On Jan 5, a news report from Malaysia was picked up by the press in Indonesia, Australia and South Africa. It was about 14 foreign women, aged between 17 and 25, who were rescued from sex slavery when one of them climbed out of the window of a 17th floor apartment building.

Although reports of foreign women being engaged in the flesh trade in Malaysia have become distressingly familiar, this particular report stood out because it was a graphic account of the women's desperation to escape from their fate.

The story revealed something else - the ugly underside of a conservative society which has yet come to grips with the fact that human trafficking, particularly of women and children, can no longer be ignored.

Hints to the extent of the problem appear intermittently in the press. In another shocking report in 2001, police discovered 34 Indonesian and Thai women locked in a shophouse fitted with hidden metal doors and passageways. The women had been drugged with sedatives during the day and forced to work as prostitutes at night.

Other indications can be gleaned from the crime statistics that the authorities let fall occasionally. In 2001, for instance, the police tallied 4,132 arrests of foreign prostitutes. Between January and June 2002, they rescued 149 girls from vice syndicates.

And in 2001, the welfare services department revealed that 453 women had been sent to rehabilitation centres after being detained in suspected places of prostitution.

Tip of the iceberg

However, these figures are by no means exhaustive. Tenaganita director Irene Fernandez says the numbers provide but a rough estimate of the number of women trafficked into Malaysia.

On the one hand, she notes that not all women arrested in vice raids have been trafficked or trapped into labour or prostitution by force or deception. Some may have been smuggled into the country but were not necessarily forced to work against their will.

However, a more serious deficiency is that the numbers of women arrested may only represent the tip of the iceberg in the context of human trafficking activities.

Part of the reason for this under-accounting, says Fernandez, is the absence of a specific law which deals directly with the issue of human trafficking.

Consequently, when vice raids take place, many trafficked persons are charged under immigration laws as persons without travel documents and subsequently deported to their home countries in the same manner as other undocumented migrants.

Similarly, traffickers have been prosecuted under various other laws such as the Immigration Act, the Restricted Residence Act and the Internal Security Act, as people who have breached immigration laws or national security interests.

The statistics on trafficking activities are therefore, biased downwards. There are also, of course, those who have neither been rescued nor arrested. Their numbers remain largely unknown.

Legal vacuum

As a first step, rights activists say the government must patch the legislative gap to directly address trafficking, instead of taking the indirect route of relying on legislation against prostitution or other offences.

This is important so as to avoid re-victimisation of women who have already suffered grave violations to their basic rights.

Fernandez says the law was not always silent in this area. The Women and Girls Protection Act, which was repealed in 2000, had a provision which prohibited trafficking in women. It applied to girls and women up to the age of 21.

Section 18 of the Act stated: "Any person who buys, sells, traffics in, or procures or brings into or takes out of Malaysia for the purpose of such traffic, and whether or not for the purpose of present or subsequent prostitution, any female person, shall be guilty of an offence and shall on conviction be liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or to a fine not exceeding RM10,000 or to both."

However, when the Act was repealed by the Child Act 2001, this provision was omitted in the new law. In addition, the Child Act only covers minors up to the age of 18, three years short of the earlier age limit.

Fernandez says: "The Young Girls and Women Protection Act had its own problems because it was an archaic law. It included implications that women who work in the sex industry are 'fallen' women.

"But now, the Child Act provides even less protection because it only applies to people under the age of 18. There is a vacuum and we need an anti-trafficking law to deal with it."

She points out, too, that reliance on the Penal Code is insufficient since it addresses prostitution, but not other trafficking-related activities.

By comparison, the anti-trafficking law in the Philippines the only country in the region to have enacted such legislation provides a clearer picture of the scope that a comprehensive law should cover.

The Philippines' Anti-Trafficking Law 2003 defines trafficking in persons as "the recruitment, transportation, or receipt of persons by means of threat or use of force, taking advantage of the vulnerability of the person. It extends beyond exploitation in the sex industry to cover forced labour, slavery, servitude or the removal or sale of organs".

The law requires relevant government agencies - from the foreign office to the social welfare department - to provide assistance to survivors of trafficking. This includes arranging for women who have been trafficked abroad to return home, and facilitating their reintegration into their communities via social welfare programmes and networks.

Issue 'too sensitive'

In contrast, despite the shortfall where Malaysian law is concerned, the government remains loath to deal with this issue head on.

At present, attempts by non-governmental organisations and women's groups to carry out projects on the trafficking of women and children are often stumped by the lack of funding.

While Tenaganita has mapped out a programme to provide support and assistance to victims of trafficking, its plans had to be set aside after funding pledges from abroad fell through, says Fernandez.

"We have been trying for years to get funding from abroad for this programme and at one point, it was promised to us. However, everything was put on hold after the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US and the grants were diverted to other purposes."

She says it is almost impossible to source domestic funding because the authorities regard issues of trafficking as being 'too sensitive'.

This is underscored by the fact that one of the more easily accessible documents on human trafficking in Malaysia is compiled not by any government agency, but by the US Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices.

In its 2002 report, released last March, the state department devoted a separate section to the subject of trafficking in persons, and noted that Malaysia was both a source and destination country for trafficking in women and girls in sexual exploitation.

More specifically, the report found that young women primarily from Indonesia, China, Thailand and the Philippines were trafficked into Malaysia for sexual exploitation.

Conversely, Malaysian women were being trafficked to Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Canada and the US.

This gave lie to the frequently held perception that Malaysia is only a transit country for trafficking in women and children, and not a source or end destination.

Human rights infringement

While there are signs that the government is cognizant of the problem, its visible activities are more often confined to regional talk shops such as the 2002 Bali Ministerial Conference on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime.

All participants, Malaysia included, acknowledged that people smuggling and trafficking were "reprehensible criminal activities that fed on the hopes and aspirations of people and frequently infringed basic human rights and freedoms".

Beyond that, it is uncertain how many countries actually took steps to act on their concerns following this meeting.

There is cause for some optimism in Malaysia, where the Human Rights Commission has been undertaking its own monitoring activities in prisons and detention camps.

"We have carried out interviews and found that quite a number of the women have been trafficked into the country. They are, however, locked up for crimes like prostitution and lack of documentation," says an officer.

The commission is now planning two crucial meetings next month, the first, a national-level consultation on the trafficking of women and children, and the second, a regional seminar.

However, such initiatives are still too few and too far in between to match the pace of traffickers.

Even under normal circumstances, criminal syndicates have proven time and time again their ability to stay one step ahead of the law.

An added tragedy to the suffering of trafficking victims is the lack of resolve among the authorities to even acknowledge that there is a problem, let alone deal with it.