The Human Trafficking Crisis

No one should be sold, abuse, exploit neither be denied to the very basic rights. Nelson Mandela once said ‘To deny any person their human rights is to challenge their very humanity and to impose on them a wretched life of hunger and deprivation is to dehumanize them.” (The New York Times June 27, 1990). There are thousands of people being trafficked and smuggled every day at different borders, continent and city. Human trafficking crisis is the exploitation and abuse of human rights that has been going on for ages. Many of the victims not only have been trafficked, but also exploited in horrendous ways. Despite all the attention and coverage given to this issue, the numbers of trafficking victims are not getting any lesser. Human trafficking

Out of these, 4.5 million (22% total) are victims of forced sexual exploitation, and 14.2 million (68%) are victims of forced labour exploitation, in economic activities such as agriculture, construction, domestic work and manufacturing (International Labour Organization, 2012). Trafficking, generally, occurs from poorer to more prosperous countries and regions. At the same time, modern forms of transportation and communication have aided the movement of people and also enabled transnational organized crime groups and trafficking rings to exploit vulnerable women and children for profit (Cameron & Newman, 2008). In the 52 countries, 79% of the victims were subjected to sexual exploitation. While it remains likely that labor exploitation and male victims are relatively under-detected, the over-representation of sexually exploited women is true across regions, even in countries where other forms of trafficking are routinely detected. Surprisingly, victims from East Asia were detected in more than 20 countries in regions throughout the world, including Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa (Global Report on Trafficking

The Washington Post (August 1, 2015) reported that in Malaysia, from rural palm oil harvesters on plantations to urban electronics workers in factories, an estimated 2 million Malaysian workers are forced into unpaid labour. Add to that the countless refugees from nearby countries who flee to Malaysia. Many young girls become “domestic workers” subject to miserable conditions and often sexual assault. Furthermore, according to Strait Times Asia (May 25, 2015), the Royal Malaysian Police have actually found 139 grave sites and 28 abandoned trafficking camps in northern Malaysia but the police still unsure on how many bodies inside each grave site. According to statistics from official Ministry of Home Affairs’ portal (MOHA), there have been 591 cases since 2009 to 2011 with a number of victims under protection order as much as 1235 and 3365 numbers of victims under interim protection order within the same period. It shows how critical is this problem and extraordinary effort must be done in order to combat this issue. Regardless of the effort by the government of Malaysia to combat the trafficking such as Anti-Trafficking in Persons and Anti-Smuggling