that comes into
play is the number of jobs available to them ... They have to be sure there's
another option for them."
Prevention
Although rescues and rehabilitation are
important for those already trafficked, prevention is still the most effective
strategy for combatting sexual trafficking as a whole.
"It's more difficult to rescue women than to prevent it in the first
place."- Jean Enriquez, Executive Director of CATW-AP
"We need education in the rural
communities - this will lead to prevention on the supply side on a community
level ... it's more difficult to rescue women than to prevent it in the first
place," Enriquez stressed.
"We also need to educate young men so
they don't want to contribute to the market ... and educate young women to
reduce vulnerability to being recruited for prostitution."
Curtis also recognises the need for prevention
"on the supply side". The Grey Man sends 100 children to school every
day, has built a joint shelter in the north of Thailand and is funding families
and whole villages that have fallen into debt and are at high risk for
trafficking.
"In northern Thailand, in the border
villages, there are whole demographics missing ... women and children from
12-25 are just gone. They've all been trafficked," Curtis told Al Jazeera.
Choosing
to stay
Of course, there are some women who do choose
to partake in commercial sex work. Because of that choice, they suffer from a
social stigma and a lack of recognition of their job as valid. This leads to
unsafe working conditions, lack of healthcare, lack of fair compensation and
social marginalisation.
Liz Hilton, coordinator for Empower - a group
formed in 1984 by activists and sex workers from Pat Pong, Thailand, said there
needed to be a focus on the "human rights of sex workers, and women in
general".
"Sex workers are criminalised and just
generally punished on many different legal levels - they can be punished under
immigration, trafficking and entertainment laws. Yet they are given no
protection under labour law, and get no form of security," Hilton
explained.
While the (mostly male) consumers of sexual
services are generally not punished, women in southeast Asia are criminalised.
This type of law enforcement has not stopped
commercial sex work from continuing - so perhaps the issue should be looked at
from a new angle? One example of this is a law enacted in Sweden in 1999 which
makes it illegal to buy sexual services, but not to sell them. Since that law
was enacted, street prostitution in Sweden was halved.
Support
from the law?
Curtis says that when he involves the local
police in rescue missions, it becomes obvious that some policemen profit from
brothels' continued business.
"We suspect a certain level of corruption
... on one mission the police went into the brothel and came back to report
that there were no girls there, that it was actually a grocery store. But we
had footage of the girls inside so obviously those guys were being paid
off," Curtis said.
Although there are laws against human
trafficking and the sexual exploitation of women and children, enforcement is a
key challenge and uneven, to say the least, in southeast Asia. Officials often
have limited capacity, resources and staffing to address the problem.
To make matters worse, some governments fear
prioritising the issue and making a real effort to end commerical sex work
because they believe it would negatively impact tourism. At the same time,
governments in the West fail to help the situation by not monitoring their
travelling sex offenders and paedophiles.
In general, there is a significant lack of
coordination between local, national and international governmental and
policing agencies. On average, only one trafficker was convicted for every 800
people trafficked in 2006 according to UN.GIFT.
"The punishment that is carried out is
not nearly strict enough to reflect the grave nature of the crimes
committed," stressed Sakulpitakphon.
Renee Lewis
Source: Al Jazeera
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