 Hi everyone, I'm your guest host for the day Pierre Asselin. Welcome to this edition of Global Connections. We'll be addressing today an issue that's been actually quite significant in terms of its impact on the global community and that's human trafficking, specifically the trafficking of girls and women in Southeast Asia. And we've got a wonderful guest today, the host of Global Connections, Professor Grace Cheng from Hawaii Pacific University. Hi, how are you Pierre? I'm quite well, Grace. Welcome to my show. It's great to have you here. Grace, I think your millions of viewers and fans worldwide are aware of what you do and who you are but could you tell us a little more about yourself and what you do and your research interests among others beyond human trafficking? Well, I'm an associate professor of political science at Hawaii Pacific University and my background is in comparative politics. My original area of focus is in Southeast Asia and China and comparative politics is a study of different types of political systems I'm also interested in different political thoughts and different political approaches to issues international significance such as coordinating on migration issues and other types of issues. So I've studied different areas of comparative politics and I've been in the academia for about 20 years and so in the last about five years I've been working with an organization that's based in Bangkok and it's called the International Institute for Peace and Development Studies and it develops a number of different programs for academics but also for people who work in non-governmental organizations and civil society organizations as well as governmental agencies to work on all sorts of different issues regarding peace building and post conflict transitions as well as development issues and you know human trafficking is deeply tied to some of the challenges of development because that's some of the reasons why there are people who are vulnerable to being victimized by trafficking. I was looking up your profile online and you've got a book on national human rights is that correct? Is that kind of where your part of your interest came from? Actually my background in migration itself goes back to when I was an undergraduate I was an intern with the what's now called the International Organization for Migration I'm working in the field office in the Philippines there was a field office where there used to be a Vietnamese refugee camp or where you know people The whole boat people? The whole boat? Yeah okay. Yeah in the late 80s so there were it was called the Philippine versus silent camp so from there this was an internship that I got through where I went to undergrad Georgetown University at the time the center was called the Center for Immigration Policy and Refugee Assistance so I've been interested in migration issues since then and we still have a lot of refugee issues as we see a lot in the US news as well as international I mean you know in Europe and elsewhere so you know actually that's also kind of interesting as far as coordinating the challenges of migration sometimes migration is stemmed from either a natural disaster or conflict you know people fleeing situations in order to survive and trafficking is also a migration issue sometimes they overlap as we see in where I was this past winter in Thailand some of the issues are more clear cut what we classically consider trafficking but sometimes they do overlap with people trying to flee a conflict zone or a zone where there's heightened insecurity on their physical well-being specifically Myanmar the Rakhine state. I think I can't help but think that this is one of the reasons why a lot of Americans kind of fail to understand some of these problems that have to do with refugees because there's a very limited understanding of the kinds of circumstances that will prompt people to end up leaving their home countries I mean there's war but there's also a variety of other instances or sets of circumstances that will prompt people to leave and with respect to Vietnam we did have the war but eventually economics also became a major factor in prompting people to leave as well as you know in post in the what Americans called the Vietnam War after the war concluded in 75 there was also political you know the very turbulent political revolutionary transition and that and the economic disruption of that so yeah that causes a lot of upheaval in the societies making you know the situation especially they're near as well as longer term future look very uncertain and that causes people to think about options for survival and sometimes it's immediate because they're the direct victims of persecution or members of their community are so yeah there's a myriad of reasons that people do decide to leave their home country and you know having been exposed to different groups of these communities usually people don't want to leave their home country it's a hardship it's not a simple decision so yeah looking at your bio you've been to Iran I think very interesting to explore and if I don't screw up too badly today maybe I can come back I understand that I've been in Iran but that's another subject so most recently you were in Thailand as you suggested earlier and you were kind of you know part of an effort to kind of study and work with refugees in Southeast Asia and Thailand and neighboring Burma can you give us a sense of what the situation is like of what I guess the kind of the latest developments are with respect to this issue of trafficking of women and girls in that particular area yeah so yeah my time was spent in Bangkok and speaking with going and visiting and speaking with various different organizations non-governmental as well as governmental and international organizations Thailand is one of the places where a lot of migrants have arrived for a variety of reasons some of their neighboring countries in particular Laos and Cambodia the economies are not as flourishing as it is in Thailand which for the region is doing relatively well so people you know coming to Thailand from those countries seeking opportunities for their economic livelihood often sending money back home to support their families and so you know a lot of this is legal and besides traveling with your passport within Southeast Asia you get these pink cards that allow you to travel and work in another country within the Southeast Asian region so there are those people but then there are also people who are there what we call irregular migrants and you know they're not there with the proper documentation and part of that you know is again these kinds of push back what we call push factors like in their home countries there are such limited opportunities their families are really struggling and so they are trying to find a way and they are often you know somehow convinced that there are some very good opportunities for them to provide some income for supporting themselves and their family and you know for this particular issue why you know they're significant there's more a little bit more concern on women and girls is because you know trafficking is where this you know employment of people persons through coercion and force and threats happens and it can happen to either gender either men women boys and girls you know women and girls actually there are a few more reasons why there are more they are more vulnerable before we get into that let me ask you so is this a case of basically Thai entrepreneur kind of going into Burma and neighboring Burma Cambodia allows recruiting people to put them to work let's say in the sex industry in Thailand or is the picture much more complicated than that in terms of the trafficking itself it's pretty complicated I mean trafficking everywhere it's not the sole domain of people from one country or other so as far as the destination country it's not necessarily that the whole trafficking circuit I guess the network right there are many stages of it there's the recruitment in the hometown there's the people who kind of lure them into the different professions or work there's also illegal you know sometimes they come in illegally and so forth so it's not necessarily that actually it's typically not that it's all just based in one country or that the networks are run by people in one country it's a transnational phenomenon it's pretty transnational and it's different you know you originally started talking about Myanmar which is on the western side the other side of Thailand and that's a different network and a different phenomenon actually the trafficking of persons that has occurred there recently or from there so before I interrupt you were talking about so the women the girls who become effectively victims of trafficking I mean are these for the most part females from poor families are they political refugees I mean is there a particular type that's more susceptible to being trafficked or become a victim of trafficking so there are coming from the east you know the countries to the east of Thailand Laos and Cambodia they tend to be people who are poorer and they're again trying to support themselves and their families and so there have been some cases recently in the recent years about domestic workers people who house maids live in house maids working in Southeast Asia who have been treated very badly badly abused by their employers and this is throughout the region not just in Thailand in general there are more restrictive policies on the side of the home country for women to get exit visas or be able to leave their countries sensibly to protect the women and in particular for domestic work I mean for couple years ago Indonesia because of one of these instances where domestic worker was severely abused by her employers Indonesia completely froze any permits to allow people to work to leave the country to work in that capacity so but the problem is the push factor the lack of opportunities for a decent livelihood is a problem still and so people still need to seek means of survival for themselves and their families so they will go through illegal channels if that's the only way to find employment and that makes them vulnerable because there are these laws that are supposed to protect women and girls from this vulnerability but we don't the development issue is related we don't have that on the other side development that provides them with enough opportunities to stay home and not become victimized so they're more likely to go out and become through these irregular or illegal channels okay so I mean this is really really fascinating so basically no one really knows what they're getting into typically they don't know what they're getting into and so a couple of the organizations I visited they've been working on this issue within Thailand for decades and the issue unfortunately is ongoing because of the issues with lack of opportunity back at home so I'll talk a bit about this I know we're taking a break at the moment that's great that's very good thank you very much Grace we'll be back in a minute with us a fascinating conversation with Professor Chang we'll be right back hello I'm Michael North inviting you to join us on The Art of Thinking Smart every second Thursday at 12 noon here at the beautiful ThinkTech Studios in downtown Honolulu I'm guest hosting for David Chang of Wealthbridge now we're talking to Hawaii's most intelligent accomplished leaders about what makes them successful in their professional lives by absorbing their practical wisdom all of us can think ahead think deeper and become more successful ourselves we look forward to seeing you on The Art of Thinking Smart hello my name is Crystal let me tell you my talk show I'm all about health it's healthy to talk about sex it's healthy to talk about things that people don't talk about it's healthy to discuss things about it so I welcome you to watch Quok Talk and engage in some provocative discussions on things that do relate to healthy issues and have a well balanced attitude in life join me hi everyone welcome back thank you for sticking around it's much appreciated I'm here with Professor Grace Chang who's been doing very interesting work in the area of human trafficking particularly the trafficking of women and girls in southeast Asia Grace so before break we were discussing this whole idea of whether people know what they're getting into yeah so often they don't people don't want to be trafficking victims they don't want to live under coercion and be abused and be extremely vulnerable because they're under somebody else's control so what the organizations that in Thailand that I had met with they've been working on this issue for decades they've been undertaking a lot of interesting collaborations with for example with the border police training them providing them with all the knowledge they've collected over the years very often these people don't know what kinds of employment they're going into so basically they've for example set up a database of what are some places where there is legitimate employment to help the officers train them to detect whether they're the address they've been provided is a false one or one that's not a place of employment because often that's where they're vulnerable they're going to show up at someone's house or something it's not really a restaurant is there a way of recognizing a victim of human trafficking the problem being what it is I'm going through Thailand and I want to help or is that why it's a problem because it's ultimately impossible to well so one of the things is that these organizations have been pretty successful there are a lot of them they work they've been around for decades they've coordinated well and they're working now much more closely with state agencies the new the current I think recently appointed minister of tourism and sports of Thailand for the first time as a woman she's been very firm about she wants to crack down on this kind of illegal especially commercial sex industry of which there are many trafficking victims involved although not exclusively but the thing is now a lot of for example this commercial sex industry has gone online so you have to join a line group they're no longer physically in bars or in these physical locations you make your appointments online you have to join the line group it's quite secretive and then they'll give you a time in a place where you meet up so it's a bit harder to detect so the traffickers or the exploiters of the trafficking victims have found new ways to avert this process you bring up the sex industry I think for a lot of westerners Americans I think Thailand sex industry trafficking trafficked women and girls are not exclusively co-opted by the sex industry we're talking about domestic servants earlier domestic help are there other areas where we find trafficked individuals in domestic help for example there are a lot of pushful factors there's also in agriculture in plantations is that right really in the fishing industry which is big in Thailand there was a big scandal in 2015 and this was largely the Rohingya minority coming fleeing the Rakhine state in Myanmar because of persecution by them against them by the Buddhist majority and so they were afraid for their lives and being very happy to be smuggled out and leave they didn't know the other trafficking victims they were going to be trafficked into working in the fishing industry we had a case of that in Hawaii a few Indonesian individuals but this is much wider scaling would seem up until that case was kind of opened up because in 2000 it goes back a little bit further there were a series of pogroms against the Rohingya which are a Muslim minority in Myanmar can you tell us who the Rohingya we hear a lot about the Rohingya so who are they they live in the many of them live in the Rakhine state which is in western Myanmar and they are a Muslim group minority in a Buddhist country in the early 80s there were a series of pogroms against them anti-Muslim by Buddhists perpetrated by the majority so much for Buddhism being the world's most peaceful religion I mean it's people violent or peaceful religions are they're not animate beings that can think recently this issue has become a big problem especially after 2012 a lot of violence erupted in Rakhine state as well as elsewhere in Myanmar against Muslim minority communities but in particular in Rakhine state because they're right along the coast a lot of them start fleeing by sea and so trying to come down to especially other Muslim majority countries Malaysia in particular and sometimes they're intercepted or they are because they're desperate to leave they're kind of easily trafficked by the people in the fishing industry so this is men and women a large number of men in this case as well but women are also put to work through your work have you met Rohingyas have you had a chance to interact with there's a small group of Rohingya in Thailand who've been there for decades because I said the pogroms against them began in the early 80s and some of them left so many of them from that time in Malaysia as well but since the 2012 violence there's been a number that have become stranded there so after 2015 what happened was a series of mass graves were discovered in Thailand and in Malaysia basically they were victims of this trafficking and it was a cover up so at that time that was a big scandal on the international level so there was a much more earnest effort to prevent the smuggling of Rohingya via the sea and so that no longer takes place if you see in the news a lot of them are fleeing to Bangladesh which is a problem for them because you know wasn't there you know Aung San Suu Kyi the darling of the west has been effectively recharged in Burma you would think that the Rohingya issue would have been settled but it doesn't seem to be the case if anything it seems things have gotten worse I think a lot of that has to do with the lack of international attention more recently we've seen that we've seen Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama speak up about this because it's become very obvious that you know what's going on there there's a significant amount to genocide by some accounts and it's a very troubling situation as far as what the reports were getting out of there so now there's more international pressure but I think for a while we did have a lot the western world in particular were very hopeful about the prospects of democratization especially under Aung San Suu Kyi leadership everything was supposed to change it was supposed to be so much better for everyone it was simple because a lot of the other issues in Thailand are kind of tied to that not you know so in my research I was looking at migration broadly and looking at the refugee camps that have existed in northern Thailand refugees coming from the ethnic conflicts in eastern Myanmar from Kachin, Karen and Sean states the international community because there's a democratization process going on ostensibly in Myanmar they think that refugees can go back home now but in fact there's a lot of international investment going on in the regions where people have been displaced in those zones also there's not a lot of good coordination so that people feel confident about going back especially if they've been displaced for decades there's a withdrawal of support for services that the people living in the refugee camps depend on and you know I think that the democratization process deserves a little more critical view as far as really how regular people are experiencing not just the minority areas but this is another thing that I had available to me is meeting many scholars from Myanmar talking about the situation in the country we do need to look at it more critically and not just take this I guess what do you call it this great personality of the Aung San Suu Kyi make us lazy about interrogating it more closely and following how how does this opening up process really been unfolding and what are the problem areas in Rakhine state the Rakhine that is a major one that hopefully the international community can continue to urge and pressure the Myanmar government to address so Grace I mean you're looking at this carefully you've been doing this for a while are you optimistic about the future is do you see improvements being made are things going from bad to worse I mean what's what's the future of human trafficking I mean you know what I mean in the sense that is this an industry that's going to keep growing or are the efforts being undertaken limiting and damaging I know it's a tough question you know it's interesting you talk about that kind of sex trade going online I mean that doesn't bode well for efforts to end trafficking if these guys get that creative I mean so just generally speaking what's your sense a lot of the reasons like we started talking about right behind people's decisions to migrate whether as refugees or being seeking employment across borders is that the situation back home is does not allow them to live in a secure way and have be able to have hope for their future and so I think as long as we don't address basic issues of you know development especially sustainable development to make that available for many communities in developing countries where there are people who are willing to risk things or who are vulnerable to these kinds of opportunities overseas that's you know that's part of the reason for there being an available pool of people who can be exploited or taken advantage of so basically I mean as much as we need to address the symptoms ultimately we'll have to look at the cars we'll have to look at under development we'll have to look at conflict and so on and so forth yeah I think so that was that was great thank you very much Grace it's fascinating you should have your own show thank you so much it's been a great honor to do this thanks for giving me the privilege it's fantastic to sit in this particular seat to our viewers thank you very much for watching the show and Grace will be back next week I presume so thank you very very much and thank you very much