GETTING CHEAPER’
than to call a doctor,” he added.
Bales attributed the fall in price to the population explosion which had “glutted the world with potentially enslavable people”.
Worldwide, about 40 million people were estimated to be trapped as slaves last year, mostly women and girls, in forced labour, sexual exploitation and forced marriages, with global trafficking estimated to raise US$150 billion in profits a year.
North Korean defector Jihyun Park told how she was trafficked to China where she was sold for ¥5000 (RM3100) to an alcoholic and violent farmer.
“He said: ‘I’ve paid for you, so you must work.’ I spent six years as his slave,” Park said.
Thousands of North Korean women are believed to have been trafficked as wives and sex workers inside China where the onechild policy has skewed the gender ratio.
In Bangladesh, Asif Saleh, of development agency Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, said Rohingya refugee women fleeing Myanmar and arriving in Bangladesh were being sold for as little as £5 (RM28).
Aid agencies said traffickers often exploited crises to prey on people separated from their families and communities.
Nepalese nun and kung fu teacher Jigme Wangchuk Lhamo, who helps families displaced by the country’s 2015 earthquake, told the conference that people were selling their daughters, sisters and mothers to traffickers after the disaster to rebuild their homes.
“Some men just see girls as a bunch of money,” she said.
In northern Kenya’s pastoralist region, lawyer Fatuma Abdulkadir Adan said child brides as young as 9 were sold for eight cows or eight camels, worth about US$800.
“Girls become commodities and they have no voice. No one asks what the girl wants,” said Adan, who used football to tackle child marriage and female genital mutilation.
But it is not just in poor countries that girls are sold off.
Sarah, forced into prostitution as a child in Britain, said the gang who groomed her said she would have to have sex every day until she had paid off a “debt” of £75,000.
“They told me I belonged to them and until my debt was cleared, I had to work for them,” she said. Reuters