Opinion | How the internet fuels sexual exploitation and forced labour in Asia

Understanding the myriad ways criminals use technology to facilitate trafficking and abuse will help counter them. With Asia becoming ever more connected, the authorities must move faster to unmask criminal online platforms

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Globally, the majority of child sexual abuse material is now exchanged via non-commercial channels such as public peer-to-peer platforms, or on the dark web. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 1:30pm, 2 May 2019Updated: 6:38pm, 2 May 2019

The Asia-Pacific accounts for half the world’s internet usage. It is also home to some 25 million modern-day slavery victims, trapped in forced marriages, sexual exploitation and forced labour – 62 per cent of the 40.3 million modern-day slaves.

With information and communications technologies so rapidly disseminating in both urban and rural communities, what role is technology playing to facilitate human trafficking and exploitation in the region? While examples of the good uses of tech are often featured, it is crucial to understand how it is also used for evil purposes, in order to fight perpetrators with their own tools.

Traffickers increasingly use the internet, gaming sites and social media to ensnare their victims. For example, in Vietnam, women and girls have been lured by criminals who posed as police officers on social media or through online dating relationships to gain their trust, only to then sell them to gangs that exploited them for sex.

Cybersex is a billion-dollar industry that bridges the distance between offer and demand for sexual services from thousands of miles to one click and is used extensively by traffickers to exploit their victims and more easily hide from police raids. The cybercrime industry trapped “Mira”, a North Korean girl, for eight years. Growing up in North Korea, Mira used to buy USB sticks loaded with foreign movies at the underground market. Technology brought her a glimpse of an outside world she desperately wanted to reach. Reality proved to be harsher: once she fled to China, she was sold to a Chinese-Korean sex-cam operation and told she had to provide online sexual services to repay her debt.

Even worse, technology is misused to exploit children for sex. According to an NGO report, 95 per cent of commercial sexual exploitation of children happening in South Korea is arranged over the internet. In the Philippines, tens of thousands of children are victims of webcam sex tourism – forced by their communities, and sometimes their own parents, to perform sexual acts for customers who watch online and pay as little as US$10 per show.