The International Labor Organization estimates that 12.3 million people have been trafficked around the world. Forty-three percent of these victims are used for forced commercial sexual exploitation, of which 98 percent are women and girls. Thirty-two percent of victims are used for forced economic exploitation, of which 56 percent are women and girls. Women are particularly vulnerable to trafficking due to governmental corruption and instability in the war-plagued Middle East. The most recent Trafficking in Persons report issued by the U.S. Department of State ranks Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Eritrea as “Tier 3” nations, which means that they do not even comply with the minimum standards of the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Other Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan, are on special State Department watch lists for failing to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking. It is currently estimated that the annual slave trade in the region is a $1.5 billion business and accounts for nine percent of all trafficking in the world. Middle Eastern countries do have laws that prohibit trafficking, but a lack of acknowledgement of the problem prevents the laws from being properly enforced.
A Recipe for Disaster
Ben Skinner, Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and author of A Crime So Monstrous, told the HPR, “The major draw to the Middle East is due to the economic disparity within the source countries of victims. It is the same thing that draws migrants across borders every year, the promise of a better life.” Few of the trafficking victims in the Middle East were born in the region. Orlando Patterson, professor of sociology at Harvard University, told the HPR, “Typically, we see that countries in the Middle East are destination countries, rather than source countries. Women are trafficked mostly from areas within Southeast Asia.” He explained that “the most common type of trafficking in the Middle East is domestic servitude, which is most commonly associated with female labor.”
Political instability in the Middle East has provided fertile conditions for trafficking and enslavement. The violence and conflict in Iraq, for example, has displaced many women. As Dr. Louise Shelley, founder and Director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University and author of Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective, told the HPR, there have been “large numbers of women displaced from Iraq who have been forced into prostitution in Jordan and Syria.” To agitate matters further, countries such as Iraq “have not been prioritizing this issue.” The United States’ military presence in Iraq has created even more opportunities for trafficking: Shelley notes that “there have been brothels that have arisen to supply service personnel.”
Culture may also play a role in the gender imbalance within trafficking. Inequalities in education and in opportunity for employment cause women in that region to be vulnerable and susceptible to trafficking. The deep-seated political corruption and, as stressed by Shelley, compliance in trafficking of Middle Eastern governmental officials, fused with the Islamic societal expectations of privacy and male domination, create a culture unreceptive to both inner dissent and outside influence on this issue.
End in Sight?
There is little evidence to suggest that trafficking is subsiding in the Middle East. According to Shelley, The recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have already given rise to labor trafficking. The Trafficking in Persons report, which has documented worsening conditions in Afghanistan, Iran and Kuwait in recent years, also conveys little hope.
The future of trafficking in the Middle East depends on whether tough policies will be enforced. Sharla Musabih, founder of City of Hope, a center for battered and trafficked women in Dubai, who is currently in exile in the United States following a smear campaign that forced her from the United Arab Emirates, described to the HPR how governments are oblivious to human trafficking: “They don’t take any of this seriously because they don’t believe it in the first place. Their heart’s not in it.” She believes that “there needs to be overall training for government officials. Awareness is the most important thing.” Little can be achieved through legislation because most nations already have laws against trafficking, but there is a pressing need to improve enforcement of these laws.
Musabih’s personal motto is that “if you turn right and are faced with resistance, you just have to turn left.” The time is long overdue for the world to embrace such perseverance and outspokenness so that slavery, the greatest disgrace to humanity, can be fought.