ABSTRACT
Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery, a crime against human rights and dignity. It involves an act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harbouring or receiving a person through a use of force, threat, coercion or other means, for the purpose of sexual and/or labour exploitation (United Nations Office of Drug Control (UNODC) 2013). The most recent estimate by the International Labour Organization from open sources suggests that at least 20.9 million people — men, women and children — are in forced labour even though it is still difficult to know exactly how many of these victims are resulted from trafficking. For a conservative estimate, some 2.5 million people are trafficked for labour and sexual exploitation in the world (United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT) 2010). Women, children and migrant workers are the most vulnerable groups who often fall into the hands of traffickers, in their own countries and/or abroad. Women count for 55 to 60 per cent of victims in those detected human trafficking cases while children make up 27 per cent of total victims (17 per cent girls and 10 per cent boys); adult males make up the remaining 14 per cent of the total victim population (UNODC 2012a). Although developing countries and regions are accountable for contributing a large number of victims to global human trafficking, ‘every country in the world is affected by trafficking, whether as a country of origin, transit or destination for victims’ (UNODC 2013, p. 27).
