Malaysia is a destination, and to a lesser extent, a source and transit country for women and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically conditions of forced prostitution and for men, women, and children who are in conditions of forced labor. The majority of trafficking victims are foreign workers who migrate willingly to Malaysia from Indonesia, Nepal, India, Thailand, China, thePhilippines, Burma, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam in search of greater economic opportunities, some of whom subsequently encounter forced labor or debt bondage at the hands of their employers, employment agents, or informal labor recruiters.
While many of Malaysia’s trafficking offenders are individual business people, large organized crime syndicates are also behind some of the trafficking of foreigners in Malaysia. A significant number of young women are recruited for work in Malaysian restaurants and hotels, some of whom migrate through the use of “Guest Relations Officer” visas, but subsequently are coerced into Malaysia’s commercial sex trade. Such women from China are nicknamed "China Dolls".[1] Many Malaysian labor outsourcing companies apparently recruited excess workers, who were then often subject to conditions of forced labor. Some Malaysian citizens are trafficked internally and abroad to Singapore, Hong Kong, France, and the United Kingdom for commercial sexual exploitation. There were approximately two million documented migrant workers in Malaysia in 2009, and an additional estimated 1.9 million who were undocumented.
Many migrant workers in plantations, construction sites, textile factories, and employed as domestic workers throughout Malaysia experienced restrictions on movement, deceit and fraud in wages, passport confiscation, or debt bondage, which are practices indicative of trafficking. Some Malaysian employers reportedly did not pay their foreign domestic workers three to six months’ wages in order to recoup recruitment agency charges,...