Human trafficking picks a new fight

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday, the 9th of February, 2023. Thanks for listening to WORLD Radio today! Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. First up on The World and Everything in It: human trafficking.

Estimates are that more than 27 million people endure forced labor around the world. To highlight the plight of these people, President Barack Obama in 2010 signed a proclamation to make each January the National Human Trafficking Prevention Month.

BROWN: One of the trafficking hotspots is Cambodia in southeast Asia. Traffickers there are tricking victims into yet another kind of forced labor.

WORLD correspondent Amy Lewis reports.

TESI: Back in the late 70s, the Khmer Rouge had murdered all the educated people. So the librarians, the doctors, the nurses, the accountants, bookkeepers. Simply if you wore glasses, you were killed, or you fled the country.

AMY LEWIS, REPORTER: Paul Tesi is the CEO of Asian Hope, a Christian humanitarian group that runs seven Christian schools in Cambodia. Christian schools filled Cambodia’s educational vacuum following the mass murders by the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s. The new schools did more than educate poor children.

TESI: There's really no other way to prevent all the things that exploit poor people in developing countries than education. That includes sex trafficking, that includes vocational exploitation for labor. It's just harder to exploit the educated, and parents don't sell their children who are educated.

Human trafficking is a problem in more than just Cambodia. Noel Yeatts leads World Help, another Christian humanitarian group.

YEATTS: What's really going on in Thailand is really what we would refer to as cultural slavery. And the reason we call it that is because it's driven by extreme poverty. And its girls are making choices because they have no other choice.

Regardless of the country, the people targeted for trafficking are pretty consistent: women, children, the poor, and the uneducated.

But now, there’s a new kid on the block. A way of trafficking that bucks that trend.

SIMS: And the people who are finding themselves in these situations are also largely college educated, they're tech savvy. they're younger. They're usually proficient in multiple languages.

Jake Sims is the country director of Cambodia for International Justice Mission or IJM, a global organization that combats slavery and trafficking.

SIMS: Cambodia is a major source, transit, and destination country for human trafficking of many different forms. Approximately 100,000 people are believed to be working in what they call the online gambling space in Cambodia alone, which, which is a euphemism for online for scamming.

Those 100,000 people didn’t sign up to become scammers.

SIMS: The first side of this equation seems to have been precipitated by COVID-19 lockdowns, large numbers of people out of work, willing to look for higher risk markets for employment…

The social media job ads they respond to sound great. They offer good pay, nice living conditions, and a generic sounding job title like “customer relations” or “sales.”

But they have to travel to a country that has a dismal record of justice. The World Justice Project ranks Cambodia dead last for being free of corruption. Its neighboring countries don’t fare much better.

SIMS: The countries where these syndicates are operating are ones in which the governments are having a difficult time holding the perpetrators accountable under the law.

Even though the scam syndicates target a different category of victims, they still use the classic trafficking tools of deception, coercion, confinement, and abuse.

SIMS: So once at the facility, the organized crime group will take the workers’ passports, their IDs, their cell phones, cut off communication with the outside and their ability to travel. Then recruited workers are locked inside buildings with security guards and not allowed to leave.

They might be given a quota of people to scam each day. If they fail to reach it, they’re often physically punished.

Their job is to promote various scams. One version is called “pig butchering.” It refers to slowly gaining someone’s trust, as fattening a pig for slaughter. They groom their targeted person for long periods of time. The truth comes out after that person signs away their cryptocurrency or life savings. Other versions involve the trafficked victim enticing others to join them, doing what they do.

SIMS: It's hard for folks in the States or elsewhere to imagine the sort of scenario by which they might find themselves locked in a compound and forced to rip people off. Right? But anytime someone is abused and held against their will and forced to work, regardless of what that work is, they are a victim, and they deserve our care and our empathy.

Americans, Australians, and Brits are losing billions of dollars to this phenomenon, Sims says. Crime leaders set up scam centers in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos. They enslave people from Thailand, Indonesia, China, India, Vietnam, and Malaysia, among others.

SIMS: So this is a truly global issue in terms of the reach of its impact in the reach of human suffering that it is causing. It's not a niche issue. This is something that is on some level impacting everyone. And as such, it merits a truly global response.

Sims says governments and aid groups need to have a coordinated response. In September, the Cambodian government cracked down on some of the syndicates in the capital city of Phnom Penh. More than 1000 people were rescued. But other groups were able to move their operations ahead of the sting. At the same time, Myanmar, also known as Burma, has seen an exponential increase in this type of exploitation.

International Justice Mission’s Jake Sims says one way to make a difference is to answer one scam call at a time.

SIMS: Ask if they're being forced to work and where they're from. See if you can get them to send the name or their GPS coordinates from where they're located. You can tell them that if they're in need of help, they should contact their embassy or a local NGO. Direct them to ijm.org if you want.

For the person on the other end of the phone, it could be their call for help. And they might have called you for such a time as this.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Amy Lewis.

BROWN: You can read WORLD Magazine’s companion story at wng.org.

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