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South Asian sex trade 'booming'
September 30, 2004
Colombo - Slavery is booming in South Asia, with hundreds of thousands of women and children being trafficked and sold or forced into the sex trade or domestic service each year, Unicef warned yesterday.
Conflicts in countries like Afghanistan and Nepal are compounding matters by displacing thousands of young people, who go in search of safety and work - only to be lured or pushed into the sex trade.
"We are facing a very serious situation here in South Asia.
"The situation is nothing short of, I would say, a modern-day slavery," Dr Sadig Rasheed, Unicef regional director for South Asia, said at a meeting in Colombo.
"It is one of the blights of South Asia. The situation is getting out of hand."
Around 500,000 women and children are being trafficked each year in Asia, with the lion's share of them in South Asia, Rasheed added. That compares to a worldwide figure of 1.2 million.
Governments - who signed up to a global anti-child trafficking drive in Japan in 2001 - must urgently tackle the root causes, such as poverty and inequality as well as tighten border control collaboration, Rasheed said.
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