Criminal syndicates winning war of human trafficking
International criminal syndicates, armed and richly funded, are winning the war against human trafficking, with 50 million people enslaved and 6.3 million in forced prostitution around the world..
That is the sombre conclusion of Matthew Friedman, an American who has devoted his career to the fight against trafficking, with the U.S. government, the United Nations and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs).
On Thursday, he gave a dramatic account of his life’s work to a packed audience at the Asia Society. He was launching his book “Awakening the Advocate: Memoirs of a Modern Slavery Activist”.
He has worked in Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand and Hong Kong. In 2012, he founded in Hong Kong the Mekong Club, an NGO that supports businesses to identify and address modern slavery in their supply chains.
“The criminal gangs have so much money. The syndicates work together, use AI and other technologies to launder the money. We are way behind the criminals,” he said.
He summarised the unequal battle in a lunch in Hanoi. He was invited to a good restaurant there by a charming, charismatic man and explained the nature of his work. Then he asked the man what was his work.
“I am a human trafficker. I have learnt a lot from you,” he said. “You NGO people are ridiculous. You spend so much time raising money, writing reports and have to follow laws and regulations. We do not follow any laws.”
Friedman said that, after the lunch, they had tried to catch this trafficker but failed.
He gave an example of the trade during his eight years as a field officer in Nepal.
A 20-year-old man arrives in a poor village and proposes marriage to a 13-year-old girl. He gives money to her parents who give their consent in the hope he will lift her out of poverty. They have a wedding.
The man takes her to Katmandu, then to Mumbai, where he sells her for US$500 to the manager of a brothel. There she has to service up to 20 men a day.
He described a meeting with Gita, also a Nepalese who had been sold into prostitution. She told him that she had been raped 7,000 times, contracted AIDS and was going to die.
“I am angry,” she said. “Where were you, the NGOs? Why did no-one come to help me?”
He said that the resources available to fight such trafficking were negligible compared to the financial power of the syndicates. “It was US$400 million and will fall to US$220 million after the cuts of foreign aid made by the Trump administration.”
As a result of this imbalance, only 6,000 of the 500,00 criminals involved in the trade had been caught and just 0.2 per cent of the women rescued.
“Governments, the U.N. and NGOs should be effective in fighting this. Most effective is the private sector who wants to protect their manufacturing and supply chains. They do more than the NGOs because they are closer to the problem,” he said.
The Mekong Club has reached 800 companies in financial services, hospitality, retail, manufacturing, technology providers and many more industries. It has trained 105,000 professionals, visited 34 countries and supported 320 groups.
These companies want to be compliant with legislation in many countries against slavery and trafficking.
A more recent form of trafficking is scamming. The Economist estimated that, in 2024, people had lost half a trillion dollars in scams around the world.
Friedman said that 220,000 young professionals, including some from Hong Kong, had been tricked into going to Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia, where they worked 16 hours. “Some have been tortured to death. We are away behind the criminals.”
His experience with trafficking began with his own grandmother. A German, she arrived in New York and was taking a train to Los Angeles to meet her husband. She got off the train in Chicago. She was 23, good looking but spoke no English. A man stepped forward and said he would take care of her. He was a trafficker.
Fortunately, others intervened and put her back on the train to Los Angeles, where she was reunited with her husband. And her son Matthew was born.
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