Bloomberg News reported that, according to the U.S. report, an estimated “27 million men, women, and children worldwide are trapped in some form of slavery — South Asian maids confined in Qatari homes against their will, children taken from school to work in Uzbek cotton fields, and Paraguayans forced into labor in Argentine sweatshops. Millions of women and children are trafficked for sex. Very few are even identified, a focus of this year’s report.”
The U.S. State Department released its annual global human trafficking report June 20, and two countries — China and Russia — are angry with the United States for being downgraded from Tier 2 two to Tier 3 status, joining Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and nearly a score of other nations noted for their severe human trafficking issues. The annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report ranks nearly 200 countries on their record of combatting various forms of human trafficking, and promises over the last nine years from China and Russia to improve their records have kept them precariously in the Tier 2 slot.
“Now, the State Department has dropped the two countries, along with Uzbekistan, to Tier 3,” reported World News, accusing “China of state-sponsored forced labor under the name ‘re-education through labor,’ as well as widespread sex trafficking,” and Russia of “using forced labor for projects related to the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Sochi and forcing North Koreans to work in logging camps, under an agreement with the North Korean government.”
China’s notorious one-child policy — along with the resulting sex ratio of 118 males to 100 females — has dramatically increased the demand for “trafficking of foreign women as brides for Chinese men and for forced prostitution,” the report states. As for Russia, the report cited research from the Migration Research Center, which has estimated that one million people suffer under “exploitative” labor conditions in the former Soviet nation.
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