Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is an underground activity and the victims are referred to as a hidden population. The profits from this industry often go through a process of money laundering, making it difficult to trace the activities of traffickers. Girls and women who are sexually exploited by rape, forced prostitution, or sexual slavery are ruined with social stigmas for the rest of their lives. According to research it was found that 89 percent of women in prostitution wanted to escape. Whereas 60-75 percent of women in prostitution had been raped and 70-95 percent had been physically assaulted.

Up to 1990s, human trafficking was incorrectly defined as illegal migration, smuggling, or sex work. In some of the countries, most prevalent forms of human trafficking are forced labor of migrant workers, sexual enslavement and forced prostitution and camel jockeying of young boys.

Today slavery typically involves women and children being sold into involuntary slavery by violence and deprivation. There is a clear lack of labor protection laws for domestic workers in some developing and underdeveloped countries. The international community recognizes the trafficking of women and children as a modern form of slavery. Many migrant people, mainly from Asian states, are tricked into coming to Middle East, where they find themselves in a forced labor situation or working for very low wages. Traffickers catch their victims by compulsion, force, or fraud. The forced labor of migrant workers is especially prevalent in the oil-rich states of Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The workers are frequently held to pay off the debt they have accumulated from the costs of travel and housing. Trafficking from South Asia to the Middle East is a serious problem.

Most commonly, human trafficking is exploitation in the form of forced prostitution or sexual enslavement. State authorities have typically confused sex trafficking with prostitution. Some young poor women and girls are attracted to the sex industry because it appears to offer quick and easy earning. Traffickers often bait desperate young women with the promise of a better paying job to a destination country where their documentation and passports are forcibly taken from them as soon as they arrive. These women often find themselves in slave-like situations. Once trafficked into sex industry, traffickers control the women through physical and psychological means. Prostitution in the Middle East is strictly illegal, along with all sexual activity outside lawful marriage. The religious outlawing of extramarital sex reinforces this trade and consequently further bolsters the demand for prostitution. The issue is increasing by the lack of legislative actions taken by states to control prostitution and trafficking.

Even though the most common forms of human trafficking are sexual enslavement and forced labor, these are not the only cases. The type of trafficking that is quite unique to the Middle East is the forced camel jockeying of young boys. Camel racing is a particularly dangerous and violent practice in which young boys around five years of age are forced into this game against their will. Boys from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are recruited to be camel jockeys in Middle Eastern countries such as the United Arab Emirates. Their parents normally sell them to agents who go around poor districts in these countries and offer to take male children away to the UAE to work. These agents tell parents that the children will earn large sums of money that will be sent home to the families. The parents are typically deceived about the conditions of work. They are led to believe that the children are going to obtain good jobs and will have a better future than if they remain at home. Usually the boys do not know who is taking them abroad or for what purpose. Most of the boys are not aware they will become camel jockeys against their will. When they arrive in UAE, they are transferred to camel training complexes in the desert.

The children are subject to several forms of abuse during their stay, including punishments such as a lack of food and electric shocks. Lack of food is a common practice because their owners try to maintain their weight at less than 20 kg (44 lbs) for racing purposes. Deaths and injuries of children during racing is another major concern. If children accidentally die during a race they are buried straight away to avoid police investigations of the death. Children are not allowed at all to leave the camel training complex. They sleep on cardboard boxes, making them very prone to scorpion bites. The children get up at 4:00am to begin exercising the camels. Every day they take the camels for rides until 11:00am. Then they are allowed to rest for two hours before feeding and cleaning the camels. Then they exercise the camels again until nightfall. The children are supposed to be paid for their work but that is almost never the case. The agent usually takes the salary and keeps it without allocating any to the child or his family. Escaping away is a virtual impossibility for children deployed as camel jockeys since these training complexes are usually in remote desert locations.

Research conducted on the routes of illegal migration, smuggling and trafficking concluded that over the period 1992-97, majority of the illegal migrants to Europe had came from Iraq, China, Pakistan, India or Africa. The International Organization for Migration notes trafficking of women from Ghana to Lebanon, Libya and EU countries, women for domestic service from Central and West Africa to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and even voluntary migrations of women from Ethiopia to the Middle East, where working conditions are considered to be virtual slavery. The Middle East is a destination region for men and women trafficked for the purpose of commercial and sexual exploitation. Wealthy Arab men from the Persian Gulf area have been known to rent flats that are ‘furnished with housemaids’ for anywhere from a few hours to a few months. Most of the prostitutes and human trafficking victims tend to be from Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Very few countries in the Middle East are devoid of the commercial sex industry.

Many locations where human trafficking is common, especially in Middle East, most are characterized by poverty. Human trafficking is a market fueled by principles of supply and demand. Therefore, where there is poverty, there is a likely supply to meet the growing demand for sexual entertainment. Economic vulnerability increases the likelihood of women becoming sexual commodities for wealthy Arabs in the Persian Gulf area. Fewer work opportunities for women have led to prostitution as an alternative. For example, in Egypt, women from lower-class backgrounds see that a few nights in prostitution generate more money than one month’s work in the public sector. This makes Egypt a popular location for international sex tourism. Despite sex tourism being illegal, Egyptians find it hard to turn away Gulf hard currency due to their crumbling economy. The proliferation of prostitution, sex tourism, and misyar marriages can be understood as the consequence of uneven economic development, further exacerbated by principles of supply and demand. Persian Gulf nationals have the will and the means to pursue sexual entertainment, and poorer Muslim communities can supply services in return for financial security.