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Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery In the early years of the 21st Century gvnet.com/humantrafficking/SriLanka.htm
Sri Lanka is
primarily a source and, to a much lesser extent, a destination for men and
women trafficking for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual
exploitation. Sri Lankan men and women migrate willingly to Kuwait, Jordan,
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and
Singapore to work as construction workers, domestic servants, or garment
factory workers. Some of these workers find themselves in situations of
involuntary servitude when faced with restrictions on movement, withholding
of passports, threats, physical or sexual abuse, and debt bondage that is, in
some instances, facilitated by large pre-departure fees imposed by labor
recruitment agencies and their unlicensed sub-agents. Children are trafficked
within the country for commercial sexual exploitation and, very infrequently,
for forced labor. - |
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CAUTION: The following links
have been culled from the web to illuminate the situation in ***
FEATURED ARTICLES *** '100 kids abused daily' in Susannah Price, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/276054.stm [accessed 24 December 2010] The scale of the
abuse has never been widely investigated. The researchers into this first
draft study on sexually exploited and abused children concluded there were between
10,000-15,000 boys involved in the sex trade, not only in beach areas but
also in the hill country and near other tourst
sites. They found the boys were mostly
aged between eight and 15 and while most of them came from fishing hamlets
and coastal villages, about a third were lured from the inland rural areas by
promises of work. ***
ARCHIVES *** The Department of Labor’s 2004 Findings on
the Worst Forms of Child Labor www.dol.gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/tda2004/sri-lanka.htm [accessed 24 December 2010] INCIDENCE
AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - Some children from rural areas are reportedly sent to
work as domestic servants in urban households where, due to debts owed by
their parents to traffickers, they may find themselves in situations that
amount to debt bondage. The government
estimates that more than 2,000 children are engaged in prostitution.
The majority of children engaged in prostitution are victimized by local
citizens, though there are reports of sex tourism as well. Trafficking of children typically does not
cross national borders; children are trafficked within the country to work as
domestic servants and for the purposes of sexual exploitation, especially at
tourist destinations. Human Rights
Reports » 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61711.htm [accessed 24 December 2010] TRAFFICKING
IN PERSONS
– Internal trafficking in male children was also a problem, especially from
areas bordering the northern and eastern provinces. Protecting Environment and Children Everywhere, a domestic NGO,
estimated that there were 6 thousand male children between the ages of 8 and
15 years engaged as sex workers at beach and mountain resorts. Some of these
children were forced into prostitution by their parents or by organized
crime. Concluding Observations of the Committee on
the Rights of the Child (CRC) UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 6
June 2003 www1.umn.edu/humanrts/crc/srilanka2003.html [accessed 24 December 2010] [49] The Committee
welcomes the State party’s ratification of ILO Conventions Nos. 138
and 182 in 2000 and 2001, respectively.
Nevertheless, it remains concerned at the high proportion of children,
including very young children, working as domestic servants, in the
plantation sector, on the street and in other parts of the informal sector. ColomboPage News At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here] [accessed 28 August 2011] Media Secretary to
the Ministry of Child Development and Woman's Empowerment Indrani
Sugathadasa said that human trafficking is not a
large scale problem in How Human Traffickers Snare Poor Victims to
Dominic Wabala,
The Nation ( At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]
[accessed 11 September 2011] The story of the
six young men started in Each of them fell
victim to a man who passed himself as an employment agent. The man, only
identified as Hilmy, was known for scouring the
villages of eastern and central Sri Lanka in search of gullible youth willing
to risk everything they owned for a chance to work in Europe. Karuna Group and LTTE
Continue Abducting and Recruiting Children Human Rights Watch, [accessed 24 December 2010] Despite promises to
investigate abductions of children by the pro-government Karuna
group, Sri Lankan authorities have taken no effective action and abductions
continue, Human Rights Watch said today. The armed opposition Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) also continue to
recruit children in Sri Lanka and use them as soldiers. Commentary: 'I am an orphan, not a child
soldier. . . ' SiberNews Commentary, 13
November 2007 www.topix.com/forum/world/sri-lanka/TOAEI02J7IKC4DUMG [accessed 24 December 2010] You as a reader put
your self in one of these situations. How would you react? Would you not want
to protect your brothers and sisters from the same tortures that you faced?
Or would you be thinking about child rights and just watch others being put
through the same misery as you. If we had given these children's a good life
and education, they would follow international child rights standards. But
what the government did was take these away from them and teach them that
those rights are only in paper. What then stops them from picking up arms to
protect themselves and others? Joint Effort To Nab Lankan Tsunami Child
Trafficking Trawler Upali Rupasinghe
in Kolkata, Daily News, 20 January 2005 www.dailynews.lk/2005/01/20/new14.html [accessed 24 December 2010] The Indian Coast
Guard along with the Indian Navy and Police are trying to locate a fishing
trawler said to be packed with Sri Lankan tsunami orphans to be sold to
Western couples by child traffickers. Free Democracy February 23, 2006 freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2006/02/uae-horrendous-record-of-child-slavery.html [accessed 30 November 2010] UAE : HORRENDOUS
RECORD OF CHILD SLAVERY - WORK WORRIES - Sri Lankan women are trafficked to Freedom House
Country Report - Political Rights: 4 Civil Liberties: 4 Status: Partly Free 2009 Edition www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2009/sri-lanka [accessed 28 June 2012] Human Rights
Overview Human Rights Watch [accessed 24 December 2010] Library of Congress Call Number DS489 .S68
1990 lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/lktoc.html [accessed 24 December 2010] Orphaned children face a new nightmare of
abuse Farah Farouque
and Linda Morris, The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 January 2005 [accessed 24 December 2010] In Tamil Tigers Forcibly Recruit Child
Soldiers Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org/en/news/2004/11/09/sri-lanka-tamil-tigers-forcibly-recruit-child-soldiers [accessed 24 December 2010] By abducting
children or threatening their families, the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have recruited thousands of child soldiers in The Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, or Tamil Tigers) use
intimidation and threats to pressure Tamil families in the north and east of
Sri Lanka to provide sons and daughters for military service. When families
refuse, their children are sometimes abducted from their homes at night or
forcibly recruited while walking to school. Parents who resist the
recruitment of their children face retribution from the Tamil Tigers,
including violence or detention. Living in Fear - Child Soldiers and the
Tamil Tigers in Human Rights Watch
Report, November 10, 2004 www.hrw.org/en/reports/2004/11/10/living-fear [accessed 24
December 2010] SUMMARY - LTTE RECRUITMENT AND USE OF CHILDREN BEFORE
THE CEASE-FIRE
- Second, children who witnessed or suffered abuses by Sri Lankan security
forces often felt driven to join the LTTE. Government abuses prior to the cease-fire
included unlawful detention, interrogation, torture, execution, enforced
disappearances, and rape. A 1993 study of adolescents in Vaddukoddai
in the North found that one quarter of the children studied had witnessed
violence personally.3
In response, many children joined the LTTE, seeking to protect their families
or to avenge real or perceived abuses. Tamil Eelam News
Services, 23 Jun 2004 www.tamileelamnews.com/cgi-bin/news/exec/view.cgi/3/2781 [accessed 24 December 2010] Of the 1643 cases
reported last year, 734 of them were related to sexual abuse and much to the
alarm of children’s rights advocates, only a meagre
30 foreign paedophiles have been arrested over the
past two years and few have been prosecuted. “Children are not
only being sexually abused here by pedophiles from other countries, but Sri
Lanka also serves as a transit point for smuggling children to and from other
countries,” said a children’s rights advocate. Concern over Sri Lanka being a transit
point mounted after seven Chinese orphans were detected at the Katunanayake airport while they were on their way to the
West. They were being accompanied by suspected traffickers whom authorities
believe may have been taking them for organ transplant or child sex. End Child Exploitation - Faces of
Exploitation UNICEF, Faces of Exploitation, January
2003, ISBN: 1 871440 26 2 www.childtrafficking.com/Docs/unicef_2003__faces_of_explo.pdf [accessed 24 December 2010] [page 22] CHILDREN IN THE SEX
INDUSTRY
- Children may also work independently, offering themselves for cash, as do
many of the 10,000 to 15,000 boys selling themselves to sex tourists on the
beaches of ECPAT Sri Lanka/PEACE [PDF] ECPAT International annual report - July
2002 - June 2003 At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]
[accessed 11 September 2011] [page 109] ECPAT Sri
Lanka/PEACE
- PEACE was launched in 1989 against the commercial sexual exploitation and
abuse of children by both local and foreign paedophiles.
It has a 20 member Consultative Committee, a 5 member Core Committee, a
network of Children’s/Youth Clubs, and a host of volunteers carrying out its
aims and objectives. Its objectives are to create awareness of the problem of
sexual exploitation of children and child labour in Sri Lanka; to influence
National Policy related to the protection of children; and to prevent
children from being lured or forced into prostitution and hazardous
employment. What is Sex Tourism of Children? Friends of the Missing Child Center-Hawaii www.missingkidshawaii.org/get_help_exploitation_child_sex_toursim.html [accessed 25 December 2010] STATISTICS - Invitation to Sri Lanka Apparel Sourcing
Fair 2002 At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here] [accessed 11 September 2011] COMPLIANCE - Poverty, Globalization, Social Customs
& South Asian Children in Prostitution [PDF] Zahid Shahab
Ahmed ( www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/AhmedAsianChildrenProstitution.pdf [accessed 25 December 2010] INTRODUCTION [page
5]
Child prostitution is rampant in An Inconvenient Truth Samantha Catanese,
ihscslnews.org/view_article.php?id=174 [accessed 25 December 2010] "I work in a
house that has five family members. I’m the only servant. I’m very busy all
day working, washing, cleaning and preparing food. The children in the family
go to school, but I don’t get to go. They can also watch television, but I’m
not allowed. I’m not allowed to play with the children. I’m always working. I
sleep on the floor in the dining room. I’ve never been home to visit since
beginning this work. My parents came to visit me twice, and collected some
money from the family, but I don’t know how much." -- Salani Radnayaka,
a ten-year-old girl working as a live-in domestic servant for a family in
Colombo, Sri Lanka The Walter Jayawardhana,
LankaWeb, www.lankaweb.com/news/items02/110602-1.html [accessed 25 December 2010] In the second
annual report presented to the Congress for the year 2002, through which the
United States was seeking to bring international attention to "the
horrific practice of trafficking in persons" the US State Department
said, "The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE) abduct and hold children against their will for purposes of forced
labor, military conscription and in some cases, sexual exploitation. A
ceasefire with the LTTE has been in place since December 2001." Easy Targets - Violence Against Children
Worldwide Human Rights Watch Report, September 2001 www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/children/7.htm#_ednref82 [accessed 25 December 2010] VII. VIOLENCE IN THE
WORKPLACE
- In Several of the Sri
Lankan girls we interviewed also experienced sexual abuse at the hands of
their employer, their employer’s children, or their employer’s friends. Such
abuse is frequently known to agents who arrange for the children’s
employment. One agent told us of how he had recruited over a thousand
children for domestic service when he knew that the primary purpose of the
recruitment was sexual. Kyodo News International, At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]
[accessed 11 September 2011] The latest
statistics reveal there are more than 100,000 child vagrants in '100 kids abused daily' in Susannah Price, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/276054.stm [accessed 25 December 2010] The scale of the
abuse has never been widely investigated. The researchers into this first
draft study on sexually exploited and abused children concluded there were
between 10,000-15,000 boys involved in the sex trade, not only in beach areas
but also in the hill country and near other tourst
sites. They found the boys were mostly
aged between eight and 15 and while most of them came from fishing hamlets
and coastal villages, about a third were lured from the inland rural areas by
promises of work. All
material used herein reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107
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ARTICLES. Cite this webpage as: Patt,
Prof. Martin, "Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery – |
Torture in [Sri Lanka] [other countries]Human Trafficking in [Sri Lanka Street Children in [Sri Lanka] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [Sri Lanka] [other countries]