Human Trafficking in [Afghanistan Street Children in [Afghanistan] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [Afghanistan] [other countries] |
Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery Afghanistan [ Country-by-Country
Reports ] Afghanistan is a
source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children
trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and involuntary
servitude. Afghan children are trafficked internally and to Iran, Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Zimbabwe for commercial sexual exploitation, forced
marriage to settle debts or disputes, forced begging, debt bondage, service
as child soldiers, or other forms of involuntary servitude. Afghan women are
trafficked internally and to Pakistan and Iran for commercial sexual
exploitation, and men are trafficked to Iran for forced labor. Afghanistan is
also a destination for women and girls from China, Iran, and Tajikistan
trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. Tajik women and children are
also believed to be trafficked through Afghanistan to Pakistan and Iran for
commercial sexual exploitation.
- U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June, 2007 [full country
report] |
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CAUTION: The
following links have been culled from the web to illuminate the situation in ***
FEATURED ARTICLES *** Out
Of Money? Sell Your Daughter Zeva's eyes filled with tears as the
10-year-old's father took her by the arm and handed her over to the man from
whom he had borrowed 50,000 afghanis, or about
$1,000. Afghan carpet
weavers are unpaid slaves, rights activist says AFGHANISTAN: CARPET WEAVERS ARE
UNPAID SLAVES, RIGHTS ACTIVIST SAYS - Thousands of women and girls who
weave world famous Afghan carpets are treated as unpaid slaves by their male
relatives, a rights activist said. The women and girls, some as young
as 11, spend up to 18 hours at wooden looms in dusty, dark and wet rooms. Women
choose death over marriage "Every minute of every day,
she was fetching water, growing crops, looking after animals and children,
cleaning the house. She was patient, but it was too much for her: she was
educated and sensitive. She found it hard to live like a slave." She was not alone in her
suffering, nor in the agonising way she chose to die. Anecdotal evidence suggests several
hundred young women are burning themselves to death in western Afghanistan
every year. ***
ARCHIVES *** U.S.
Dept of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs INCIDENCE
AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - Afghanistan is a country of origin and transit for children
trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation, forced marriage, labor,
domestic servitude, slavery, crime, and the removal of body organs. Since early 2003, there have been
increasing reports of children reported as missing throughout the
country. It is also reported that
impoverished Afghan families have sold their children into forced sexual
exploitation, marriage, and labor. Bur of Democracy,
Human Rights & Labor - Country Reports on Human Rights
Practices - 2006 WOMEN – Forced marriages continued to be a widespread
problem. Previous AIHRC reporting estimated that 60
to 80 percent of all marriages were forced. The AIHRC
estimated that approximately 40 percent of marriages were forced, and
distinguished this category from another 20 percent of marriages that were
"arranged," in which the woman was not allowed to choose her own
spouse but may opt not to marry the man chosen for her by her family. During
the year the AIHRC recorded 213 cases of forced
marriages. There were 106 reported cases of self-immolation, several of which
were women protesting a forced marriage. Exchanging or selling women or
girls remained a customary method of resolving disputes or satisfying debts,
even though it was outlawed by presidential decree. For example, according to
the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Rosina, 18, was sold into marriage by her father to a man
in his fifties. When she refused she was beaten. During the year the AIHRC recorded 41 cases of women being given to another
family to settle disputes; however, the AIHRC
believes the number of actual cases to be much higher. In the early part of
the year, there was a very high-profile case involving a 13-year-old who was
engaged to the son of an influential politician in Badakhshan
province. She refused to marry the man and was threatened with stoning by
residents of her village. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court; however,
quiet negotiations involving local and central government led the case to be
dropped and mediated informally. The girl did not have to marry the
politician's son. Honor killings also continued to
be a problem. The AIHRC documented a total of 50
cases throughout the year. During the year the AIHRC
reported a case in which a girl was raped by her brother. A resulting
pregnancy forced the girl to reveal the incident to her parents. In order to
save the family's reputation the parents set the girl on fire. She died three
days later. At year's end authorities had not investigated this case. There
were no further developments in the December 2005 case of an honor killing in
the Watapour District of Konar
Province. Bur of Democracy,
Human Rights & Labor - Country Reports on Human Rights
Practices - 2005 TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS – The law does not prohibit
trafficking in persons; however, traffickers could be prosecuted under other laws.
The country was a source and transit point for trafficked persons. A 2003 IOM
report noted qualitative and anecdotal evidence of increased trafficking in
girls and children to There were continued reports of
poor families promising young girls in marriage to satisfy family debts.
There were a number of reports that children, particularly from the south and
southeast, were trafficked to AFGHANISTAN: Lack
of institutional mechanisms to tackle human trafficking According to Paktiawal,
among trafficking victims were tens of Afghan children, boys and girls, who
had been taken to neighbouring countries for forced
servitude, sexual exploitation and other illegal purposes. Inside Afghanistan, traffickers use their
minor victims for narcotics smuggling and hard labour,
Afghan police said. “Adult Afghans
also fall prey to traffickers, due to widespread poverty and unemployment. The
traffickers mostly exploit their victims in the regional [labour]
markets,” said Paktiawal. An official at Afghanistan’s Ministry of
Foreign Affairs also confirmed that hundreds of young Afghans are annually
trafficked to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other countries
where they are widely exploited and used in complex forced servitude. Human trafficking
in Afghanistan; Taliban reap backlash Also it is reported that selling
of women has become very common in Faryab province
in north of Afghanistan and each woman is sold up to 50,000 Afghanis (around
US$1,000). Sharifa,
head of women’s affairs department in Faryab is
concerned and says that violence against woman have not been reduced but
abuses and humiliation against them increase day by day. Says explains that most of the girls sold
are between 5 to 15 years old and poverty, lack of women’s rights and
domestic violence are main factors behind it. Opium
Trade in Afghanistan Linked to Human Trafficking The IOM says children are
trafficked within the country to work as beggars or as bonded labor in the
brick kiln and carpet making industries. It says women and girls are
kidnapped or sold for forced marriages. They are pushed into prostitution and
sometimes used to settle debts or to resolve conflicts. Internationally, IOM says Afghan women and
girls are being trafficked primarily to Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Afghan carpet
weavers are unpaid slaves, rights activist says Love
Afghan Style: Women Are Still Being Used As Currency In The Marriage Market Zakira was given away in
marriage to stop a blood feud. Her uncle had murdered a man and, rather than
start a round of revenge killings between the families, 20-year-old Zakira was bestowed on the murdered man's brother who
happened to be three times her age.
Forced marriages have long been a custom in Out
Of Money? Sell Your Daughter Zeva's eyes filled with tears as the 10-year-old's father took her by the arm and handed her over to the man from whom he had borrowed 50,000 afghanis, or about $1,000. Freedom Or
Theocracy?: Constitutionalism in Afghanistan and Iraq ¶ 69 The
authorities in New rights, but
Afghan women still may face forced marriages Fourteen year-old Bibi has
never seen the father who wants to sell her into marriage with a stranger. She hid when he sent police to her village
home in northern The custom of bride kidnapping still ruins the life of
both women and men in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakstan, and
polygamy is on the rise across the region. The practice, which is legal in TRAFFICKING
AND EXPLOITATION - Female trafficking for sexual purposes is a
thriving business in Freedom
House Country Report - Political Rights: 5 Civil Liberties: 5 Status: Partly Free Human Rights Overview by Human Rights Watch – Defending Human Rights Worldwide "But civil rights for
women?" she says. "Light years off." The major problems for
women remain a lack of opportunity and fear for their personal safety at
home, says Le Duc. She points out that the
mistreatment of women flourished under the mujahideen.
Now, she says, women who work can
still be dismissed by men as "whores". "Women say that men
don't know how to behave towards them," says Le Duc.
"Not a week goes by without a report of a gang rape by a warlord, or a
woman beaten almost to death by her husband. Women are still valued for their
reproductive rather than their productive role." 2,000
former Afghan child soldiers to be demobilized and rehabilitated UNICEF estimates that there a
total of 8,000 former child soldiers in Afghanistan, many of whom have
already left the fighting forces informally over the past year. All are in urgent
need of assistance to fully reintegrate to civilian life, especially in the
area of education and sustainable income-generation. The family I stayed with showed me
how they all huddled in a corner, praying that they would be spared, during
three months of rocket attacks. Rape, abduction of women and children,
kidnappings and home invasions or forced land acquisitions are still
commonplace. Women
choose death over marriage "Every minute of every day,
she was fetching water, growing crops, looking after animals and children,
cleaning the house. She was patient, but it was too much for her: she was
educated and sensitive. She found it hard to live like a slave." She was not alone in her
suffering, nor in the agonising way she chose to die. Anecdotal evidence suggests several
hundred young women are burning themselves to death in western Afghanistan
every year. A government mission sent to
investigate the problem in Herat, the capital of western Afghanistan,
reported that at least 52 young married or soon-to-be married women had
burned themselves to death in recent months. The youngest was a bride-to-be
of just 13. Forced marriages
contributing to women suicides in Afghanistan Forced marriages and a lack of
education were contributing to a recent spate of suicide attempts among women
in Afghanistan, Deputy Women’s Affairs Minister Dr. Suraya
Sobah Rang said on Thursday. “Among the rest there could be
more suicides but you know, according to Afghan tradition, people are not
ready to talk about suicide, it is taboo and they try to hide it.” She said
neither the police nor a government delegation sent to Herat to investigate
the deaths could determine the true number of suicides. Afghanistan:
Rights Activists Temper U.S. Picture Of Progress For Women "A great deal is better for
the Afghan woman. She can go outside without the Taliban in tow, but she's
harassed by a lot of armed men. She can go if she wants a job, but there are
not jobs available for her to do. She wants to be healthy, but there's not a
health care system there. The worst part is that she does not have the right
to choose who she wants to marry," Shorish-Shamley
said. The issue of forced Afghan
marriages is making headlines in the Western press. Several newspapers and
broadcasters have recently carried stories about a recent string of
self-immolations by Afghan women in despair over forced marriages, domestic
violence and a lack of respect for their rights. Forced Marriages,
Beatings, Suicides Persist Despite Taliban's Fall For four months, the 21-year-old
civil liberties activist has been teaching 120 local women and girls to read,
write, take care of their health and not be afraid to stand up for their
rights. But two months ago, her work at the Afghan Center, a humanitarian
organization that provides general and vocational education for women in
Kabul, was undercut by her own family. They made clear to her that
because she is an Afghan woman, she has no rights. In February, Ghazal's
parents informed her that they had engaged her to marry her cousin, Rafi, 28, an unemployed carpenter in the tiny village of Reshkhor. They expect the striking young woman with an
arresting Sandra Bullock-like smile to move from the cosmopolitan capital of
Kabul and to be confined to a lifetime of cleaning Rafi's
house, cooking his food, washing his clothes and bearing his children. Still
an important source for human trafficking - IOM report A new report by the International
Organization for Migration (IOM) argues that Afghanistan remains an important
source country for human trafficking, despite improvements in the conditions
of women and girls in post-conflict Afghanistan. IOM said it had learnt that there
were many forms of trafficking practiced in Afghanistan including
exploitation of prostitutes, forced labour, slavery
and practices similar to slavery, servitude and removal of body organs. According to the report, Afghans are also
suffering from other human rights abuses, which are related to trafficking.
These include forced recruitment into armed groups, forced labour for poppy cultivation and the abduction of young
men and boys for forced religious training. Campaign
under way to raise awareness of child trafficking According to the Afghan
Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), human
trafficking - particularly child kidnapping and abduction - were identified
as one of the most serious rights violations in recent months in Afghanistan,
despite improvements in the situation of children in the war-weary country. AIHRC said that although exact figures
were hard to come by, in the last five months of 2003 over 300 complaints had
been received from the families of children who had disappeared. "The
commission is aware that many children are flown to Gulf countries, in
particular Saudi Arabia, for labour purposes,"
the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA)
said on Sunday, quoting AIHRC. Post-Taleban, post-war -
justice for women in Afghanistan? Two years after the beginning of
the military action against the Taleban, the women
of Afghanistan are still subject to horrific abuses, from honour
killings to forced and underage marriage, virginity testing, and prosecution
and imprisonment for adultery, said Amnesty International in a major new
report published today (6 October 2003). 'No one listens to us and no one
treats us as human beings: Afghanistan - Justice denied to women is based on
interviews with women in many parts of Afghanistan and finds that the
day-to-day lives of many Afghan women are little changed from the oppression
they endured under the Taleban. Afghan
Women Fight for Citizenship FEW GUARANTEES FOR WOMEN - Afghan women who attended the
September conference "felt that because of the recent history of abuses,
it was very important to very specifically list rights of women. That really
hasn't happened in this document," Sultan said. "It doesn't outlaw
discrimination based on gender. It doesn't talk about the rights of
inheritance and property. It doesn't address the exchange of women in terms
of disputes between families." Although members of a constitutional
commission reviewed a women's bill of rights composed at the Kandahar conference, they did not write it into the draft
constitution. Female commissioners "told us this was the best that could
have been done under the circumstances, that it was the best we could get out
of the loya jirga,"
Sultan said. Millions
Suffer in Sex Slavery
Afghani women are sold into prostitution in Pakistan for around 600
rupees - less than $4 a pound, depending on their weight. All material used herein
reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC §
107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use |
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Human Trafficking in [Afghanistan Street Children in [Afghanistan] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [Afghanistan] [other countries]