Facing starvation, many families viewed marrying off their teenage daughters as a viable economic survival mechanism. This reduced the number of mouths to feed and sometimes brought in a dowry.
: Reports indicated a rise in the sharing of pornographic images of young girls, with nearly 26% of internet users in the country—mostly children—experiencing online harassment. Moving Forward: The Path to Protection
The article below is written for an academic or policy-making audience. exploited teens asia 2021
For the first time, survivors of teen exploitation in Asia began speaking out publicly, albeit anonymously. In Indonesia, a 19-year-old woman who had been exploited online at age 15 started a TikTok channel educating teens about sextortion. In India, a collective called Sahiyar (Support) provided legal aid and counselling to rescued teen labourers, achieving a landmark Supreme Court ruling in November 2021 that mandated age-appropriate compensation for all child trafficking survivors.
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), there are an estimated 152 million child laborers worldwide, with 58 million of them in Asia and the Pacific. Many of these children are teenagers who are exploited in various forms of work, including forced labor, debt bondage, and human trafficking. Facing starvation, many families viewed marrying off their
The exploitation of teenagers in Asia can take many forms, including but not limited to:
Perhaps the most disturbing phenomenon to gain global attention in 2021 was the explosion of scam compounds. In Sihanoukville, Chinese nationals as young as 15 were lured by "relaxing jobs" online only to be trapped in guarded compounds forcing them to run online romance scams. Thailand, too, became a recovery zone for teenagers forced into hotel rooms and brothels. Operation Isolation in 2021 successfully freed three teenage girls and two teenage boys from "windowless rooms" where they were sold for sex for as little as $45 . Moving Forward: The Path to Protection The article
: Predators coerced teenagers into sending explicit material, subsequently blackmailing them for monetary payments.
Child marriage was another crisis accelerated by the pandemic. UNICEF warned in 2021 that the COVID-19 pandemic could put an additional 10 million girls at risk of becoming child brides over the next decade. South Asia, already home to the largest number of child brides, saw at least 2,000 child marriage-related deaths in the year. In Indonesia, Laos, and Myanmar, recruiters and traffickers increasingly exploited the desperation caused by COVID-19 for profit.
As the world grappled with the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, a parallel, silent crisis escalated across Asia. Lockdowns, economic freefall, and school closures did not just disrupt normal life; they created a perfect storm for the exploitation of teenagers. The keyword "exploited teens Asia 2021" does not represent a single, neat category. Instead, it encompasses a brutal spectrum of abuses: forced labour in supply chains, online sexual exploitation via live-streaming platforms, trafficking for forced marriage or begging, and the recruitment of adolescents into armed conflict or criminal enterprises.
Perhaps the most alarming trend in 2021 was the explosion of Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (OCSEA).