Children in Travel and Tourism, it is common in Thailand“for child victims to be
confined after their rescue in highly restrictive and inadequate shelters for long
periods of time, often for the duration of the criminal investigation and prosecution.”
8.5 Forced Labor in Thailand’s Seafood Industry................
The Thai human trafficking issue that has garnered the most international attention
lately has been labor trafficking in the seafood industry. Migrant workers are most
impacted in this industry, as 90% of the workforce in the seafood sector in Thailand
comprises of migrant workers who often lack official legal identification and
immigration documents. In 2014 and 2015 there was an inundation of media
coverage on the egregious labor rights abuses in the largely unregulatedfishing
industries in Thailand (International Labor Rights Forum and the Migrant Workers
Rights Network 2016 ). Tremendous numbers of Thai, Cambodian, and Indonesian
men were reportedly trafficked onfishing boats off Thailand, treated as animals, and
forced to work without pay and under threats of extreme violence. These men work
in the production of seafood, mainly shrimp, for major retailers in the USA and
Europe, such as Walmart, Carrefour, Costco, and Tesco. A six-month investigation
by theGuardianfound that enslaved men were living under“horrific conditions,
including 20-hour shifts, regular beatings, torture, and execution-style killings.
Some were at sea for years; some were regularly offered methamphetamines to keep
them going. Some had seen fellow slaves murdered in front of them”(Hodal et al.
2014 ).
The Associated Pressand other media sources followed a year later with more
reports revealing that these inhumane conditions remain a significant concern, such
as reports about slavery in Thai shrimp peeling facilities. Most notably in May
2015, reportsflooded international news coverage about thousands of Rohingya
Muslims who were uncovered in mass graves at trafficking camps on the
Thai/Malaysia border (Equal Rights Trust 2014 ; Chambers 2015 ). Significant
international response led to low rankings on the Trafficking in Persons
(TIP) Report, a“yellow card”from the European Commission, lawsuits against
Costco and Nestle seeking“forced labor”disclosure labels, calls for investigations
into Thailand’s shrimp industry and boycotts by US senators of Thai seafood
products (International Labor Rights Forum and the Migrant Workers Rights
Network 2016 ).
8.6 TIP Report..........................................
The annual Trafficking in Persons or TIP Report is the“world’s most compre-
hensive resource of governmental anti-human trafficking efforts”which ranks all
countries’governments on their effectiveness in tackling human trafficking issues
8.4 Child Trafficking in Thailand 121