Sex Trafficking: Taiwan

Sex Slaves in Taiwan 

In my region of Far East Asia human trafficking has been a major issue for years.  In places like Thailand dubbed by humantrafficking.com as the “source, transit and destination for prostitution.” Victims after being kidnapped from their homes start there and are then transported internationally to places like China, Malaysia, UAE and even in some cases the United States. Upwards to 600-800,000 people mostly women are forced into sexual labor for their trafficker(s). As far as Taiwan is concerned, In the mid to late 1990’s the Taiwanese government implemented many different statues and laws, in ’93 the Child Welfare law enables juvenile welfare bodies, prosecutors, and victims to apply to courts for termination of guardianship  if they have been forced into prostitution by their parents. This eventually led to prostitution being abolished by the Legislative Yuan. In the small island off the coast of China there have been tons of NGO efforts being made to combat this problem. Organizations like Garden for Hope and Taipei’s women’s rescue foundation work to rescue women who have been abused. They provide counseling services to children affected by trafficking and domestic violence as well. I think the next step we as a society should take on to prevent this from continuing is to further educate our women and keep them in school. Making sure everyone has the right and ability to go to school shouldn’t be an issue. Just making sure that women get their education and work to contribute to society increases any country’s GDP to 9% and in some cases it could be even higher. This is a challenge that I think can and should be taken on and organizations like the TWRF are trying to find ways to ensure that one day this does in fact become a reality. More recently Michelle Obama has been a major advocate for educating women across the world. Her latest campaign Let Girls learn is a government-wide effort that will leverage the investments we’ve made in primary education in America to help expand the education of adolescent girls in impoverished situations. Keeping women in school will prevent the opportunity for more of them to be kidnapped, sold and used in the human trafficking world; things like this can be prevented. The SDGs suggest that the use of social media is the best thing the average person can do to aware others and combat sex trafficking.  The SDGs stress that people use of the hashtag “#Action2015” to raise awareness. 

Sex trafficking is the new age slave trade and something must be done to get rid of it. I believe if everyone becomes conscious of this situation and do things to help the many NGO’s out there like increasing school retention rates for adolescent women change will eventually happen.