USAID, IOM Provide Assistance to Enslaved Sailors
Trafficking is not just a young woman’s problem. Men, too, are often forced to labor in construction and agriculture. In 2006, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) provided reintegration assistance to a group of Ukrainian men who were trafficked to be exploited as slave labor in the Russian fishing industry.
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Anti-trafficking image presents a simple message: People are not a commodity
Photo Credit: IOM |
A group of at least 24 men aged 18-50 were lured onto a boat after accepting bogus job offers, allegedly to work on industrial fishing vessels for salaries ranging between $1,200 and $1,600 a month. Once the men arrived in Russia’s Far East, they were duped into surrendering their passports and put to work without adequate food or water aboard an old Russian fishing vessel that was crab-poaching off Sakhalin Island in the North Pacific. They were variously enslaved on the boat without pay from 6 to 11 months.
“The men suffered from severe sleep deprivation,” says IOM’s Fred Larsson in Ukraine. “They were severely physically and psychologically abused.”
When a Russian Coast Guard contingent patrolling the North Pacific seized and impounded the vessel for poaching, it found the exhausted men. IOM Ukraine helped to get the men back to Kyiv and reintegrated into society. The Russian local prosecutor has begun a criminal case in the matter.
With up to 2 million Ukrainians estimated to be currently living abroad, and others eager to join them, potential migrants are in critical need of accurate information before making the crucial decision of whether to go abroad for work, study or travel.
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