Traffic in Women in Asia-Pacific

 

Unscrupulous agents prey on women desperate for work—legal or illegal—in the new global economy.

BY LAURA SKOLNIK AND JAN BOONTINAND

In the Asia-Pacific region, a long tradition of labor migration predates colonialism and has been molded by complex social, political, and economic factors. The movement between different social and cultural environments often has a powerful impact on the people involved. In many societies, a certain amount of prestige and status is given to those who successfully return from their sojourn elsewhere.

For instance, in northeastern Thailand, young men traditionally try to find opportunities away from home for a while to show their ability to support themselves before returning home.1 The seasonal rhythm of the agricultural lifestyle in that region well accommodates these temporary migrations.

In modern times, the 1970s oil boom in the Middle East and stepped-up economic development in East Asia in the 1980s created a large demand for Southeast Asian laborers, particularly in manufacturing and construction. In addition, during the 1970s and 80s, western European governments allowed entry of temporary laborers from poorer countries to reduce labor production costs.

Mass temporary migration has thus become an integral part of the globalization of production and the economy. The International Labour Organisation estimates that in 1995, the number of documented migrant workers from Asian countries to the West and the Middle East as well as within the region had reached 10 to 15 million, and around half of these migrants were women.2 These official figures do not include illegal migration, which would undoubtedly bring the figure much higher.

In many countries, more females than males leave home in search of work. However, available employment for women is often limited to low-paying and low-skilled jobs, including restaurant services, domestic work, and certain segments of the manufacturing industry. Others work in the entertainment industry. In 1995, for example, 60 percent of the 2.45 million documented contract workers from the Phillippines were women who migrated to work as domestics or entertainers.3

Government labor policies also promote exporting female labor, often for low-paying, low-skilled jobs. For example, Indonesia’s five-year plans of 1990 and 1994 called for sending 500,000 women overseas to ease the problem of high unemployment rates. Eighty percent of those women went to the Middle East to work as domestic workers.4

Within Asia-Pacific, women typically migrate from poorer to richer countries. For example, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan have recently experienced labor shortages and have opened their borders to workers from countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines with large and growing labor forces.5

Other countries such as Thailand, which promote the export of skilled and nonskilled labor for manufacturing and mechanical industries abroad, have allowed the employment of migrant workers from neighboring countries to meet the labor demand of certain economic sectors. Thai fishing industry and rubber plantations, for instance, rely heavily on Burmese labor, while the construction sector employs many Burmese and Cambodian migrants, both legal and illegal.

While some countries such as Taiwan have eased legal restrictions on the immigration of workers, others such as Japan continue restrictive policies that limit the entry of legal, unskilled laborers. This has facilitated mass illegal migration, often for the underground domestic labor and prostitution industries.

While increasing numbers of women seek to migrate overseas for employment because of limited opportunities back home, many of them don’t have sufficient information or appropriate or reliable channels to help them migrate and find work abroad. As a result, many women rely on arrangements offered by agents, often through an illegal channel. Women may also experience deceptive and abusive brokerage practices. Once in the country of destination, they may find themselves in an exploitative work situation. They may also be forced to accept work they didn’t bargain for. As illegal immigrants, these women are vulnerable to further exploitation with little recourse or other means of protecting themselves.

In short, while female labor migration has existed for a long time, globalization has changed its characteristics. Poverty, unemployment, and lax labor policies all contribute to the growth of traffic in women. Even when the women choose to migrate voluntarily, they may fall victim to trafficking and encounter other forms of exploitation and human rights violations.

Agents of Deception

Though there is no universally accepted definition of trafficking, a number of women’s groups have adopted a working definition that reflects the wide range of problems and abuses women experience both during the recruitment process and after their arrival at their destinations. Trafficking means all acts involved in the recruitment, transportation within or across borders, transfer, receipt, purchase, sale, or holding of a person involving the use of deception or coercion. Trafficking is manifested by the use or threat of force or the abuse of authority or debt-bondage. Typical examples of trafficking include forced labor in the garment, agricultural, fisheries, prostitution, and domestic work sectors, including forced or servile marriages and slavery-like practices.

Both poverty and women’s desire for economic and social improvement have led to increased migration and have fed the trafficking network. Recruitment of women into prostitution and other forms of labor has become more organized. Because women in the less-developed nations in Asia-Pacific typically have limited access to legitimate information on job opportunities abroad, they are particularly vulnerable to these agents.

In order to leave their home country, women often have to pay a stiff fee to the traffickers, money they usually don’t have and therefore must borrow at high rates of interest. In many cases, traffickers offer to arrange for transportation and travel documents for the women. In both cases, the price becomes an exorbitant debt they must work off. This type of debt-bondage makes it impossible for women in these situations to leave the job.

Moreover, women who work far from home in jobs such as prostitution, domestic labor, and factory work are often isolated from the local community and from each other. In addition, they are highly dependent on their employers and agents because their jobs are often not covered by national or international labor laws and codes. The situation is much more grave if the women have migrated illegally since any complaints they register against their employer or the trafficker may lead to their imprisonment as illegal migrants.

Some agents simply prey on the naiveté of desperate women. For instance, in Bangkok, Thailand, a female agent who was a regular customer at a Thai woman’s noodle shop, convinced the shopkeeper, named Lek, to leave an abusive husband for a job as a cook in Malaysia. The agent did not ask for any money and arranged for free transportation across the Malaysian border for Lek and two friends, who were also given false passports.

Their destination in Kuala Lumpur was not a restaurant, but instead a brothel where Lek and her friends were locked in a small room for three days and repeatedly raped by the brothel supervisor, who told them they would die if they did not work. After three days of this mental and physical abuse, they relented. Three weeks later, the women also found themselves in debt-bondage, owing more on their room and board bill than they could make from their jobs.6

Slave Labor and Prostitution

Within Asia-Pacific, income disparities between rich and poor are increasing, prompting many women to migrate just to survive. While some of these women are eager to improve their lives, in other cases daughters are pressured to migrate to support their families in dire financial straits. However, in many cases these women pay a heavy price: their freedom.

At times, the slave-like conditions they endure are blatantly obvious. For example, in July 1997, the Kuala Lumpur police and a Thai special task force raided a brothel where they discovered 39 women, including 37 Thai and two other women and girls, ranging in age from 15 to 26. The brothel entrance consisted of a triple-layered steel door that had to be forced open, and the windows were all barred. The searchers found the women and girls hidden in a secret tunnel.

Conditions in the brothel were barbarous. The women worked 19 hours straight, from 5 p.m. to noon the next day, when they would clean the brothel and then sleep until 4 p.m. They were forced to take four contraceptive pills a day to suppress menstruation. If they wanted to see a doctor, they had to pay 180 Malaysian ringgit (about US $50), or the equivalent of compensation they would receive for serving about 10 customers. Furthermore, the women were not allowed to talk to each other, they were forced to sleep in a hidden room, and they were allowed only one meal a day.

Obviously, the health of these women was severely compromised. The customers were given condoms but did not necessarily use them, and six of the women and girls were found to be HIV positive. Sometimes customers gave the women drugs to make them more submissive, and the pimps hit or flogged them if they were impolite or tried to refuse a customer.

Likewise, debt-bondage further cemented the bonds of the women’s enslavement. The women’s pay was less than 20 percent of the price the brothel charged customers. If the women were booked in advance for a set period, their pay was double. However, they never received any cash; instead, the brothel management kept an account book documenting their living expenses—such as medicine, food, and contraceptives—that were deducted from their account.7

Though prostitution and related activities are illegal in most Asia-Pacific countries, including Thailand, the laws are often ignored by government officials. When they are enforced, the target of arrest is the prostitutes rather than the profiteering brothel networks. In many cases, law enforcement officers themselves are the ones who profit from the operation of brothels.

For example, in Thailand, it is illegal to solicit or advertise for prostitution or to maintain establishments for prostitution. Nevertheless, in Nakhon Pathom, a province near Bangkok, 40 girls are exhibited prominently on a platform in the display window of a brothel called San Kampaeng. Here, they wait for customers between 1 p.m. and 2 a.m. More than 100 women and girls between the ages of 11 and 30 work there. Only five have Thai citizen identification cards. The rest are from economically depressed southern China or the Shan State of Burma.

The women and girls were told they would be working in a massage parlor and had no real idea what that was. With no way to pay back exorbitant transportation expenses charged by their recruiters, they are persuaded to sell sex in addition to massages so that they can earn more money to pay off their debt.8 Physical and economic captives, held in perpetual debt-bondage and deprived of basic health care, these women were clearly modern-day slaves in the sex industry.

Of Human Bondage

The sex industry, however, is not the only sector of the economy that abuses this abundant source of cheap labor. Other illegitimate, and even some ostensibly legitimate, businesses take advantage of women’s vulnerable social and economic position.

n Factory work. In recent years, there have been increasing reports of Asian women being trafficked to the United States and western Europe to work in factories. The conditions in the factories are often substandard and labor laws ignored. The women are frequently treated like slaves, unable to leave the factory and forced to work hours that exceed the labor laws of the country.

For example, in 1995, a raid on a garment factory in El Monte, California, by a team of U.S. officials resulted in the release of 67 Thai women and five Thai men who had been trafficked to the United States. The workers had been confined within a barbed wire fence in a residential neighborhood and were made to work up to 20 hours a day for US $1.40 to $1.60 per hour. They had to purchase food and other necessities from the company store at highly inflated prices, and they were also told that their family members in Thailand would be harmed if they tried to escape.9

n Begging. Since prostitution rings prefer young, attractive women, and factory labor requires healthy workers, traffickers have found begging to be an effective way to exploit the labor of other women. In Cambodia, for example, women of all ages, including many older women and even children, are being trafficked into Thailand for this purpose. According to the Department of Labour and Social Welfare of Thailand, around 820 women and children were arrested as illegal migrant beggars in 1997.10 Women who migrate to work as beggars think they can make a lot of money. In reality, however, the agents take most, or all, of the earnings, and the women are forced to work long hours. As with other forms of trafficking, the women are often sold from owner to owner and are subject to arrest and detention as illegal immigrants.

Take the case of Soun, a 52-year- old woman who lived in a Cambodian village bordering Thailand. She was recruited by a woman who informed her that she could make a living in Thailand as a nanny. When she arrived in Bangkok, however, she was sold to a man and forced to beg.

The little money Soun earned begging each day was taken from her, and after a month, the man sold her to a woman in Malaysia where Soun earned around US $20 per day; but again all her money was taken from her. She then met a woman who brought her back to Bangkok. However, she had no idea where to go, so she went back to the man who first bought her.11

n Domestic labor. The majority of domestic servants in the Asian-Pacific region come from the Philippines, where there are limited opportunities to make a good living. These Philippine women also migrate to the Middle East. They find it hard to adapt to the local culture and are also subjected to sexual harassment and rape by their employers. Since they often work illegally, they can’t seek legal redress or protection. This makes them very dependent on their employers. In addition, many agents and employers confiscate the women’s passports so they cannot escape if they find themselves in abusive or exploitative conditions. In this regard, migrant domestic workers are always very dependent on, and under the control of, the employer.

n Forced marriage. Traffic in women for the purpose of marriage is also common in Asia-Pacific. Women from South Asia are often trafficked to the Middle East, and women from Vietnam to China. Indeed, in China, the situation of domestic trafficking and bride selling is quite prevalent. In rural China, between 30 and 90 percent of marriages—depending on the village or province—are arranged through bride selling. This is an old practice that until recently was confined to marriages, arranged by a go-between, between Chinese men and women. Families may arrange these marriages to get rid of a daughter who is considered an economic burden, or a husband may buy a wife or in some cases simply abduct the daughter.12 The primary motive suggested for abduction and sale of women is the sex-ratio imbalance, which results in a considerable shortage of women in many areas. Increasingly, women are trafficked from rural areas in Vietnam to China to become wives of Chinese men. Women in forced marriages are often isolated, and they may be raped by their husbands or other family members or rented out to villagers as prostitutes.

Human Rights

In the early 1990s, the Foundation For Women, a Bangkok-based nongovernmental organization working on the issue of violence against women, conducted a three-year study on trafficking in women in Thailand. Research findings revealed numerous violations of human rights against women in the international trafficking process. By clearly identifying these abuses as human rights issues, based on various human rights treaties and the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundation hopes to raise global awareness of the problem and call for the use of human rights approaches to address the issue of trafficking and the treatment of trafficked persons.

Siriporn Skrobanek, director of the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women in Bangkok, has identified the following key elements of these violations in global international trafficking in women.13

Because women are unaware of the conditions of their employment before they migrate, they are denied the right to self-determination. In addition, they are sold—perhaps several times—by traffickers and owners and are forced to pay back debts decided by their buyers, which further robs them of their ability to choose their terms of employment freely.

Moreover, since women used as prostitutes are denied the right to choose their clients and working conditions, they can’t protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases. This denies them basic health care and safe working conditions.

Trafficked women are forced to work to pay back debts, and if escape is possible, they are afraid to try because of their illegal status. In essence, they become bonded laborers. It frequently takes years for these women to pay off their debts; in the meantime, they are economically exploited since their income is often appropriated by others.

By using false documents during transportation procedures, women become stateless, subject to persecution in both the sending and receiving countries. In addition, immigration laws subject illegal residents to arrest and deportation. Such laws keep women from being perceived as trafficking victims. And if they seek assistance from authorities such as the police, women encounter other types of sexual violence, such as rape and sexual harassment. In addition, children born to migrant women are denied the right to nationality by some receiving countries.

Further exacerbating the problems, should these women attempt to pursue a court case against those who have forced them into these jobs, they must testify, usually in public. This denies them their right to privacy, and their testimony—often of a highly personal nature—can be quite traumatic. In countries where prostitution is illegal, the social stigmatization of these women is further enforced. The media often add another dimension to this problem by focusing on the women, who are victims, rather than on their abusers, who are criminals but who largely go unpunished.

Slowing Traffic

There have been many attempts over the years to eradicate trafficking for the purpose of prostitution. The 1949 Convention on the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, which has been signed by about 70 countries, attempts to eliminate trafficking for the purpose of prostitution. More recently, the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination recognizes that women are being trafficked for many purposes other than prostitution and calls for states to take measures to suppress all forms of traffic in women. However, the usefulness and effectiveness of these international conventions have been limited for several reasons, including the inadequacy of the provision and the lack of enforcement mechanisms of the treaties.

Many governments such as Japan and Cambodia have their own laws concerning traffic in women. However, these laws are rarely enforced, and when they are enforced, the trafficked women, not the traffickers, are punished. In addition, officials often do not have a clear understanding of what constitutes traffic in women and are often biased against illegal migrants and prostitutes.

In light of the inadequacy of government action, nongovernmental organizations such as the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women, the Cambodian Women’s Development Agency in Cambodia, and Batis Center for Women in the Phillippines, have done most of the work against the traffic in women and slavery-like employment practices. These groups promote the rights of women and protect their human rights through social programs that offer shelters, education, and vocational training; legal programs; rescue programs; research and documentation projects; and advocacy and lobbying campaigns.

Freedom Fight

The classic idea of trafficking—kidnaping women for prostitution—is woefully out of date. Today, many women migrate voluntarily in search of a better life and instead wind up virtual slaves.

To counter this trend, trafficked women need information on their legal rights as well as access to shelters and health services. They also need more information about legitimate means of migration and what services are available to them in their country of destination.

Moreover, since trafficking laws are rarely enforced and official corruption is an integral part of the trafficking networks, national, regional, and international agreements must be drafted and enforced to eradicate these networks. And since existing anti-trafficking laws tend to lead to discriminatory immigration policies that further marginalize women and keep them from seeking redress, trafficked women will need new channels to obtain assistance. The laws themselves also need to be rewritten to protect the women victims and to punish the abusers.

Women migrant workers need national and international labor laws to protect them, and the definition of trafficking must be expanded to reflect the realities and complexities of the current situation. Furthermore, governments that encourage outmigration must provide appropriate services to women, including information before they migrate, and governments that harbor helpless and vulnerable women must offer them much-needed assistance.

In the long run, women’s interests will best be served when they are able to find rewarding, legitimate work in their native countries, or at least can decide to migrate because they want to, not because they have to. This, however, is a distant dream as long as the global marketplace leaves spot shortages of labor in some regions, with pockets of high unemployment in others. Governments therefore must do everything in their power to expand employment opportunities for women in their own countries.

In the meantime, international efforts must be aimed at enacting stricter labor laws, providing oversight of migration, fostering more enlightened immigration policies, and weaving a network of support for displaced women.n

Laura Skolnik, a former staff member of the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women—a feminist alliance that coordinates actions against trafficking in women—works as a consultant with the Human Resources Development Section, Social Development Division at United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. Jan Boontinand is a program coordinator for the research section at the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women, in Bangkok.

1. M. Parnwell, Population Movements and the Third World, (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 29-40.

2. "Migration Facts, Analysis and Issues in 1997," in Asian Migrant Yearbook, (Kowloon, Hong Kong: Asian Migrant Centre Ltd., 1998); Siriporn Skrobanek, Trafficking in Women in Asia and the Pacific (Bangkok: Global Alliance against Traffic in Women, 1997), p.1.

3. Florian Alburo, "Overseas Labour Market," Philippine Review, 1996; Manila Times, August 7, 1996.

4. Daiva Stasiulis, "Report on Violence against Migrant Workers," keynote speech presented at the North American Regional Consultative Forum, Victoria, BC, April 29 - May 3, 1997.

5. "Trafficking in Women in the Asia-Pacific Region: A Regional Report," (Bangkok: Global Alliance against Traffic in Women, 1997), p.4.

6. Personal Communication with a GAATW staff member, December 1997.

7. "Thai Girls Rescued from KL [Kuala Lumpur] Brothel," Bangkok Post, July 25, 1997; "Thai Women Rescued From Malaysian Brothel Found to have HIV," The Nation, August 2, 1997.

8. "Prostitution: New Laws Won’t Help," Bangkok Post, April 7, 1996.

9. Practical Guide to Assisting Trafficked Women, GAATW, 1996.

10. K. Archavanitkul, Combating Trafficking in Children and Their Exploitation in Prostitution and Other Intolerable Forms of Child Labor in Mekong Basin Countries, a subregional report submitted to the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), (Bangkok: International Labour Organization), 1998).

11. Two Reports on the Situation of Women and Children Trafficked from Cambodia and Vietnam to Thailand, (Global Alliance against Traffic in Women, Cambodian Women’s Development Agencies, and International Organisation for Migration, 1997).

12. Marjan Wijerrs and Lin Lap-Chew, Trafficking in Women, Forced Labour and Slavery-Like Practices (Utrecht: Foundation against Trafficking in Women, 1997).

13. Siriporn Skrobanek, "International Migration and Traffic in Women," Journal of Social Research 19 (1) 1996, pp.87-88.

FORUM Homepage

Table of Contents