While War Rages, Human Traffickers Thrive // FAI ONLINE

Lebanese women flash the palm of their hands colored in red as they demonstrate against prostitution, sex slavery and violence against women in front of the Justice Palace in the capital Beirut on April 8, 2016. / AFP / PATRICK BAZ

The global trafficking of persons has become one of the most heinous and widespread forms of criminal exploitation in the 21st century. Human trafficking is not simply the exploitation of vulnerable people, it is the exploitation of unstable political climates to build underground empires of organized crime. These networks are particularly successful in the Middle East because of multiple refugee crises, the kafala (sponsor) laws, the criminalization of victims, and pervasive conflict that keeps journalists focus on war, not trafficking issues.

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Refugee population levels have reached record levels in history as over 70.8 million people have been displaced worldwide, with a large percentage of those displaced originating from Syria and Iraq. Many refugees already face harrowing journeys, harsh living conditions in camps, and discrimination in host countries, but they are also at a high risk of human trafficking. Among migrants traveling to Europe through North Africa, alone, more than 70 percent have been trafficked or exploited, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Although many trafficking victims are refugees, others are lured through the offer of a workers visa. Much of the issue stems from law systems in the region, specifically kafala (sponsor) laws that allow foreign workers to enter a Middle Eastern country on the sponsorship of someone in that country. Once inside the country, these individuals have little to no rights, suffer abuse from sponsors, are overworked, not not paid, and enslaved. A frequent strategy of sponsors is to keep the “worker’s” passport so that they are essentially stranded.

While many individuals arrive through a legal channel, once they are trafficked and labeled as a “prostitute” they become criminal in the eyes of their host country. Often, the legal difference between prostitution and trafficking is not well understood by police officers.

According to Lebanon’s 2011 anti-trafficking law, a woman must prove that she was forced into prostitution, a very difficult thing to prove when she has received money or signed work papers. Often, trafficking victims cannot count on local governments to help them as all, and risk being sent to jail themselves if they approach authorities for help.

Beyond the domestic incompantancies of local government, international conflicts plays a even larger role in human trafficking in the region, with the Syrian Civil War being particularly relevant. In Jordan, Syrian refugees have been subject to preying by organized crime groups working in human trafficking, with Syrians being the UN’s most detected victim nationality of human trafficking in the Middle East outside of the Gulf. Syrian women are forced into sex work at nightclubs or are sold by their desperately poor families as child brides into sham marriages that either end after one night or result in the girl being forced into trafficking . Human trafficking is also present within the Syrian crisis as ISIS exploited thousands of Yazidi girls as sex slaves to be sold in open slave markets across its territory. In 2016, a trafficking ring in Beirut was busted, and 75 women were rescued, but local NGOs estimate that is a tiny percentange of the true level of exploitation of Syrian women.

Human trafficking in the Middle East is often overlooked and rarely reported on, and subsequently counter-trafficking efforts are undermanned and under-resourced. Frontier Alliance International is working to change this inbalance by engaging the crisis of sex-trafficking on the front lines of the Mediterranian basin. Join us in advocating for the vulnerable, and fight to help end this great evil of our times.