Burma - Human Trafficking

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It is estimated that between thirty to forty thousand Burmese women and girls, sometimes as young as twelve years old, have been trafficked to Thailand alone, with thousands of new arrivals each year. A booming sex industry in Burma and across the border in Thailand is virtually the only option of employment for many women. Children are trafficked for forced labor as beggars, street hawkers, and soldiers. Burmese men and women hoping to migrate abroad for a better life instead find themselves forced into sexual and labor exploitation in Thailand, China, Malaysia, Bangladesh, South Korea, Macau, and Pakistan. Sometimes, these women and girls are aware that they will be working in the sex industry, but have very little understanding of the health risks, such as HIV/AIDS and other diseases, that they will be exposed to- as well as the degrading physical conditions they will be working in and the consequences for their own personal or social self worth.

• The military junta’s gross economic mismanagement, human rights abuses, and its policy of using forced labor are the top causal factors for Burma’s significant trafficking problem.


• The official ban on overland emigration of most young women drives some seeking to leave the country into the hands of “travel facilitators,” who may have ties with traffickers.


• The lack of job opportunities and higher incomes have also pushed Burmese to migrate into one of its five neighboring countries. This situation has created an opportunity for traffickers to lure the victims to other countries with false premises.


• Any positive effects of the liberal, open market policies of 1988 have been counteracted by the huge increase in military spending.


• The subsequent economic failure, the halt of international aid in the wake of the ’88 civil rights massacre, and the diversion of state funds away from the development of infrastructure, has meant that the majority of the population has been left to ensure their own survival in whatever way they can.


• A booming sex industry in Burma and across the border in Thailand is virtually the only option of employment for many women. Pressure to provide for their families means they have little choice.

• Methods of trafficking - false job offers, abduction, and the selling of girls from hill tribes and rural communities


• The victims of trafficking mostly come from minority groups, such as the Shan, the Mon, and the Tai Yan.


• The ‘green rice season’, when farmers struggle to make money, is when the sale of girls from rural areas reaches its peak.


• In other cases, family members sell girls to trafficking merchants in return for considerable amounts of money.


• Virgin girls between the ages of twelve and eighteen are in especially high demand in Thailand, so they are sold into brothels for short periods of time until their virginity has been deemed to have lost its value and they are returned to Burma.


• These women and girls are daily subjected to a wide range of abuses, including illegal confinement, forced labor, rape, other forms of physical abuse, exposure to HIV/AIDS, and even murder.


• They work up to eighteen hours a day, twenty five days a month, serving up to fifteen clients daily. Health care and contraception are all but neglected. It is thought that between fifty to seventy percent of those who return to Burma are HIV positive.


• Escape is out of the question: if they attempt to leave the brothel, they risk severe physical punishment, retribution against their families for defaulting on debt repayments, and arrest and deportation back to Burma. Thai Non Governmental Organizations estimate that there are as many as ten thousand new arrivals each year.


• The denial of basic human rights has an explicit connection with the exposure to HIV/AIDS. The abject failure of Thai and Burmese officials to punish and protect against debt bondage, illegal confinement, and forced, unprotected sex with large numbers of men undeniably ensures exposure to this deadly virus.


• Subsequently, their actual or suspected HIV status exposes them to further abuse, including compulsory testing by officials and the non- consensual distribution of test results, which subjects them to yet more abuse.