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Prevention and protection

To prevent trafficking in persons and protect victims of trafficking, it is essential for countries
to explore avenues to reduce irregular migration and promote the use of safe and legal avenues
for migration. Any strategy seeking to reduce the levels of trafficking and smuggling needs to
involve practical measures that encourage the use of legal migration options and dis-incentivise
the use of smugglers and traffickers.

Promoting safe migration

A central feature of national and international efforts to prevent smuggling of migrants and
trafficking in persons is to promote safe migration. This means that states adopt strategic and
practical measures diverting migration flows from irregular to regular avenues and take active
steps to ensure the safety of migrants during their journey from their place of origin to their
destination.
These efforts need to go hand in hand with measures designed to dis-incentivise the use of
smugglers and other forms of irregular migration. The high costs, dangers and uncertain
outcomes of smuggling need to be communicated to would-be migrants. This has to be
supplemented by greater efforts to criminalise, investigate, arrest and prosecute smugglers and
traffickers, such that smuggling and trafficking change from high-profit, low-risk activities into
high-risk, low-profit crimes.

Legal avenues for migration

A precondition for promoting safe migration is the existence of meaningful avenues for legal
migration. This involves the creation of fair, fast and efficient processes that enable would-be
migrants to apply for visas, work-permits and, where applicable, protection. This report has
clearly shown that so long as legal avenues remain non-existent, closed, cumbersome or too
costly, migrants will opt for irregular avenues of migration that involve the risk of smuggling and
trafficking.
The possession of legal documents also greatly improves the status, safety and autonomy of
labour migrants once they are in Thailand. In this context, it may also be worth exploring the
introduction of a separate offence criminalising persons who unlawfully confiscate or withhold
the travel and identity documents of migrant workers, which is a commonly used tool to control
and exploit labour migrants in Thailand.

The spectrum of smuggling and trafficking

In trying to tackle trafficking in persons, it is important to see that trafficking is not a stand-
alone phenomenon but one that, along with the smuggling of migrants, exists along a spectrum.
Irregular migration is best understood as a continuum, which, if facilitated by persons seeking to
gain financial or other material benefits, can amount to the smuggling of migrants or can
constitute trafficking if done for the purpose of exploitation using any of the means that define
trafficking.
While the topic of trafficking in persons has gained some attention and countermeasures have
gained traction in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar and Thailand, the topic of smuggling of migrants
has not. Efforts to research, understand, conceptualise, criminalise and prevent the smuggling of
migrants in these countries and in other parts of Southeast Asia are still in their infancy. Several
countries have yet to introduce specific offences and articulate clear policies to combat migrant
smuggling.

Community-based interventions
This report has shown that trafficking in persons from Cambodia, Lao PDR and Myanmar does
not affect all people and all parts of each country equally. Certain communities and people of
certain backgrounds are much more likely to fall victim to traffickers. Rural and remote areas
where sustainable full-time employment is scare and where farmers struggle to feed their
families and pay their bills are particularly vulnerable to false promises and the lure of jobs and
higher incomes in Thailand.
To prevent and combat trafficking in persons, especially sex trafficking and trafficking into
Thailand’s domestic service industry, it is necessary to give women greater access to education,
training and local labour markets so they gain greater independence and can make decisions
about their lives more autonomously.

Education and training

Community-based interventions and greater rights for women need to be accompanied by
efforts to keep young people in school and provide better access to and better quality primary
and secondary schooling for boys and girls. At present, many young people leave school
prematurely to help their families earn money, which often leads to situations of child labour and
child exploitation. The report has shown that many teenagers are migrating to Thailand for the
same reasons as adults and end up in situations involving trafficking.