We are addressing the issue of human trafficking in Malaysia. A shocking number of people are tricked into leaving their families and homes for a job that they belive will bring their lives out of poverty, but which instead ends up being the worst type of life ever: a life of forced labour, sex slavery, and abuse. This issue is important to us and the communities within Malaysia. It impacts the victims of human trafficking, their families, their victimizers, and the many companies whose work is being done by trafficked slaves. The people of Malaysia don't know the risk of human trafficking, and they don't know about human trafficking. Human trafficking is a very little known issue, and this ignorance leads to a false sense of security everywhere, It is important for the people in Malaysia to know about human trafficking so that they understand what is going on around them and make an effort to prevent it.
Something that I came across while making my notecards was that according to Malaysian law, there is no difference between a refugee, asylum seeker, trafficking victims and undocumented migrants. This shocked me, because a victim trying to return home, and a migrant trying to get away from home are very different things, and I believe it is important to differentiate between them. I also learned that if a child is trafficked into forced prostitiution, and they are caught, the consequences are very serious for the child, not the trafficker, and this is why many childrens traffickers give them false documents to make them officially adults even though they aren't because the traffickers want their workers back, and the consequences for a non-minor prostitute are less than for a child prostitute. The slaves keep returning to their trafficker, because they are bound by terror that their torturer will hunt them down and kill them and their family if they attempt to run.
Learning about this horrifies me, because of the horrifying things that are done to innocent people, but it also makes me feel like something needs to change, because if we continue like this, our entire world will be full of nothing but slaves, and a few people who own them. It also makes me feel very sad when I hear that children my age and younger are being taken from their families and forced into the sex trade. I can't imagine the horror of this, and I feel like I need to do something about this isssue. So learning about this makes me feel shocked and horrified, but it also makes me feel like I've got to help.
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