Maysam

January 23, 2009
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Yesterday a human trafficking trial began in the Songino Khairkhan District’s court.

A Mongolian national, M.Purevbat, is charged with kidnapping girls and forcing them into the sex trade.

According to the charges, Purevbat may be responsible for the disappearances of 100 girls. If convicted, he could face 5- 15 years imprisonment.

According to a report titled “Country Gender Assessment-2008”, which was completed by the National Network of Mongolian Women’s Organizations, together with Asia Development Bank, SDB and CEG, protection against human trafficking, for its victims and witnesses protection have not originated yet in Mongolia. 

The report says that the lack of protection for victims and witnesses serves as a major deterrent for reporting trafficking and forced prostitution.

They also highlighted the serious need for legal reform to ensure compensation for psychological and mental health damage and for broadening legal, social and psychological support to victims, as well as the need for more public awareness and capacity-building of government institutions.

The age of sex workers in Mongolia has decreased significantly. The report also states that Mongolian law favors those who solicit sex, while disproportionately punishing those who illegally provide it as a service.

Trafficking in women and children is a new phenomenon in Mongolia that arose in connection to Mongolia’s transition to a market economy, the opening of its borders, democratization and the free movement of people across borders.

As discussed earlier, formal migration opportunities are more limited for women, while unemployment, underemployment and low wages have consistently been a more serious problem for women, especially young women and women over 35. The proliferation of informal and illegal recruiters/middlemen for employment abroad, due to the lack of adequate regulation of the sector by the government, has made women particularly vulnerable to fraud, irregular migration and trafficking. Given the clandestine, criminal nature of human trafficking, it is hard to accurately establish the numbers of Mongolian women and children affected, but there is indication of a fast growing trend.

In 2000, two victims of trafficking were reported, whereas in the first half of 2006 alone, 127 victims were reported. Surveys conducted in Erlian indicated a growing number of Mongolian sex workers – 200 to 300 according to police estimates in 2005 – who work in the city’s red light areas. Many of them are believed to have been originally trafficked. In the first half of 2006, 20 victims sought assistance from the Mongolian Embassy in Beijing.

A majority of the 48 victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation interviewed by GEC in Beijing, Hong Kong, Macao and South Korea were young women over 18, while four were 16-17 years old. 79 percent  of them had never been married, 17.2 percent were divorced. One in three women had attended a college or university. Fifty two percent of the women sought to migrate abroad to find employment to be able to help their families, 25 percent to earn money for their education, and 23 percent to become financially independent from others. Women were promised US$500-3,000 for jobs abroad as waiters, models, beauticians, dancers, and masseuses. Ninety six percent of the women found out about the reality of their situation after having crossed the border, had their documents confiscated by their brokers, and being told they owed US$1,500-3,500  for the broker’s services. They were then  forced to prostitute themselves in order to repay the debt and regain their freedom. Such false promises are the most commonly used method by recruiters. In some cases, women are told they would be engaged in prostitution, but assured they would enjoy freedom, better living and working conditions and much higher pay.

Many women fell victims to traffickers when they responded to age- and gender-specific job advertisements such as “will find well-paying jobs abroad for tall, good-looking girls under 25”, as was in the case in 21 percent of the victims interviewed by GEC. There is also evidence that TV chat offers and announcements lure victims into trafficking. Seventeen percent were approached by strangers. However, the majority of the victims (62 percent) were recruited through friends and acquaintances. 

Fifty four percent of the women work in saunas and massage parlors, 26 percent in disco clubs, eight percent in hotels, eight percent in karaoke bars and four percent on the streets. In Macao, girls mostly work in saunas, from 8 pm to 6 am. Women work under extremely difficult, high-risk conditions and are forced to submit to every wish of their customers. They do not have any guarantees for personal security either from violence and abuse or from STDs and HIV/AIDS. Women are frequently beaten up, abused and humiliated by their clients, who are often drunk or high on drugs, and often clients do not pay them. Twenty three percent of the victims reported that they had encountered clients who were sadists, who had beaten them nearly to death.

Women mostly lived under close supervision by the madams, 4-10 of them crammed in one small room, close to the place of work. Until the debt was repaid, women were not allowed to go outside by themselves. Many of the women did not know the total amount of their debt or how much they had yet to repay. In Hong Kong, women were punished by deduction from their salaries, corporal punishment, working with no rest for being late or missing a day of work. If they refused to participate in a “show,” they were fined by 1,000-2,000 HKD (US$150-250 ).

Women were also made to undergo various alterations and surgical operations to better please the customers. These included drinking slimming tea and forced dieting to lose weight, forced breast enlargement operations, and making folds in the eyelids. Payments for these operations were deducted from the women’s salaries (US$ 1,000 for breast enlargement, US$ 50-100 for altering the eyelids).

Most recently, NGO activists led by GEC were able to visit some of the brothels in Erlian and talk to some of the Mongolian sex workers. They were admitted inside by the owners/madams after explaining they wished to provide women with health services. The activists found out that women were not adequately protected against STDs and HIV/AIDS and that they were told by their owners to perform vaginal douche using toothpaste in order to disinfect and prevent from diseases. Every time women were sick or appeared to be falling sick, they were injected with unknown substances (one of the NGO activists was a doctor and she was most concerned about these injections). Activists also reported that women in Erlian were forced to undergo various treatments that delayed their menstrual flows. 

GEC also interviewed 16 victims of trafficking who returned to Mongolia. Half of the women were 20-22 year-olds and one was an under-age girl who had dropped out of school. More than half had secondary educations and one had higher education. 69 percent of the women sought employment abroad to earn more money than they could in Mongolia, 37.5 percent to provide for their families, 50 percent to gain money for their education and 50 percent to gain money to start a small business in Mongolia. Women had paid US$ 100-500 to brokers, they thought they owed their brokers about US $1,000-3,000, they were promised US$2,000-3,000 per month, but 60 percent of them returned with nothing as they never received any salary and only worked to service the debt. About 20 percent had earned US$200-300 per month, but all the money had been spent on bare necessities.

Women still working abroad and women who have returned reported serious deterioration of health due to the heavy use of slimming tea and drugs to stop menstruation. Many had also become addicted to alcohol and tobacco or drugs in the hopes of soothing or dulling their anxiety and depression.

The most common route for trafficking is reported to be Ulaanbaatar-Erlian-Beijng-Macao, but women and girls have also been trafficked to Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Israel, Belgium, Turkey, Malaysia, Singapore, and Eastern European countries. NGOs report that scope and nature of human trafficking is changing, becoming more organized. In all known cases, traffickers had established prior contacts with buyers in foreign countries. Based on the analysis of these cases, CHRD concluded that transnational criminal networks are operating in Mongolia.

NGOs have also reported on the increasing scope of domestic trafficking and organized criminal networks in Mongolia that kidnap girls from the streets or lure them through their peers, relatives or acquaintances, keep them locked in hotels and force them into prostitution. In February, 2008, during the Mongolian New Year, half a dozen girls were reported to have been kidnapped from the streets and forced into prostitution in Ulaanbaatar and Darkhan city. One of the cases involving a 17-year old girl, a daughter of a poor single mother of three, caught significant media and public attention. Victims and NGOs also reported that girls are often trafficked abroad after having been ‘tamed’ and sexually exploited in Mongolia.

All existing studies, especially one by the GEC that focus specifically on identifying vulnerability to trafficking, as well as reports by victims, their family members and NGOs, agree that the most at risk groups are poor, young, poorly educated women and girls who do not have adult male members of the family (mostly daughters of poor single mothers), are half or full orphans, are unemployed or employed in the service sector (bars, karaoke, saunas, discos). Girls and women who live in the streets and are engaged in prostitution are placed at much higher risk. However, NGOs and the police have also reported cases when boys who live in the streets have also been trafficked abroad for the purpose of making them work as thieves.
 
Trafficking through Marriage Arrangements
In the context of human trafficking, marriage migration is another serious issue that demands examination. By 2005 data of the Center for Citizen Registration Bureau, 2,233 Mongolian citizens – 95 percent of whom are women - registered their marriages with foreign citizens, Mongolian-Korean marriages accounting for 65 percent of all international marriages. The overwhelming majority of the marriages were between Mongolian women and Korean men: 98.8 percent of 1,668 Korean-Mongolian marriages, while the number of registered marriages between Mongolians and Germans was 155, followed by Chinese-Mongolian marriages at 137 and Japanese-Mongolian marriages at 119.
In the case of Korean-Mongolian marriages, a number of cases have been documented of women being essentially trafficked to lower income, often rural and middle-aged or old Korean men, through marriage arrangements. GEC reports that women are recruited by marriage brokers through media advertisements saying that “marriages shall be arranged with foreign citizens with higher than average incomes and living conditions.” Women are married off 1-3 months within turning to a marriage broker and see their would-be husbands 1-2 times before their marriages or never see them until they are married. The majority of the women (78 percent of the 30 women interviewed) stated they went through a marriage broker and a majority (23 out of 30) stated their husbands paid the brokers US$3,000-5,000 .

The average age of the 30 women married to Koreans interviewed by GEC was 24.9, whilst their husbands’ was 44.5 percent (or about 20 years) older than the women. Two of the women interviewed were as young as 18-19 years old. A Majority of the women (56.3 percent) did not know their husbands’ educational levels, while 1/3 of the rest stated their husbands have blue-collar status. When women did know their husbands’ educational levels, their own educational level was higher than their husbands’. Over 88 percent of the women stated they had married Koreans in order to obtain Korean visas and work permits, 59 percent stated they married to be able to send money home and 35 percent to be able to save money for their education. Several of the women had run away from their husbands, 13 were living in Seoul, several women did not know in what state or city they were living in Korea.

Fifty percent of the women did not have their passports on them– their documents were kept by the broker, husband or in-laws. A majority (24 out of 30) were dissatisfied with their lives, their financial situation had not improved, they were financially dependent on their husbands, and were practically unable to send money home. Women did hard household work, took care of their husbands and relatives, provided sex to their husbands, assisted in earning household income (including heavy and unfamiliar farm work) and half of the women reported they did this work because they were forced. Women also reported high level of physical and sexual abuse by their husbands and verbal and psychological abuse by their in-laws. Women are beaten, punished and confined inside the homes for poorly performing household chores, for not cooking Korean food, for “wandering” outside and for calling Mongolia on the phone. In some of the cases, husbands were reported to be mentally retarded or addicted to narcotic substances.

Sixty percent of the women reported a deterioration in health, especially in mental health. They felt high levels of stress, depression, and anxiety. They felt isolated. Very few women had social support through church groups; the rest received no support from any organization or individual while in Korea. Despite such harsh living conditions, none of the women wished to return home because they had no home of their own, no job prospects, no sources of income in Mongolia and feared that wide-spread corruption would make it impossible for them to make a living in Mongolia. Therefore, while only seven women reported they plan to stay with their husbands, the rest hoped to escape their husbands and find work in Korea.

While many marriages between Mongolian women and foreigners are based on mutual affection, it is clear that marriage has become a form of trafficking in women and girls for forced labor and sexual exploitation. Women are forced to choose migration through a marriage arrangement because of desperate financial and living conditions and no hope for any opportunities to make a living in Mongolia. Marriage brokers and foreign husbands who benefit from this double and triple exploitation (sexual services, domestic work, household income generation work) are currently outside regulation by Mongolian laws.
 
State and NGO Responses, Legal Framework

Despite clear violations of human rights and evidence of transnational criminal operations, the national legal framework and law-enforcement institutions have been slow to respond to the growing problem of human trafficking, especially in women and children. Much needed services for the victims such as legal aid, shelter, and psychosocial support have been provided exclusively by a small number of NGOs such as the CHRD, the Mongolian Gender Equality Center, the National Center against Violence and a few child rights NGOs (primarily members of the ECPAT National Network in Mongolia). These services have been limited due to the limited capacity of NGOs while demand is increasingly growing.

Legal and policy framework have improved thanks to active advocacy by NGOs. Thus, in 2008, the Criminal Code’s Article 113 was amended so as to include the full definition of trafficking according to international standards and the parliament has ratified the Palermo protocol. In 2006, the National Program on Preventing and Combating Human Trafficking, Especially in Women and Children, was adopted but shelved until recently. Most recently, the national council on the implementation of this program has been formed involving governmental and non-governmental stakeholders.

Until recently, most of the reported cases of trafficking were dismissed prior to reaching the courts: in 22 percent of the reported 24 cases in 1999-2005, criminal files were never opened and 60 percent were dismissed during investigation. Only 11 percent or three cases were resolved by the court, two percent were suspended, and five percent were under investigation during the time of the CHRD study. Only 35 percent of the cases had been uncovered by the police operative work, 40 percent were reported by victims’ family members, and 25 percent by victims themselves. Difficulties faced by the police in investigating human trafficking included lack of gender-sensitive and rights-based understanding of the victim’s situation and consequently blaming of the victim, lack of financial and other resources to go abroad to interrogate the suspected perpetrators, and lack of a clear definition of human trafficking in the law prior to the amendment of Article 113, and the requirement to prove that money had exchanged hands to establish criminal content.

It is also important for Mongolia to sign mutual legal aid agreements and strengthen cooperation in law enforcement with countries that serve as major destinations for trafficking in Mongolian women and children. Currently, Mongolia has agreements with 20 countries that are a part of the Vienna Convention of 1963 on consular relations (Germany, Kazakhstan, Russia, Poland, South Korea, Turkey, Hungary, China, Czech Republic, etc.), agreements on repatriation of criminal offenders with four countries (Kazakhstan, South Korea, China, India), and consular conventions with 15 countries including the USA, Russia, Hungary and Czech Republic.

Despite these improvements, the environment is still extremely hostile towards victims of trafficking. They are viewed by both law-enforcement personnel and general public as prostitutes, i.e. as women who voluntarily consented to prostitution in order to make an easy living.

Police response to the case of the girl who escaped her traffickers in February, 2008, clearly demonstrated that the police are far from being able to adequately address the problem of trafficking. Instead of seeking to assist the girl and apprehend her victimizers, the police exerted significant energy to denounce the 17-year old girl as a prostitute, her mother as a fraud and women’s rights activists as liars. The police had openly declared the girl’s name, the place of her residence and the fact that she lives with her mother and two younger siblings, with no adult male to protect her. This disclosure affected the younger siblings of the girl, who were insulted by their schoolmates and teachers as siblings of a prostitute. Consequently, the younger brother and sister refused to attend school.

Sustained and coordinated media interventions by women’s NGOs, other stakeholders and media cooperation forced the police to admit that the crime of trafficking exists and is growing in Mongolia, and that the police had not been able to adequately deal with this situation. Nevertheless, mistreatment and further victimization of trafficking victims by the police, unethical coverage by the media and hostile public attitudes are common in Mongolia. This attitude is closely related to the general attitude towards prostitution and patriarchal notions that regard women who have had multiple sexual partners as impure and unworthy of respect.

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