The con­tin­u­ing hor­rors of mi­grant Venezue­lan women and chil­dren should awak­en in the State, and in Trinidad and To­ba­go’s so­ci­ety, greater and more ur­gent re­spons­es. Once again, a sto­ry in the me­dia high­lights sex­u­al and oth­er forms of ad­van­tage be­ing tak­en of Venezue­lan fe­males.

In the present in­stance, it is about teenage girls be­ing held at a place in which they have been sub­ject­ed to dif­fer­ent forms of phys­i­cal and sex­u­al abuse by whol­ly un­wor­thy men and women.

The re­al­i­ty has been that a num­ber of Venezue­lan women and girls, who have es­caped the very dif­fi­cult liv­ing con­di­tions in their coun­try, lit­er­al­ly jumped from the prover­bial fry­ing pan right in­to the blaz­ing fire here.

On oc­ca­sion, when such women have found it dif­fi­cult to make a liv­ing in a de­cent man­ner through le­gal en­deav­our, they have giv­en them­selves over to sex work un­der its known de­hu­man­is­ing con­di­tions. Then there are oth­er Venezue­lan women who have de­vel­oped the prac­tice of find­ing a street cor­ner with ba­bies in arms to beg.

To ag­gra­vate the con­di­tion of the im­mi­grant women be­ing sex­u­al­ly en­trapped, sev­er­al such women have come for­ward with com­plaints of not even be­ing able to re­ceive and keep the mon­ey they have worked for; the pay­ment goes in­to the pock­ets of the broth­el own­ers and traf­fick­ers.

It may sure­ly be ar­gued that many women to­day make a de­lib­er­ate choice to en­gage in sex work in ac­cor­dance with changed lifestyles, val­ues and even le­gal prac­tices in cer­tain coun­tries. That, how­ev­er, is very dif­fer­ent from what has been re­port­ed as hu­man traf­fick­ing and forced sex­u­al de­hu­man­is­ing.

As with many crim­i­nal acts, the po­lice are of­ten out of the loop, they are un­aware; in some in­stances re­port­ed­ly per­suad­ed to look the oth­er way from such il­le­gal sex­u­al ad­van­tage of women. On­ly oc­ca­sion­al­ly, as in the in­stant sit­u­a­tion as re­port­ed on, does a per­son with a con­science in­ter­vene to res­cue the in­di­vid­u­als trapped in these sit­u­a­tions.

If all of us as in­di­vid­u­als can take the po­si­tion that it is not our busi­ness, the Gov­ern­ment can­not. In sign­ing the Unit­ed Na­tions Pro­tec­tion of the Rights of all Mi­grant Work­ers In­ter­na­tion­al Con­ven­tion, “gov­ern­ments must pro­tect all mi­grants from racist and xeno­pho­bic vi­o­lence, ex­ploita­tion and forced labour,” states the con­ven­tion.

For cer­tain, there are oc­ca­sion­al in­stances when the po­lice un­cov­er such crim­i­nal de­hu­man­i­sa­tion of groups of women, and the gov­ern­ment takes a de­ci­sion to de­port those found, but from the out­side, it sure­ly seems that there is not suf­fi­cient and con­sis­tent in­ter­ven­tion to pre­vent the crimes and pros­e­cute the of­fend­ers.

On the hu­man side of this mat­ter, Trinidad and To­ba­go must be con­scious of the fact that thou­sands of our own na­tion­als are il­le­gal im­mi­grants in oth­er so­ci­eties, and may un­der­go sim­i­lar and or oth­er forms of il­le­gal ad­van­tage-tak­ing.

What is hap­pen­ing here with Venezue­lan fe­males in par­tic­u­lar con­cerns us all. It chal­lenges what is a long-prac­tised form of degra­da­tion of self and oth­ers by our own na­tion­als. And this is notwith­stand­ing that long-cher­ished prin­ci­ples of moral be­hav­iours have un­der­gone change in the con­tem­po­rary pe­ri­od, and sex work has be­come ac­cept­ed in cer­tain coun­tries and cul­tures.

How­ev­er, as such prac­tices vi­o­late our laws, the Gov­ern­ment and the po­lice have to be proac­tive.