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).