Forced Labor - Essay Example

Women and girl victims are exploited for sex. When the victims finally reach their destination, they are forced to work as prostitutes, sex escorts or to make pornographic films. They are informed they cannot expect wages from prostitution until their earnings are sufficient to pay back the amount paid by brothel owners to agents {like to traffickers} who transported them there. The women commonly find that their ‘debts’ go on mysteriously increasing, whereby there are no hopes of fully paying them (Palmerlee http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2727). Sex tourist packages are becoming increasingly popular; aided by specialized travel agencies all over the world that promote ‘exotic sexual adventures’ with women ‘who know how to please men’ (Batstone, 2007, p.60). Another way of exploiting women is to force them into marriage by arranging brokered marriages with the connivance of agents and brokers (http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/82902.pdf). Thanks to the Internet, traffickers are able to supply girls as young as 13 from Asia and East Europe as ‘mail-order brides to Western men (Bechard, 2006, p.36). A third way of exploitation is domestic servitude. Women and girls are trafficked into households in destination countries where their passports are confiscated and they are forced to do hard work for long hours without pay while being used for sex as well. Such victims are invariably from poor countries and their plight is not visible to others outside the employers’ household, making it very hard for them to obtain assistance and for law enforcers to detect (http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/82902.pdf).

In several nations, national armies and rebels illicitly recruit children {both male and female} as soldiers, porters, spies, servants, and sexual slaves. Men and teenage boys are forced into hard work without payment by unethical employers who take advantage of loopholes in laws and threaten or coerce victims by using bonds or arbitrary debts.  Victims recruited for jobs on fishing vessels are forced to do hard work in life-threatening conditions with no possibility of assistance or breaking free from captivity; they are given very little food and water, not given any payment, and used for periods ranging from 6 months to 4 years. Human traffickers prefer this exploitative method on the high seas because there are very few possibilities of either the victims escaping, or investigation by law officials (http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/82902.pdf).