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Latest • Perspectives • Slide
An Account On Modern Slavery
Nusrat Jahan Progga
Modern Slavery is a bigger issue than we thought in Southeast Asia, according to the largest ever health study of trafficking victims. An alarming number of survivors from Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam showed signs of suffering from the physical and psychological abuse they experienced, including sexual abuse, dog attacks, burning, and choking.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the International Organization for Migration interviewed more than 1000 people who were looking for post-trafficking treatment from the three countries mentioned above. About 32% of these people had been coerced into becoming sex slaves while the others were sold to either factories or fisheries.
What many people do not understand is the term “slavery” no longer paints an image of a black man in shackles or the dirty hands and feet of the workers working in hazardous conditions of the African diamond mines. Modern slavery is much more fluid and take many forms such as forced labor, sex trafficking, child soldiers, and involuntary domestic servitude.
Almost half of the people who participated in the study reported physical or sexual abuse or both, while about two-thirds had been diagnosed with clinical depression. More than half of them were also diagnosed with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders.
The physical abuse survivors informed that they went through being stabbed with knives or attacked by dogs, and had even been strangled at one point. Almost all the girls had been sexually assaulted while some were threatened, and on the other hand, a lot of workers were locked in small rooms by their employers.
Victims had to work all seven days a week, for numerous hours at a time without breaks, in unbearable conditions, which resulted in a lot of the workers sustaining severe and fatal injuries in the workplace. Unfortunately, almost close to none were able to avail medical treatment after such incidents.
According to a social epidemiology lecturer and the lead author of the study, Dr. Ligia Kiss, the “findings highlight that survivors of trafficking urgently need access to health care to address a range of needs” and that “mental health care should be an essential component of this. Research is needed to identify effective forms of psychological support that can be easily implemented in low-resource settings and in multilingual, multicultural populations.”
Thailand’s failure to address this trafficking problem has been called severely inadequate by the Environmental Justice Foundation. The executive director of the organization, Steve Trent, said in a statement “Nothing that we have seen or heard in the last year indicates that Thailand has taken meaningful action to address the root causes of trafficking and abuse”. The beautiful country that is world renowned for it’s booming tourism sector is now in “tier 3” on the State Department’s list of worst offenders, which is the same ranking afforded to North Korea and Iran, due to its appalling human rights record.
According to the workers who were surveyed, the ones who were sold off to the fishing sector had to work for more than 19 hours day and some even spent an year at the sea at a time. The people on fishing boats witnessed murders and how the injured fishermen were pushed overboard.
One of the study’s key findings was about the apprehensive mental health of trafficked women, who were worst affected when forced into labor or marriage, rather than sex work. What shocked me was how some women were trafficked as brides and how they endured severe violence. According to records, there were even cases of child brides and minors being coerced into marriage or sex slavery. According to John Carrey “perhaps no greater assault on basic freedom than the evil of human trafficking” in 014’s Trafficking in Persons Report, and I could not agree more. Those who thought that slavery ended years back with waves of historical revolutions could not have been more wrong, as modern slavery is also quite prevalent in Central American countries such as Mexico and Guatemala. Although countless awareness campaigns have been carried out, both physically and on social media, no real solution has surfaced. Hopefully, this study that put numbers to the issues, will help us reach one in the near future.
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