Trafficking in PNG a million-kina business

People involved in human trafficking in the country are making millions, Trafficking in Person (TIP) 2018 report says.
The report says traffickers made big profits from exploiting others, leaving individual victims and their local communities to face the consequences.
Chief of mission International Organisation of Migration (IOM PNG) Lance Bonneau said women and girls made up 71 per cent of victims and children made up almost a third of all human trafficking victims worldwide.
They are trafficked for sexual exploitation, forced labour or domestic servitude, he said.
The report further stated that traffickers exploited weaknesses in protection and took advantage of the hopes and fears of their victims, preying, for example, on parents’ dreams of an education for their children or on an undocumented migrant workers’ distrust of law enforcement officers.
The executive director of Employers’ Federation of PNG, Florence Willie, said PNG was the most obvious child-labour country as many worked on the streets.
“Some children from rural areas are sent to live with relatives or host families in cities where they may be forced to perform domestic work to pay off family debts.
“There has been some researches and data collection from certain patterns like the United Nations Children’s Fund and a little study by a Fijian woman on certain aspects of issues affecting children, but in terms on child labour there is no real data.
“That is something that all partners under the national action plan 2017-2019 need to work together in order to effect the programmes and activities to help our children who are forced into labour work,” Willie said.
The Secretary of the Department of Labour and Industrial Relations, Mary Morolam said that in 2012 there were roadshows conducted by the department and they established labour committees at the provincial levels to look into child labour in the provinces.
Trafficking in Persons is defined as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.