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Human Trafficking Growing Worldwide
Trafficking of humans is replacing slavery or bonded servitude as the most widespread form of forced labor, with the trafficking network touching almost every country in the world, the International Labor Organization said Friday.
Most nations are either sending countries, transit countries or receiving countries ¡ª and many are all three at once, said the 128-page study, ``Stopping Forced Labor.''
The study, a follow-up to the U.N. agency's 1998 declaration on fundamental rights at work, said forced labor is universally condemned, yet it still flourishes across the world.
Ancient practices such as slavery and bonded labor still exist in some parts of the world, especially Africa and South Asia, but the fastest-growing form of forced labor is through trafficking, it said.
Much trafficking involves women and girls who are destined for the sex trade.
Poverty, unemployment, civil disorder, political repression and gender and racial discrimination create an easy environment for traffickers to exploit vulnerable people, the study said.
Europe in particular ``has seen an explosion of trafficking since the breakup of the former Soviet Union,'' and large-scale sweatshop activities involving clandestine migrants have been found in Europe and North America.
Main destinations are the large cities of Western Europe, Israel, Japan and the United States, the study said. Some 50,000 women and girls are believed to be trafficked to the United States every year for the sex trade or domestic work. The main entry points are New York and California, it said.
The report noted that outright slavery is still found in a handful of countries, and the wholesale abduction of communities is not uncommon in Liberia, Mauritania, Sierra Leone and Sudan.
Indigenous peoples are particularly at risk from coercive recruitment practices in Africa and Latin America.
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