- 1.5 million Asian women are working abroad as legal or illegal workers.
- Countries of origin report an outflow of 800,000 female migrant workers a year, and the number is increasing steadily.
- Women increasingly migrate to support families; women usually migrate alone.
- Parallel to legitimate immigration there are well-organized underground syndicates engaged in trafficking immigrants.
- Women who enter countries illegally, or overstay their visas, are particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
- The selling of naïve and desperate young women into sexual bondage has become one of the fastest growing criminal enterprises in the global economy. The pattern is similar in most countries: young women attempting to find legitimate jobs are deceived by agents who specialize in trafficking humans. Upon arrival in a strange land their papers are seized, their movement confined, and even if they have the opportunity, they are too frightened to seek help - rapes, beatings and druggings by their captors are the norm.
- The United Nations reports that 4 million people a year are traded against their will to work in one or another form of servitude.
