‘Bangladesh a source of forced labour, sex trafficking’

Bangladesh is primarily a source, and, to a lesser extent, a transit and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking, said a new US government’s report released in Washington on Monday.
The Trafficking in Persons Report (July 2015), mentioned some Bangladeshi men and women who migrate willingly to work in the Middle East, East Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States subsequently face conditions indicative of forced labour.
It said Bangladesh government does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking however, it is making significant efforts to do so.
The government continued to prepare, but did not finalise, the working rules for the Prevention and Suppression of Human Trafficking Act (PSHTA) 2012, in last one year.
It identified the government lacked a formal mechanism to refer trafficking victims to protective services.
The authorities rescued 2,621 victims and placed in nine government-operated shelters.
The government continued to fund nine multipurpose shelters, drop-in centers, and safe homes for victims, including victims of trafficking. While the government reached a labour export agreement with Saudi Arabia requiring employers to pay certain recruitment costs, legal recruitment fees continued to be extremely high.
Before their departure, many migrant workers assume debt to pay high recruitment fees, imposed legally by recruitment agencies belonging to the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA) and illegally by unlicensed sub-agents.
Some recruitment agencies and agents also commit recruitment fraud, including contract switching, in which they promise one type of job and conditions, but then change the job, employer, conditions, or salary after arrival.
Within the country, some children and adults are subjected to sex trafficking, domestic servitude, and forced and bonded labour, in which traffickers exploit an initial debt assumed by a worker as part of the terms of employment.
Street children are sometimes coerced into criminality or forced to beg; begging ringmasters sometimes maim children to increase their earnings.
In some instances, children are sold into a form of bondage by their parents, while others are induced into labour through fraud and physical coercion, including in the domestic fish processing industry, or exploited in prostitution.
According to an international expert on debt bondage, Bangladeshi families and Indian migrant workers are subjected to bonded labour in some of Bangladesh’s brick kilns, some kiln owners sell bonded females into prostitution, purportedly to recoup the families’ debts, and some Bangladeshi families are subjected to debt bondage in shrimp farming.
Some ethnic Indian families are forced to work in the tea industry in the northeastern part of the country. The Burmese Rohingya community in Bangladesh is especially vulnerable to human rafficking.