EDITORIAL: Trafficking in human beings, a modern form of slavery, is on the rise across the world as poverty, conflict and climate change have rendered many people vulnerable to exploitation, reveals the UN Office on Drug and Crime in its Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, 2024. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of victims trafficked for forced labour surged by 47 percent, and the figure for child victims jumped by 31 percent of which 38 percent were girls. Overall, people of 162 nationalities were trafficked to 128 countries. While most African victims are trafficked within the continent where displacement due to conflict and climate change has exacerbated susceptibility to manipulation by criminal elements. Furthermore notes the report, child trafficking is also on the rise in high-income countries, confirming a conjecture that it is a truly global phenomenon.
As regards our own region, according to the UN report, South Asian victims were found in 36 countries, including in Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific region. Although Pakistan is not mentioned by name, numerous creditable accounts indicate the scale of human trafficking is quite alarming in this country. While the boys are forced to labour arduously in a range of bonded sweatshops of labour, women and girls are compelled to engage in commercial sex, including prostitution and pornography, or sent into domestic servitude where they are also exposed to sexual exploitation. This has gone on despite the fact that Pakistan is a signatory to the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons. Apart from involuntary victims, there have been many cases of women being offered well paying jobs in another country, only to find themselves trapped in an abusive situation from which escape is difficult. Conditions inside this country are also quite dismal. For too many of the poor and powerless debt bondage leads to endless coercive labour by entire families in brick kilns — banned under the law — agriculture as well as private homes. If that is not bad enough, employers often ‘resell’ indebted women for years of forced work. It’s a shame that so many people should be allowed to fall prey to slavery in this Islamic Republic.
Predictably, thwarting anti- trafficking efforts is the usual bane of corruption and patronage by some politically influential individuals for their own purposes. Also, the penalty for traffickers is a fine, which amounts to a mere rap on the knuckles. It is about time governments both at the Centre and in the provinces addressed this immoral and inhuman practice with the seriousness it demands, and took necessary preventive steps suggested by specialists. These include increasing the quality and availability of trafficking-specific services, complete with training facilities and funding for the services staff; establishing a national hotline, in collaboration with civil society to report trafficking crimes; raising public awareness, particularly about deceptive promises of good jobs abroad; and last but not least, the punishment for trafficking agents ought to include imprisonment commensurate with the crime. Abuse and exploitation of the weak and powerless must come to a stop.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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