A group of Filipina women who had been sold into prostitution in Malaysia returned last week to Manila after having been rescued. They had been recruited to work in bars in Brunei, but instead, it is alleged that they were sold into slavery in Malaysia. The four were rescued by Malaysian authorities, whose assistance was sought by the Philippines Department of Justice and the Presidential Anti-Illegal Recruitment Task Force headed by Director Reynaldo Jaylo.
When the women arrived in Malaysia in May, they were forced to work at the Golden Key KTV and Tip Top Club in Labuan. Police in the Philippines have arrested the recruiters on charges of sex trafficking.
The US State Department Trafficking in Persons report states that as many as several thousand women from Thailand, Indonesia, the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.), Cambodia, and Burma are trafficked to Malaysia for commercial sexual exploitation. It seems that the Philippines can be added to this list.

A former Filipina bar worker has won damages of $5000 against her employer who forced her to have sex with US soldiers based near the bar in Korea where she worked. The X-Zone club is near Camp Hovey in Toka-ri. The Seoul District Court Judge Kim Soon-han said that while the woman worked at the club from Feb. 8 to March 3, 2004, she was forced to perform acts of prostitution with US soldiers for fees from $60 to $150.The woman had been recruited in the Philippines by a South Korean firm to work as a night club singer, but when she arrived she was locked in room with several other workers and told that she would have to have sex with US soldiers. The woman, claims that prostitution continues with US soldiers in Tongducheon, but the problem has shifted from Toka-ri to “the Ville” area near Camp Casey’s front gate after a crackdown by military authorities in 2004.

40% of the world’s cocoa is grown in the West African country of Cote D’Ivoire. However, while the world enjoys the pleasure of eating chocolate made from these beans, around 200,000 children are forced to work long hours for little money and inadequate food in order to harvest them. Thousands of these children are trafficked from within Cote D’Ivoire or from over the border in Mali.
In 2001 the Chocolate industry established a voluntary code which aimed to remove child slave labour from the industry in West Africa. The deadline for the code was July 2005. Sadly the deadline has passed and little progress has been made.
The problem is made more complex by the fact that beans are mixed together when they are sold onto the manufacturers so that it is hard to tell which beans came from which plantation – hard, but not impossible. Extensive monitoring should be put in place so that manufacturers know where they are buying beans from and the practises used on those plantations.
Pressure is also on the farmers to employ cheaper and cheaper sources of labour – turning some to slave labour – because the price for cocoa is so low on the international markets. It is also very unstable. The industry must find a way to stabilise the price at a level which will enable growers to employ people at a decent wage.
With the passing of the dead line for the voluntary Cocoa protocol, pressure needs to be re-applied to the industry to try to address this abuse of human rights which underpins an entire industry.

There are reports of an increasing number of young boys being trafficked into prostitution in Iraq. There are an estimated 4000 male commercial sex workers in the country, but it is unknown how many are boys forced into sexual servitude.
Saeed Muhammad, a senior official in the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, said it was addressing the problem but was under-resourced.
“We have been informed about dozens of cases of male prostitution, and all of them [the boys involved] were threatened,” he said. “But we don’t have the capacity to deal with them.”
The UN news agency IRIN interviewed a gang leader calling himself Abu Weled (or “father of the boys”), who claimed ““Iraqis love boys and our work is to offer pleasure to them,”
“They are all gay and, in Iraq, the homosexual is something cheap and bad, but we make them feel special when working with us.” Abu Weled also admitted to forcing underage girls to act as prostitutes.
With 48% of the young men in the country unemployed and most people discouraged by low wages, some families are selling their children into prostitution to get money so that they can eat.
Um Zacarias, a mother of two child sex workers, said “We are a poor family and my husband cannot work because he has serious epilepsy,”
“Three months ago, Abu Weled came to our house offering us money if we let our two teenage [aged 13 and 14] boys work with them.”
“Thanks to him, today we have a good income. People may find it surprising, but at least we can eat now and I’m proud of them.”
Other young boys are threatened and if they are homosexuals they are sometimes blackmailed into becoming prostitutes.
The Iraqi ministry for the Interior has recently set up a commission to try to deal with the problem. The Iraqi NGO Iraqi Peace and Better Future has also begun to try to rescue children trapped in forced prostitution, but they have found success difficult in the face of threats from the gangs who operate the prostitution rings.
“We have been trying to do our best in taking those unlucky boys and girls from the streets of the capital,” said Abdallah Jassim, spokesman for IPBF. “But sometimes we are stopped by the gangs, who threaten us. And the government cannot offer us special security on a daily basis.”

The Australian Crime Commission has summonsed and interviewed 107 people concerning alleged sex slavery since 2003. The findings of their investigation shows that there are probably more than 1000 women in Australia who have been trafficked into forced prostitution. Sydney was found to be the most common port of entry for women from all over South East Asia. A growing number of women from South Korea are being trafficked, while the number of Thai women was falling. Organisers of sex trafficking were largely South Korean, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian or Chinese, many of whom were based in Australia. The Australian authorities have been dealing with the problem of sex trafficking more effectively since the passing in June of the new anti-trafficking legislation and also since the adoption of a national anti-trafficking plan. The report of more than 1000 women trapped in sex slavery in the country must, however, act as a wake up call to do more to stop this crime.