RIGHTS: Activists Urge Governments to Protect Trafficked Women

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, Dec 18 2000 (IPS) - Women’s rights activists are urging world governments to consider women trafficked across national boundaries as “victims” of human rights violations, not as “criminals”.

Such a distinction, they say, is essential if these women are to be protected from the global scourge of human beings trafficked by international crime syndicates.

Governments have to acknowledge this difference rather than assuming that the trafficked women are “criminals and undocumented migrants”, asserts Widney Brown, advocacy director for the Women’s Rights division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based non-governmental organisation (NGO).

What is more, adds Vachararutai Boontinand, international co- ordinator for the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW), a Bangkok- based NGO, it is a distinction that will encourage these women to trust governments as their protectors and assist them in bringing to book those responsible for such “horrible crimes”.

This view, say Brown and Boontinand, has still to gain universal acceptance. And the most recent reminder of that for the women is the fact that it was not emphasised in the language of a companion protocol to a new United Nations convention. The convention was opened for signatures during an international conference on transnational organised crime held in Palermo, Italy, from Dec. 12 to 15.

“It’s a flawed instrument,” says Brown, of the protocol on human trafficking that accompanies this latest international treaty, the ‘UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime’. For her, the protocol is “weak on the issues of protecting women who have been trafficked”.

She adds, however, that governments can overcome such a lapse, thus making this global initiative an “important first step”. The challenge will be for states to “invest the time and resources into investigating cases of trafficking, rather than just assuming that the women are criminals and undocumented migrants”.

Boontinand agrees, adding that it will also require governments to stop the harsh manner in which they treat trafficked women. “Today, the usual treatment of victims of trafficking in many countries include the arrest, punishment for illegal entry and work, like prostitution, and deportation.”

But Pino Arlacchi thinks otherwise, consequently defending what the protocol sets out to achieve. This initiative seeks to “bring about a change in the way we see and treat” women trafficked across national boundaries and often forced into prostitution and “sexual slavery”, said Arlacchi, executive director of the UN Drug Control Programme and Crime Prevention, on the opening day of the meeting in Palermo.

“No longer will they be viewed as accomplices (to crime syndicates),” he argued. “Now we will know them for what they are victims of a new form of slavery. They must not be criminalised. Instead, they need help and protection.”

According to a UN statement, the ‘Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children’ has identified three areas that warrant action. They include: preventing and combating the trafficking in persons, “paying particular attention to women and children”; protecting and assisting the victims of such trafficking, “with full respect for their human rights”; and promoting co-operation among governments to meet these objectives.

And since this protocol was opened for signatures in Palermo, close to 60 countries have initialed it, as against around 100 signatures that endorsed the main document, the treaty against organised crime.

For Kathryn McMahon, director of research and training at the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), a Los Angeles-based NGO, a committed international response is a pressing need to help the thousands of women forced into “slave labour” by crime organisations.

“I am horrified by the number of people being trafficked,” she says. “And it is getting worse across all regions of the world. Governments cannot portray a business-as-usual attitude.”

According to available studies, in the United States, for instance, there are nearly 100,000 women forced to work in prostitution. And in Japan, some 40,000 to 50,000 Thai women have been lured by crime syndicates into the sex industry, declares the ‘UN Global Report on Crime and Justice’.

In addition, states the Global Report, the number of “illegal sex workers in the European Union ranges between 200,000 and half-a-million, with some two-thirds coming from Eastern Europe and the other third from developing countries”.

And often, it reveals, the manner in which young women are drawn into the prostitution rings is similar across all regions. “They are lured by advertisements for domestic work abroad and find themselves bought and sold via catalogues, advertisements or by close family members.”

Thereafter, once enslaved, “the women are often beaten and raped before being traded from one master brothel owner to the next, frequently working up to 18 hours a day”.

What is more, it points out, there is no escape route for such women, since “they are at the mercy of the brothel owner, finding themselves in many cases illegally without passports in a foreign country and forced to repay debt owed to the middleman, expenses for the journey, and the sum that the brothel owner paid for them”.

For Boontinand, these are enough reasons to justify a “rights- based approach”, since it will be more meaningful to the victims.

For Brown, on the other hand, such an approach should also include commitments by governments to provide support services for trafficked women, including medical assistance, counselling, legal advice and protection.