Report on sexual slavery within the UAE.

The United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) remains a destination country for men and women trafficked for the purpose of involuntary servitude and commercial sexual exploitation.

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Relevant links (with excerpts):

Human trafficking from Armenia to Dubai, UAE

… when she arrived in Abu Dhabi she was taken to a brothel where a pimp told her that he had bought her for $7000. From that moment on she was to work as a prostitute until she paid off her so-called debt. After three months of captivity, Tanya managed to escape. She bolted to a police station and recounted her story. Incredibly, she was charged with prostitution and sentenced to three years in a desert prison. In 2001, psychologically crushed and ashamed, Tanya was released. Nothing happened to her pimp. Branded a prostitute by the Muslim nation, she was summarily deported back to her Ukraine.

Private sector ‘can help combat human trafficking’

He said T.S. and M.K. used the victim’s poverty to subjugate and exploit her into working in the sex industry unwillingly. “The couple bought her from an unidentified person for Dh4,300 after she reportedly abandoned her sponsor. When she refused to have sex with customers, she got brutally beaten by the female suspect,” said the Attorney General.

New study shames human traffickers

Countries in the Middle East have been named as the worst culprits of human trafficking.

A new report by an international trade unions’ umbrella organisation says Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen are notorious destinations for women trafficked from Kenya.

Its report, ‘Trafficking in Persons — The Eastern Africa Situation’, notes that women and children were favourite targets for well-organised trafficking rings, which operate freely for lack of solid laws against the vice.

Stress on global network to fight human trafficking

A teacher in her home country, Noora says she was tempted by the promise of a good job and salary in Dubai. It was the first time that she had ever left her home country and her job and visa were arranged by a man she was put in contact with by a friend from her home town.

In her early 20’s at the time, Noora was told to expect a representative from the school where she was to work to collect her from the airport. Instead, she was met by a couple who took her to their home in Sharjah and locked her inside a room in a high-rise.

“The first couple of days were a blur. I kept asking when I was starting my job. The wife laughed and said there is no school - that I had to work as a prostitute,” she remembers. “I was terrified and couldn’t do anything. I was powerless.”

UAE: Probe begins into Indian Human Trafficking Racket

The 54 year-old visitor identified as A.K.S, 50, and his wife identified as M.S, were waiting for a connecting flight to Paris when they were arrested. They were reportedly carrying fake passports of two young boys accompanying them.

The data recorded in the passports of the two minors showed them to be the sons of the accused but upon questioning, the couple denied being the parents, claiming they had been asked by some people in Mumbai to hand over the children to someone in Paris.

According to Asia Tribune:

For the past three years, the State Department has condemned Saudi Arabia for its policies on human trafficking, placing it in the category of most serious violators, or Tier 3 under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Though sex trafficking also exists on a large scale in the USA.

Blast from the past:

Mariam, 16, relives the day her father in Baghdad sold her off as a domestic worker in one of the prosperous Gulf nations. Instead, she was forced into the sex trade.

“I was a virgin and didn’t understand what sex was. I was told that they [the traffickers] were going to get good money for my first night with an old local man who paid for my virginity. He was aggressive and hit me all the time,” Mariam, who refused to reveal her real name, told IRIN.

Thousands of Iraqi women are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous sex worker traffickers seeking to exploit young girls’ desperate socio-economic situation for profit, United Nations agencies have reported.

In Mariam’s case, she was taken to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and kept in a house with 20 young girls, all of them sex workers, she said.

Before she left Iraq, she and her three sisters were being cared for by her father. Their mother was killed during the US-led invasion of the country in 2003.

-IRIN News