UNICEF: About 1.2 million children are trafficked each year for $10 billion, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in a report published yesterday.
"Trafficking is a truly global problem, affecting all countries everywhere," says the report, titled End Child Exploitation: Stop The Traffic. The report said that while Europe was a major market for child trafficking, with west Africa and Eastern Europe being the major suppliers, there was also a thriving business within the supplier regions and across Asia.
In Europe 500,000 women and young girls were trafficked each year, mostly from former Soviet nations. The price for a woman at the start of the trail in one Romanian town was put as low as €42.
It said some 200,000 children were also trafficked each year in western Africa, either to enter the export trade to Europe or to be sold into slavery as domestic workers.
South-east Asia accounts for one-third of the domestic and international trade in women and children, the report added.
It noted that there had been a 20 per cent increase in child prostitutes in Thailand in the past three years, and 15 per cent of the girls trafficked from South Vietnam were under 15 years old. In China, 250,000 women and children were victims of trafficking.
The trade is not limited to women, as thousands of boys as young as five were sold annually from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates to work as camel jockeys.