Local judges too often deport the laborers without any lawyers present, O'Neill said.
In 2002, the number of "unaccounted for" Southeast Asian immigrants in Taiwan -- common victims of trafficking -- totaled 8,135, Taitung County Police Department official Chen Ming-an (
They came here on labor or marriage visas but then vanished, he said, adding that most women among those missing foreigners went underground, almost always against their will, to sell sex.
Fast forward to last year: the figure for missing Indonesians, Filipinos, Thais, Vietnamese and Mongolians was 16,142, nearly double the number just four years earlier, while the number of prostitution arrests involving foreign women soared from 41 in 2002 to nearly 200 last year, Chen said.
Such conditions, Becker told interior ministry officials, give rise to "modern day slavery," the "most pernicious form [of which] is the trafficking of women and children into a dark world of sexual servitude where virgin rape ... abuse and disease amount to a virtual death sentence for the young and vulnerable."
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