Mongolia Human Trafficking

Yesterday a human trafficking trial began in the Songino Khairkhan District’s court. A Mongolian national, M.Purevbat, is charged with kidnapping girls and forcing them into the sex trade. According to the charges, Purevbat may be responsible for the disappearances of 100 girls. If convicted, he could face 5- 15 years imprisonment. According to a report titled “Country Gender Assessment-2008”, which was completed by the National Network of Mongolian Women’s Organizations, together with Asia Development Bank, SDB and CEG, protection against human trafficking, for its victims and witnesses protection have not originated yet in Mongolia. The report says that the lack of protection for victims and witnesses serves as a major deterrent for reporting trafficking and forced prostitution.They also highlighted the serious need for legal reform to ensure compensation for psychological and mental health damage and for broadening legal, social and psychological support to victims, as well as the need for more public awareness and capacity-building of government institutions.

The age of sex workers in Mongolia has decreased significantly. The report also states that Mongolian law favors those who solicit sex, while disproportionately punishing those who illegally provide it as a service. Trafficking in women and children is a new phenomenon in Mongolia that arose in connection to Mongolia’s transition to a market economy, the opening of its borders, democratization and the free movement of people across borders.

As discussed earlier, formal migration opportunities are more limited for women, while unemployment, underemployment and low wages have consistently been a more serious problem for women, especially young women and women over 35. The proliferation of informal and illegal recruiters/middlemen for employment abroad, due to the lack of adequate regulation of the sector by the government, has made women particularly vulnerable to fraud, irregular migration and trafficking. Given the clandestine, criminal nature of human trafficking, it is hard to accurately establish the numbers of Mongolian women and children affected, but there is indication of a fast growing trend.

In 2000, two victims of trafficking were reported, whereas in the first half of 2006 alone, 127 victims were reported. Surveys conducted in Erlian indicated a growing number of Mongolian sex workers – 200 to 300 according to police estimates in 2005 – who work in the city’s red light areas. Many of them are believed to have been originally trafficked. In the first half of 2006, 20 victims sought assistance from the Mongolian Embassy in Beijing.

A majority of the 48 victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation interviewed by GEC in Beijing, Hong Kong, Macao and South Korea were young women over 18, while four were 16-17 years old. 79 percent of them had never been married, 17.2 percent were divorced. One in three women had attended a college or university. Fifty two percent of the women sought to migrate abroad to find employment to be able to help their families, 25 percent to earn money for their education, and 23 percent to become financially independent from others. Women were promised US$500-3,000 for jobs abroad as waiters, models, beauticians, dancers, and masseuses.

Ninety six percent of the women found out about the reality of their situation after having crossed the border, had their documents confiscated by their brokers, and being told they owed US$1,500-3,500 for the broker’s services. They were then forced to prostitute themselves in order to repay the debt and regain their freedom. Such false promises are the most commonly used method by recruiters. In some cases, women are told they would be engaged in prostitution, but assured they would enjoy freedom, better living and working conditions and much higher pay.

Many women fell victims to traffickers when they responded to age- and gender-specific job advertisements such as “will find well-paying jobs abroad for tall, good-looking girls under 25”, as was in the case in 21 percent of the victims interviewed by GEC. There is also evidence that TV chat offers and announcements lure victims into trafficking. Seventeen percent were approached by strangers. However, the majority of the victims (62 percent) were recruited through friends and acquaintances. Fifty four percent of the women work in saunas and massage parlors, 26 percent in disco clubs, eight percent in hotels, eight percent in karaoke bars and four percent on the streets.

In Macao, girls mostly work in saunas, from 8 pm to 6 am. Women work under extremely difficult, high-risk conditions and are forced to submit to every wish of their customers. They do not have any guarantees for personal security either from violence and abuse or from STDs and HIV/AIDS. Women are frequently beaten up, abused and humiliated by their clients, who are often drunk or high on drugs, and often clients do not pay them. Twenty three percent of the victims reported that they had encountered clients who were sadists, who had beaten them nearly to death.


Women mostly lived under close supervision by the madams, 4-10 of them crammed in one small room, close to the place of work. Until the debt was repaid, women were not allowed to go outside by themselves. Many of the women did not know the total amount of their debt or how much they had yet to repay. In Hong Kong, women were punished by deduction from their salaries, corporal punishment, working with no rest for being late or missing a day of work. If they refused to participate in a “show,” they were fined by 1,000-2,000 HKD (US$150-250 ).

Women were also made to undergo various alterations and surgical operations to better please the customers. These included drinking slimming tea and forced dieting to lose weight, forced breast enlargement operations, and making folds in the eyelids. Payments for these operations were deducted from the women’s salaries (US$ 1,000 for breast enlargement, US$ 50-100 for altering the eyelids).

Most recently, NGO activists led by GEC were able to visit some of the brothels in Erlian and talk to some of the Mongolian sex workers. They were admitted inside by the owners/madams after explaining they wished to provide women with health services. The activists found out that women were not adequately protected against STDs and HIV/AIDS and that they were told by their owners to perform vaginal douche using toothpaste in order to disinfect and prevent from diseases. Every time women were sick or appeared to be falling sick, they were injected with unknown substances (one of the NGO activists was a doctor and she was most concerned about these injections).

Activists also reported that women in Erlian were forced to undergo various treatments that delayed their menstrual flows. GEC also interviewed 16 victims of trafficking who returned to Mongolia. Half of the women were 20-22 year-old and one was an under-age girl who had dropped out of school. More than half had secondary educations and one had higher education. 69 percent of the women sought employment abroad to earn more money than they could in Mongolia, 37.5 percent to provide for their families, 50 percent to gain money for their education and 50 percent to gain money to start a small business in Mongolia.

Women had paid US$ 100-500 to brokers, they thought they owed their brokers about US $1,000-3,000, they were promised US$2,000-3,000 per month, but 60 percent of them returned with nothing as they never received any salary and only worked to service the debt. About 20 percent had earned US$200-300 per month, but all the money had been spent on bare necessities.
Women still working abroad and women who have returned reported serious deterioration of health due to the heavy use of slimming tea and drugs to stop menstruation. Many had also become addicted to alcohol and tobacco or drugs in the hopes of soothing or dulling their anxiety and depression.

The most common route for trafficking is reported to be Ulaanbaatar-Erlian-Beijng-Macao, but women and girls have also been trafficked to Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Israel, Belgium, Turkey, Malaysia, Singapore, and Eastern European countries. NGOs report that scope and nature of human trafficking is changing, becoming more organized. In all known cases, traffickers had established prior contacts with buyers in foreign countries. Based on the analysis of these cases, CHRD concluded that transnational criminal networks are operating in Mongolia.

NGOs have also reported on the increasing scope of domestic trafficking and organized criminal networks in Mongolia that kidnap girls from the streets or lure them through their peers, relatives or acquaintances, keep them locked in hotels and force them into prostitution. In February, 2008, during the Mongolian New Year, half a dozen girls were reported to have been kidnapped from the streets and forced into prostitution in Ulaanbaatar and Darkhan city. One of the cases involving a 17-year old girl, a daughter of a poor single mother of three, caught significant media and public attention. Victims and NGOs also reported that girls are often trafficked abroad after having been ‘tamed’ and sexually exploited in Mongolia.

All existing studies, especially one by the GEC that focus specifically on identifying vulnerability to trafficking, as well as reports by victims, their family members and NGOs, agree that the most at risk groups are poor, young, poorly educated women and girls who do not have adult male members of the family (mostly daughters of poor single mothers), are half or full orphans, are unemployed or employed in the service sector (bars, karaoke, saunas, discos). Girls and women who live in the streets and are engaged in prostitution are placed at much higher risk.

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