Poverty fuels trafficking in women and girls

Last year about 4,000 Kyrgyz women fell victim to a global trafficking racket and found themselves entrapped as prostitutes as far a field as the Gulf Arab States, Asia and Europe. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which is researching human trafficking in the region, told IRIN the Kyrgyz Republic was an increasingly attractive prospect for traffickers. Already a primary route for the illicit drug trade from South Asia to the West, it has an established criminal network that could easily be exploited to traffic people. IOM Regional Representative Richard Danziger told IRIN that many girls did not realize just how far they would be exploited. “Even if they suspect that they are going into prostitution, they may not realise that they end up having to give up their passport and hand most of their earnings to someone else. Basically they become bonded labour.” In most cases, the motive for travelling abroad stems from the absolute poverty that most Kyrgyz live in. Over 68 per cent of the population earn less than US $7 per month and many women are attracted by the prospects of lucrative work abroad, as promised by dubious advertisements in Kyrgyz newspapers. Many of the women interviewed in an IOM survey had young and elderly dependants to support and said they had chosen to go abroad to earn money. The experiences of one young woman interviewed by IOM as part of the survey are indicative of the dangers: “When I was just 19 years old I was struggling to support my young son and invalid mother. I heard that it was possible to earn a lot of money working in the UAE so I decided to go. I travelled there with four very young Kyrgyz girls. “When we got there we were all imprisoned in hotel rooms. I had to service up to 30 men a day and never received any money at all. After one month I was arrested and imprisoned. After four months in jail I was deported back to Bishkek. I was forced to service nearly 1,000 men and I came back to Bishkek with nothing.” Trafficking in the Kyrgyz Republic has become so established that an entire industry has emerged to cater for its special needs. According to IOM, the number of adverts in newspapers searching for “attractive young women” has dramatically risen in the last three years. At least 25 tour companies provide air tickets and documentation for women to work abroad as commercial sex workers. Marriage agencies and mail-order-bride agencies also form a part of the trafficking chain. IOM research uncovered 2,000 internet sites with connections to “women in Kyrgyzstan” with a changing inventory of hundreds of women, including photographs and all personal details. This trafficking industry sends girls, some as young as 13 years old, to the main destinations of the UAE, Russia, Turkey, China and Germany. Kyrgyz government and NGO sources also had evidence that women and girls are trafficked to South Korea, India, Iran, Sweden, Malaysia, Qatar, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Denmark and Poland. Human rights abuses were common amongst the women trafficked for commercial sex. Over half the women interviewed had been tortured and physically abused by their employers. An IOM survey discovered that most of the women were enslaved into prostitution and often forced to work for free. Others were forced into prostitution after having travelled abroad in another capacity. IOM has been researching human trafficking in Central Asia over the last year prior to embarking on an informed strategy that will aim to combat the illegal trade. This would include an information campaign that would try to convince women and girls not to be involved. But Danziger said that sometimes this was not an easy message to get across to prospective women desperate to leave poverty behind. “We had a call-in radio show once. One woman rang in to say that if she had the choice of going to Germany to be a prostitute or to stay here and starve to death, then she knows which she’d choose. So we can’t simply tell people not to go. You can’t treat them as children. But we can warn them of the dangers.”