As desperation swells in the squalid camps that are home to a million Rohingya refugees, long-dormant - and often deadly - trafficking networks are being revived, Bangladeshi officials warn.Smugglers operating rickety fishing boats prey on the hopes of people who fled violence in Myanmar, charging them small fortunes for a dangerous journey to Southeast Asia, offering an empty promise of a fresh start.
The practice of “pulling wife”, bride kidnapping or marriage by capture is an old tradition among the rural Vietnamese. According to old custom, young girls are symbolically kidnapped and detained for two to three days by young boys, sometimes in collaboration with his family, to force a marriage negotiation with the girls’ parents. The girls’ parents could ask for her release or accept the marriage, following which the bride price – to be paid by the boy’s family – would be bargained.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been trying to tackle the scourge of human trafficking for a while now. Unfortunately, as 2018 dawned, none of the ASEAN member states made it onto the United States (US) Department of State’s Tier 1 list for human trafficking.
When news of the Thai government’s move to ratify the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO’s) Work in Fishing Convention (Convention 188) reached fisher associations, they came together to protest. This week, fisher associations from 22 coastal provinces of Thailand threatened to bring the country’s fishing industry to a halt by ceasing work if the government there fails to address their grievances within seven days.
The discovery of 28 abandoned human-trafficking camps and multiple unmarked mass graves in the dense jungle of Wang Kelian near the Thai-Malaysia border in May 2015 sent a shock wave through ASEAN and the rest of the world. Almost 800 victims were suspected to have been held in squalid conditions, in crudely built wooden cages and barbed wire that were too small for adults to even stand in.
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage. But for those for whom this traditional family-building strategy doesn’t quite resolve itself, advances in the artificial reproductive field have made it possible to have genetically-linked children through surrogacy. Surrogacy refers to the arrangement in which women become pregnant and carry a baby to term for contracted parties who will then assume the role of parents.
Human trafficking in Southeast Asia is still rampant as revealed by the United States (US) State Department’s latest annual Trafficking in Persons report. Dubbed by the US State Department as the “the world's most comprehensive resource of governmental anti-human trafficking efforts,” the report shows that human trafficking is still a massive problem in Asia. In the report, countries are placed under different tiers based on their efforts in combating human trafficking.
“I've seen video content of a child that's the same age as mine being raped by an American man that was a sex tourist in Cambodia”, remarked former model and American actor, Ashton Kutcher, before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee on ending modern slavery and human trafficking in February this year. He paused.
