Detailing the Scourge of Human Trafficking in the Netherlands, Ecuador, Brazil, and South Africa at the UN

Human trafficking is a scourge which impacts every country. At its very core, human trafficking is the exploitation of human life for financial gain. Traffickers lie and deceive their victims to gain their trust and then sell them to work as slaves or be sexually exploited. According to the U.N. Global Report on Trafficking in Persons:

The term trafficking in persons can be misleading: it places emphasis on the transaction aspects of a crime that is more accurately described as enslavement. Exploitation of people, day after day. For years on end.

The most common form of human trafficking is sex trafficking, which the U.N. estimates makes up 79% of human trafficking cases and primarily involves women and girls. The remaining cases of human trafficking are primarily for forced labor. Out of all these cases of human trafficking, nearly 20% of the victims are children.

To further shed light on this atrocity, we have just filed written reports with the U.N. for the 41st Session of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). Of the 14 countries up for review this session, four had significant issues involving human trafficking (we will detail our reports on the remaining 10 in future posts). We detailed the scourge of human trafficking plaguing the Netherlands, Ecuador, Brazil, and South Africa. Furthermore, we urged that these countries work to put a stop to human trafficking and provide aid and rehabilitation for the victims.

Below are some of the facts we provided to the U.N. Due to the nature of the content, the stories are quite disturbing.

In the Netherlands, it is estimated that there are approximately 6,250 victims of human trafficking with 1,300 of those being underage Dutch girls. Most of these victims are sold into forced prostitution. In our report on the Netherlands, we told the story of a Romanian woman, who was sold into prostitution in the Netherlands at the age of 17 by someone whom she thought of as her boyfriend:

At the age of 17, someone she thought of as her boyfriend lured her from Romania to London where she believed she would have a good paying job as a hairstylist. Soon after getting to London, she was sold and forced to go work in an Amsterdam brothel and had her passport taken away from her. According to her, “The man who brought me to England and then to Holland used me like a piece of meat . . . When I saw the brothels with all the girls in the windows, I cried. I cried very hard because they looked horrible, and I knew that was coming to me.” She was forced to work 12 hours a day and only received £9 a day for food. After being sexually exploited for five years, she was finally able to escape with the help of a support agency.

In Ecuador, 80% of human trafficking victims are women and girls who are sexually exploited. However, these are likely conservative estimates as many cases go unreported out of shame and fear. In 2020, five men were sentenced to 25 years in prison for their involvement in a sex trafficking ring which led to the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl. As we further detailed in our report:

[T]he individuals were convicted of grooming girls outside of schools located in poorer districts in the capital city of Quito. The girls, who were between the ages of 13 and 16, would be invited to a party where they were supplied drugs and alcohol. One of the victims told of how they were drugged and told to have sex while being filmed.

In South Africa, women and girls are at risk for sexual exploitation and are passed around from brothel to brothel. According to eXpose HOPE, a non-profit in South Africa that provides aid for women trapped in the sex industry, “Women who are trafficked are seen as a commodity by brothel owners who move them from house to house.” In one of the stories we highlighted in our report, members of the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigations (“Hawks”) Serious Organized Crime Investigation team rescued 11 women who were trafficked to work in brothels:

In September of 2020, after a year-long investigation, Hawks raided three brothels in two different provinces. The raid resulted in the arrests of five individuals and rescue of eleven victims. All but two of the victims were citizens of foreign countries. According to a Hawks spokesperson, “The women, aged between 20 and 39 years, were used as prostitutes on the premises after they were allegedly lured by the suspects with a promise of employment.”

Human trafficking takes otherforms and is not just limited to sexual exploitation. As we stated in our report on Brazil, “slave labour is largely centered in rural areas” where “poor and mostly uneducated individuals” are exploited for “labour-intensive work in textile companies and in the agriculture sectors such as cattle ranching, coffee production, and tobacco.” The victims of slave labor are forced to live in squalor while working long hours with no pay. In our report, we told the story of a tobacco company that was using children for slave labor:

In March of 2021, Brazil charged a large tobacco company for using slave labor. Authorities were able to rescue nine individuals, five of which were children, from a farm in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. According to a labour inspector “(The workers) had acute intoxication, they had nausea, they vomited . . . . The children were also suffering from symptoms of acute intoxication.” This case marks a huge milestone for the fight against slave labour, as it is the first time the government has taken action against a tobacco company for conditions on a farm.

It is imperative that the international community come together to fight the evil of human trafficking in all its forms. Because human trafficking often involves transporting victims to other countries, procedures must be adopted to identify cases of human trafficking at the border. Furthermore, every country must enact and enforce comprehensive legislation that punishes human traffickers and provides aid and rehabilitation for the victims.

At the ACLJ, we will continue to shed light on the scourge of human trafficking and advocate for justice for the victims.