 Hello everyone and welcome to IOM, the Regional Office of Asia Pacific for our first webcast to celebrate and commemorate the World International Day against Trafficking. I'm joined by several experts from around the region. I'll introduce them as we start talking to them and we're going to hear a bit about what's going on in trafficking, in anti-trafficking activities from IOM's offices and IOM special projects around the region. We're lucky to have such high-caliber people with us from Bangkok, from Indonesia, from Hong Kong, Cambodia, Timur Lechte and indeed Papua New Guinea. I'll start with Tara Dermott who works in the Regional Office here like myself. I'm Joe Larry, by the way, I'm the Regional Spokesperson and Senior Communications Officer in the Regional Office for IOM Bangkok. Tara is a colleague of mine here working on leading a project, a mainstream project called IOMX which uses celebrity music and media to try and draw up awareness about trafficking. Tara, what have you been doing recently? Thanks for the intro, Joe, and for organizing this conversation today. So, as you mentioned, IOMX is the Regional Office's innovative campaign to promote safe migration and to encourage public action to stop exploitation and trafficking. Now, IOMX aims to move beyond simply raising awareness and to actually affecting behavior change through applying a communication for development approach. So, this means that we take an evidence-based participatory approach to designing our materials so that they are most likely to achieve the actual impact that we desire. So, we launched in early 2015 and since then we have been prioritizing our campaign efforts on two industries. We have been looking to prevent the exploitation of men and boys in the fishing sector and also women and girls in domestic work. So, in 2015, we launched the I Care Do You campaign where we tapped into our strong network of celebrities, musicians, and we produced video content that reached 60 million people. And I'm happy to say that in post-impact surveys, we found that of the viewers of the programs, of Thai viewers of the programs, more than half of them said that they would support ethical companies. So, this is really great for the counter-trafficking community's ongoing efforts to not only protect aspirant migrants before they leave, but to actually address, you know, institutional problems within supply chains of seafood industries. This is really great. With domestic work, earlier this year we launched the IOMX Happy Home campaign and this was around not only increasing the general public's understanding of domestic worker rights and trying to provide a platform for domestic workers to voice their priorities, but to also encourage all employers and homeowners and neighbors to make sure that their homes, their homes, their homes are supported by domestic workers and that we that they have our language contracts. And it's really important because the local staffs show that a domestic worker, so this is really relevant to the world today. Yeah, and so IOMX, we've been focusing on fishing and domestic work, but we're going to be expanding the work that we do to other sectors, so I encourage everyone to visit IOMX.org, follow us online and stay tuned for more exciting work that's coming out. Thanks very much, Tara. Elizabeth, in Dili, can you tell us about the work you've been doing in helping victims of trafficking, helping the police to be more sympathetic towards victims of trafficking? What are you doing in Dili to make that happen? In Timor, we are helping not only police, but the immigration service here in Timor, like to explain to them what human trafficking is because this is very new, like we mentioned in Timor. So we are helping them to identify the case and then the police officer is mostly here or work through intimidation and usually consider victims of trafficking as guilty. So also there is like, we are like giving their awareness of specific needs for victims of trafficking in here, like dealing with the person who suffer from like physical and mental abuse in here. And also currently last week, we are organizing like CSS training with the local national NGO in here, like how to encourage the police, how to give them, like how to deal with the victim of trafficking here. That's great. Thanks, Elizabeth. A few audio challenges there, but I gather you're helping, you're using actors to help the police to understand what it's like to be victim of trafficking and get the police to be more sympathetic, which is an amazing approach. Narul, you are a well-known anti-trafficking activist and worker in Indonesia. You've moved recently to head up IOM's office in Hong Kong. Can you put some numbers on this? How many people in your experience are still in slavery, in fishing vessels and in sex work and other forms of exploitation in this region? Well, it's difficult to come up with the real figure, but you know, when I'm speaking about trafficking in Indonesia, particularly for the fishing industry, there are estimate that around 200,000 Indonesian fishermen actually still in water and exploited, you know, just in like trafficking situations. This figure actually come up from our Indonesian government. They believe on this number and therefore they are actually approaching IOM on how we could actually intervene and help them in additions that we have already been assisted, offer, you know, 2000 foreign fishermen, particularly from Cambodia, Myanmar and some number of Lao and Thai in Indonesian water. So, you know, we work closely with IOM Cambodia, with IOM Myanmar to assist with their return and by now they all already go back home. But you know, we believe that there are still small scale of numbers happening because just recently the Indonesian government through the Ministry of Marine Affairs and their fisheries and marine affairs, they have contacting us, you know, small scale of number like 150 or 20 people, you know, stranded in Indonesian water again and of course they actually also been exploited in a fishing industry. So, that's if it is talking about fishermen, you know, exploited in a fishing industry as a trafficking. But when we're speaking about trafficking in Indonesia, in addition of fishermen itself, foreign fishermen or Indonesian fishermen, we have also big numbers of Indonesian micro workers who are actually exploited outside Indonesia, working as domestic worker, working as, you know, worker in a plantation, particularly palm oil plantations, construction worker, and also, you know, of course, including in some other sectors. And locally itself, we have local domestic workers being trafficked, you know, or also being exploited within Indonesia. That's the situation. We have also foreign women's actually from Moldova, Colombia, Uzbekistan, trafficked in a forced prostitution in a big cities of Indonesia, including Jakarta as a, you know, prostitution. So, this is these situations actually are quite complex. Trafficking in Indonesia is quite complex. And if you're asking me to come up with some how many estimate at the moment, it's difficult to be honest. Yeah. That's true, of course. It's a very shady, shady industry. And it's impossible to tell exactly the numbers that we're talking, you know, hundreds of thousands of people work as modern day slaves in this region. And somebody who actually has to deal with that problem when people get home is Brett Dixon, who works in our office in Cambodia as a project manager there. Brett, you're seeing these people when they get home, when they get back to Cambodia, when they've been rescued by IOM in Indonesia, they get back to Cambodia. What's the state are they in? And what are the long lasting scars that they would bear from the awful exploitation that they endure with working 24 hours a day with beatings and with violence and little or no pay? What are you seeing? Thanks, Joe. Yeah. So, last year, IOM in the region, particular IOM, Indonesia, IOM, Cambodia, Myanmar worked together to assist thousands of men stuck in the fishing industry, enduring these conditions, forced labour conditions. And this has been possible through our presence in the region, also our strong relationships with the government and the embassies who played a big role in identifying and assisting with the voluntary return. So, here in Cambodia, IOM plays a key role in providing post-arrival immediate assistance. So, this entails meeting the men at the airport, helping them through immigration. We also work in the land borders as well to assist men and identify men who have been in that condition and to provide the care they need. We either have acknowledged that there's a lot of health consequences of trafficking. So, medical care and psychological care is a key. So, we provide a lot of medical checkups and treatments. We also have psychologists on board to provide that care and cancelling. Many of the men returning back with behavioural issues such as drug abuse that they picked up on the boats, heavy drinking. It's a very highly violent sector that they work in on fishing boats and they're subjected to regular beatings, as you mentioned. So, this has a huge impact on the psychological well-being. And this can inhibit finding secure work and meaningful employment if they're suffering from depression or a drug abuse. So, we work with a strong network of NGOs to provide reintegration support, which is really key to their recovery, to providing support to their families and helping the families to support those loved ones that have returned. We had some successes in a few cases, finding employment, working with local employers to develop apprenticeship programs to help the men to develop skills and eventually open up their own businesses, such as motorbike mechanics. That's great. So, there can be some good news and there can be resolution for these people, but as you said, there are deep lasting psychological scars. We're hearing that trafficking is exploitative and it's wrecking lives. What's the experience in Calille in Papua New Guinea? What's the work as IOM doing there and what's the trafficking phenomenon like in the country where you are, which not many people would know much about? Thanks, Joe. Good day, everybody, listening in. And what I wanted to say in for trafficking within PNG, the phenomenon itself is very little awareness has been done within the country. A lot of people don't understand what trafficking is and that's everything from both domestic to international trafficking. So, IOM has been engaging with the community and the government for the past six, over six years since 2010 to raise awareness and to also develop legislation to combat the crime. One of the biggest, one of the most significant achievements within the last six years has been the official recognition of trafficking as a crime within the country, which was developed in 2013 by IOM in assisting the Department of Justice and it's now criminalized the act with a charge of 20 years for adult trafficking and 25 years for trafficking of minors. So, that has been a huge achievement for the country and alongside that IOM has also been involved in the technical aspect of it, so helping the government to identify victims of trafficking. We're working with the police, we're working with immigration, we're working with customs officials to go through the process of doing a victim identification assessment and as well as bringing together both the government side as well as the civil society side to provide a holistic approach to protection for potential victims of trafficking. Within the country itself, domestic trafficking is a very, very big issue largely because it is embedded so much in culture and the lack of understanding does not bode well for this. Many people say, well, we've been doing it for this amount of years and there's never been anything wrong. Why is it now domestic, why is it now considered trafficking? So, getting the understanding of what it is at a very, very local village level is key to combating it. The issue of forced marriage, of underage forced marriage and paying off of bride pricing is a very big factor within the country and it's something that needs to be addressed and this is what IOM is trying to do. Great, thanks for almost all the time. It's a really, very complex phenomenon of human trafficking and it can touch all our lives. No one is immune from being duped into trafficking from the villages in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea to the metropolises of Bangkok. I want to ask you all one last question and a quick answer, one word or one sentence and I'll start with you, Khalil. I'll go back in reverse order. Khalil, what is needed in one phrase to make an impact against human trafficking? I think we need to work on the demand side and curb it on the demand side. Okay, great. Brett, how about you? What do you think? One thing that we need to do, society needs to do to curb human trafficking. I think we need to empower migrants to make proper decisions to give them the information so they can migrate safely. Excellent, thanks. How about you and Nurul? What would be the one thing you would say on this anti-trafficking day to try and curb trafficking? Nurul, can you say it again with your microphone on? Nurul, what's the one thing you would do to curb trafficking? Law enforcement is definitely important to combat trafficking in person. In addition, of course, promoting safe migrations, preventing awareness tracings, but I think law enforcement is playing also very significant roles. Thank you. And back to you, Elizabeth, in Dili, what's the one thing that should be done to help counteract a modern day slavery? From me, it's like it's because the trafficking is very new in Timor-Leste in here. So it's like maybe give more education, not only for the police officer and immigration service, but this more education to young generations here in Timor-Leste, so they need to know what is trafficking is really. Thank you, Elizabeth. And finally, Tara, what do you say? The one thing that needs to be done by the world to help reduce or stop trafficking? We need a global movement. We need for every individual to understand how human trafficking is relevant to their lives and to act accordingly. Thank you all very much for joining. Thanks for your time to discuss this important subject. It's World Anti-Trafficking Day, the day when people take action against human trafficking. Spread the message. Log on to www.io-m.int. Find out more. Talk about the subject. It's not going away. It's a huge phenomenon. Thanks again for listening and I'm Joe Larry in the IOM Regional Office in Bangkok.