The word “trafficking” normally brings to mind images of women and children trafficked for the sex trade but the truth is the fish or shrimp on your plate is more likely to have been pimped by traffickers buying and selling labor for the fishing industry…and this is especially true in Southeast Asia.

Obnoxious as the sex trade is, globally many more people are physically or mentally enslaved by those who trade in human lives to provide cheap and malleable labor to the fishing, seafood and shrimp processing, domestic maiding, garment and agricultural industries.

In a new report centered on Southeast Asia, we have not only found that the practice of bartering for labor within and between countries is widespread but has listed ten truths about trafficking that most people are ignorant. Many are not aware that laborers are being imprisoned in private homes, factories and on fishing boats.

In Thailand and Malaysia, the fishing business is a multi-billion dollar industry. Young men and boys are often recruited from poor villages in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar onto boats where they are literally imprisoned at sea. Escapees have reported being drugged to work harder, threatened at gun point, seeing colleagues killed, being beaten, starved, worked half to death and not being paid.

Kyaw is one such man. Born in Myeik, Myanmar, he wanted to support his family and ended up on a Thai fishing boat operating illegally in Indonesian waters. At first, he was pleased to join four other Myanmar workers as a fisherman. But he soon discovered conditions on the boat were worse than those on an 18th century slave ship.

“They allowed us to sleep only about an hour per day. There were Thais and Khmer people but they got better treatment than us,” said Kyaw.

Thailand has taken steps to improve the fishing industry by setting up a National Sub-Committee on Fishing Labor and it has upgraded legislation to criminalize men and boys trafficking. It is now in a position to charge some of the biggest players in the game. However, other countries, like Malaysia, also need to follow suit to end labor trafficking into various industries.

There are around three million foreign workers in Malaysia working in a variety of industries. It is accepted local practice for employers to keep employees’ legal documents, including passports, for “security purposes”. Confiscation opens the door for unscrupulous employers to abuse workers.

Although Malaysia promulgated A Trafficking in Persons (A-TIP) Act in 2008, misunderstandings about how it relates to foreign workers means trafficking is perpetuated. Under the law trafficking victims are individuals who have been subjected to exploitation, including forced labor and services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, and as such should not be prosecuted for illegal entry, unlawful residence or possession or procurement of fraudulent travel or identity documents.

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KUALA LUMPUR, June 10 (Bernama) — An estimated three people were trafficked for every 1,000 inhabitants across the Asia-Pacific region, a report by World Vision said.

It said in a statement Friday that globally for every person forced into the sex trade, nine were forced to work.

The report stated that trafficking for labour exploitation was generally not considered as severe a crime as trafficking for sexual exploitation, and there was a high level of impunity for offenders.

“Victims of labour trafficking are often not identified as such, and instead are detained and deported from the country where the exploitation took place.

“As a result, the majority of trafficked persons do not have access to assistance or justice, and the traffickers remain free to exploit others,” it said.

The report also comes with a list of recommendations on how to fight trafficking, including urging the private sector to take responsibility for all labour within their supply chain with ongoing monitoring for compliance, banning the confiscation of workers’ official documents by employers, having government target high-migration areas with vocational and skills training and safe migration information.

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M. is an ebullient girl, age 10, who ranks near the top of her fourth-grade class and dreams of being a doctor. Yet she, like all of India, is at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to a brothel.

Her mother is a prostitute here in Kolkata, the city better known to the world as Calcutta. Ruchira Gupta, who runs an organization called Apne Aap that fights human trafficking, estimates that 90 percent of the daughters of Indian prostitutes end up in the sex trade as well. And M. has the extra burden that she belongs to a subcaste whose girls are often expected to become prostitutes.

M. seemed poised to escape this fate with the help of one of my heroes, Urmi Basu, a social worker who in 2000 started the New Light shelter program for prostitutes and their children.

M., with her winning personality and keen mind, began to bloom with the help of New Light. Both her parents are illiterate, but she learned English and earned excellent grades in an English-language school for middle-class children outside the red-light district. I’m concealing her identity to protect her from gibes from schoolmates.

Unfortunately, brains and personality aren’t always enough, and India is the center of the 21st-century slave trade. This country almost certainly has the largest number of human-trafficking victims in the world today.

If M. is sold to a brothel, she will have no defense against H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases. Decisions about using a condom are made by the customer or the brothel owner, not by the girl. In one brothel I slipped into to conduct some interviews, there was not a single condom available.

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Officers raided a Chinese herbalist today suspected of being run as a brothel in direct view of a busy city centre police station.

   The joint operation between Northumbria Police and the UK Border Agency involved around 50 officers, saw five people arrested on suspicion of sex trafficking and rescued two women allegedly being forced to work as prostitutes.

 Two white men believed to be customers were also lead away from the Chinese Medical Centre, Pilgrim Street, Newcastle.

 The shop, in direct view of and less than 100 yards away from the city’s main police station, advertises massages, Chinese Viagra and treatments to boost sex drive in its window.

 The UKBA said those suspected of being involved in sex trafficking and the rescued women were Chinese.

 Officers led out a respectable-looking silver-haired man in handcuffs, and separately, a woman in her 20s in glasses.

 Elsewhere in the city, police arrested two others and a simultaneous raid in Foyle Street, Sunderland, saw a woman held for questioning.

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Ms Sy says several factors make it difficult to identify Southeast Asian girls who have been recruited into the domestic minor sex trafficking trade. [AFP]

An outreach organisation in California says young Southeast Asian women are vulnerable to sexual exploitation in America.

Banteay Srei, which works with young women and girls aged betwen 12 and 24 in Oakland, says the risk of sex trafficking is pronounced for second generation Southeast Asian-Americans dealing with cultural divisions such as language barriers.

“The girls are struggling with a new cultural identity of growing up in a newly emigrated refugee household where often times there isn’t a common language that parents and kids can share,” founder Elizabeth Sy told Radio Australia’s Connect Asia program.

“Even as the kids are going through this issue and being recruited, they can’t tell their parents not only because they are ashamed of it…but also because they don’t have a language capacity to do it.”

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