Hong Kong 'a hot-bed for modern day slavery'

Matt Friedman has battled what he calls modern-day slavery for more than 22 years, working for outfits such as the UN Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking.

It has brought him to the front lines, where he has seen thousands of girls and young women in the most horrific circumstances, tricked into leaving their homes and forced into sweatshops or into the sex industry. Some details may get a little hazy over time, but he will never forget one 11-year-old girl he met in a Mumbai brothel.

"She was wearing adult clothes and she wrapped her arms around my legs and begged me to take her with me. I told the police we had to take her out, but they said they couldn't because they [were outnumbered and would] get killed.

"So we came back with more [officers], but by that time she was already gone. That haunted me because you see the horror of what happens to a person in the cycle and can't get out."

Now project director of Liberty Asia, a Hong Kong-based alliance of professionals dedicated to tackling human trafficking, Friedman says it is important to recognise the issue as the modern equivalent of slavery: the victims are deceived, coerced or even abducted from their communities and transported to other places where they are cruelly exploited.

The International Labour Organisation estimates about 21 million people were trafficked around the world last year, including 11.7 million in Asia. "There are 1.1 million new victims a year, which is 3,000 victims a day, 125 per hour," Friedman says.

But his horrifying stories aren't just a concern of poor, developing countries; they occur in Hong Kong, too. In July, for example, two Thai women were lured to the city by offers of well-paid jobs as masseuses, and then threatened with violence and forced to work in a Yau Ma Tei brothel.