Most trafficked women, kids from Philippines, Indonesia—ILO

An undisclosed number of women and children from the Philippines and Indonesia continue to be trafficked into forced commercial sex in countries like China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO).

In a report, the United Nations-attached agency also described as “high” the number of cases of forced labor of domestic workers trafficked from the two countries to Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong.

“In Japan and Australia, women (from the Asia Pacific region) have entered these countries legally under entertainment visas in the expectation of working in dance clubs, only to be forced into providing sexual services,” said the ILO, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland.

It noted that the “root causes of trafficking and irregular migration (of women and children) included poverty, indebtedness and limited educational and employment opportunities in their rural communities of origin, social exclusion and the lure of the big cities.”

According to the ILO, women and children from the Philippines and Indonesia were among an estimated 9.5 million victims of forced labor in the Asia Pacific region, which represents over three-fourths of the global total of 12.3 million victims.

“Forced commercial sex exploitation makes up less than 10 percent of the total while about 20 percent of forced labor, affecting approximately 1.9 million people, is state-imposed and concentrated in a few countries,” said the agency.

The ILO also reported that “domestic workers in the region are facing new forms of coercion.”

“Sometimes an initially freely chosen job later becomes an exploitative trap, while in other cases women and girls are trafficked into forced domestic service overseas. Forced labor situations can develop when workers are confined to their employer’s home, subjected to physical, verbal or sexual abuse, and their freedom to leave the job is denied, particularly when passports and other identity documents are confiscated,” the agency said.

The ILO pointed out that “in Asian countries, domestic workers are not recognized as workers and are deprived of labor rights.”

“To remedy this situation, both the Philippines and Indonesia have filed bills that provide for a minimum wage for domestic workers and for working hours and benefits similar to those of workers in other sectors,” it said.

The agency said it was “helping the Philippines and Indonesia strengthen the outreach of domestic worker organizations and creating linkages with groups of migrant workers in the neighboring destinations of Malaysia and Hong Kong.”

In the same report, the ILO said migrant workers from the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka “have died in unclear circumstances while others have been subjected to severe punishments in several Middle Eastern countries.”