The annual "Trafficking in Persons Report" prepared by the US State Department and released yesterday is an invaluable resource for government policy-makers, law-enforcement officials, social workers and anyone who cares about international human rights. The report, which monitors the modern-day slave trade and how governments around the world react to it, is a tool the US government uses when conducting its foreign policy and managing its relations with countries around the world. Countries react to the annual report differently. Some, particularly those with a poor record in this regard, see it as a reflection of what they describe as arrogant Uncle Sam taking on the role of a champion of human rights and trying to impose its own standards on the rest of the world. Others view the report as providing useful information that the international community should tap into to improve cooperation in confronting and eliminating this atrocity, one of the worst crimes against humanity taking place today.

Human trafficking as a distinct human-rights violation became an international issue only in the past decade or so after the world finally came to the realisation that highly organised human-trafficking rackets demand the same vigilance as international efforts to suppress drug trafficking. The body of knowledge regarding the actual scope of worldwide human trafficking remains limited.

The international community needs all of the information it can get to come up with a global strategy for stamping out this despicable trade in humans. The "Trafficking in Persons Report" says common factors in human-trafficking scenarios include the use of force, fraud or coercion to exploit a person for profit. Victims can be subjected to labour exploitation, sexual exploitation or both. Labour exploitation includes slavery, forced labour and debt bondage.

The report cites various estimates on the scope and magnitude of human trafficking. For example, the International Labour Organisation estimates there are 12.3 million people in forced labour, bonded labour, forced child labour and sexual servitude at any given time. Thailand is listed among those nations that are doing reasonable well in suppressing human trafficking and addressing related issues, but there is still much room for improvement.

Thailand has long been identified as a source, transit point and destination country for men, women and children trafficked for sexual exploitation and forced labour. Each year, tens of thousands of men, women and children from Burma, Cambodia, Laos and southern China are smuggled into this country by organised crime groups and forced into bonded labour and prostitution, either here or in a third country. Many of those smuggled into the country illegally, mostly women and young girls, feed Thailand's oversized sex industry, while others provide cheap manual labour for farms, factories, construction sites or aboard fishing trawlers and are often subjected to ruthless exploitation and cruel treatment.

At the same time, many Thai women are taken to work as prostitutes in the Middle East, East Asia, Europe and North America.

Year in and year out, the US report and assessments by international organisations find Thailand's performance in the areas of law enforcement and prevention lacking in terms of consistency and seriousness of purpose. And it comes as little surprise - corruption among law-enforcement officials makes it all but impossible to eliminate human trafficking.

Stamping out corruption will take time. Meanwhile, Thailand must educate its own people about the scourge of human trafficking. Thais need to be told that as much as we as a society should be concerned about human-rights violations affecting our own citizens, we cannot ignore the plight of victims of human trafficking from other countries who are systematically abused and subjected to unspeakable cruelty in our Kingdom - often going unseen, unheard and with no one to turn to for help.

The prevailing attitude is one of out of sight, out of mind. But we cannot keep a clean conscience while remaining insensitive to the atrocities continuing to be committed within our borders against fellow human beings. Without public awareness of the evils of human trafficking, Thailand will continue to pay only lip service to its international commitment to fight this modern-day slave trade.