PROTECTION
The government sustained efforts to protect identified victims. Authorities identified 20 potential sex trafficking victims in 2014, including four confirmed victims—three adult females and one female child—and 16 suspected victims, all adult females. In comparison, authorities identified 14 suspected victims of trafficking in 2013. Eleven of the suspected victims were Jamaican and nine were foreign nationals from Colombia, Guyana, and Suriname. Police developed a standard operating procedure on victim identification available by intranet at the national police college. The children’s registry continued to use a standard procedure to receive reports and referrals concerning violence against children and trafficking victims, and immigration officials continued to use a procedure to screen and conduct risk assessments of potential victims. Although the government offered protection to all confirmed and suspected victims, few victims were identified relative to the size of the vulnerable population.
All 20 confirmed and suspected victims were referred to government and NGO care facilities and received medical services, psychological services, and financial assistance for basic necessities. The foreign national victims from Colombia, Guyana, and Suriname were later voluntarily repatriated to their home countries. The government’s trafficking shelter, which could house 12 people, continued to assist only one person—a domestic servitude victim who recently turned 18 and has lived in the shelter for two years. The victim did not attend school, but was provided guided instruction through a web-based curriculum commonly used in Jamaican schools; she left the shelter infrequently and reportedly with a chaperone for her safety. Other government- supported shelters did not allow victims to leave at will or without a chaperone. Authorities provided 3,400,000 Jamaican dollars ($29,500) in funding for the government shelter in 2014. In accordance with Jamaica’s anti-trafficking law, the government provided official guidance for immigration authorities not to deport foreign victims. Authorities did not provide immigration relief to any foreign victims, all of whom chose to be repatriated, compared with one foreign victim out of 14 potential victims in 2013 and 21 foreign victims out of 23 potential victims during

2012.There were no reports of the government inappropriately punishing victims for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being subjected to human trafficking.

PREVENTION
The government increased efforts to prevent human trafficking, in contrast with previous years. Jamaica had a national anti-trafficking plan through 2015.The cabinet appointed the Jamaican children’s advocate as the national rapporteur on trafficking in persons in order to investigate reports of trafficking, report on violations of the rights of victims, and provide an annual report to the government. The government funded public service announcements, which aired via television, radio, and cinema messages from February to April 2015. Officials published an anti-trafficking curriculum for secondary school students to raise awareness. The national anti-trafficking taskforce delivered presentations and pamphlets about trafficking to students, educators, and the public at a university, schools, churches, and events across the country; and also to 245 health workers in three parishes.The labor ministry educated Jamaican workers set to work in a foreign seasonal agricultural program about the risks of trafficking prior to their departure between January and October each year. The taskforce educated members of the tourism industry in major resort areas to encourage reporting of suspected sex tourism. The government provided anti-trafficking training to some diplomatic personnel. Although raids were conducted in popular resort areas, the government did not report any child sex tourism investigations, prosecutions, or convictions, nor were there efforts to reduce the demand for commercial sex acts, child sex tourism, or forced labor.

JAPAN:  Tier 2 
Japan is a destination, source, and transit country for men and women subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking, and for children subjected to sex trafficking. Male and female migrant workers, mainly from Asia, are subjected to conditions of forced labor, including through the government’s Industrial Trainee and Technical Internship Program (TITP). Some men, women, and children from East Asia, Southeast Asia (mainly the Philippines and Thailand), South America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central America travel to Japan for employment or fraudulent marriage and are subjected to sex trafficking. Traffickers use fraudulent marriages between foreign women and Japanese men to facilitate the entry of women into Japan for forced prostitution in bars, clubs, brothels, and massage parlors. Traffickers strictly control the movement of victims using debt bondage, threats of violence or deportation, blackmail, and other coercive psychological methods. Victims of forced prostitution sometimes face debts upon commencement of their contracts. Most are required to pay employers fees for living expenses, medical care, and other necessities, leaving them predisposed to debt bondage.“Fines” for alleged misbehavior are added to victims’ original debt, and the process brothel operators use to calculate these debts is typically not transparent.Trafficking victims transit Japan between East Asia and North America.
Japanese nationals, particularly runaway teenage girls and children of foreign and Japanese citizens who have acquired nationality, are also subjected to sex trafficking.The phenomenon of enjo kosai, also known as “compensated dating” and variants of the “JK business” (JK stands for joshi-kosei or high school girl) continue to facilitate

the prostitution of Japanese children. Sophisticated and organized prostitution networks target vulnerable Japanese women and girls—often in poverty or with mental and intellectual disabilities— in public areas such as subways, popular youth hangouts, schools, and online; some of these women and girls become trafficking victims. Japanese men continue to be a significant source of demand for child sex tourism in Southeast Asia and, to a lesser extent, Mongolia.
Cases of forced labor occur withinTITP, a government-run program that was originally designed to foster basic industrial skills and techniques among foreign workers, but has instead become a guest worker program. During the “internship,” many migrant workers are placed in jobs that do not teach or develop technical skills—the original intention of the TITP; some of these workers continued to experience conditions of forced labor.The majority of technical interns are Chinese and Vietnamese nationals, some of whom pay up to $10,000 for jobs and are employed under contracts that mandate forfeiture of the equivalent of thousands of dollars if workers try to leave. Reports continue of excessive fees, deposits, and “punishment” contracts under this program. Some employers confiscate trainees’ passports and other personal identification documents and control the movements of interns to prevent their escape or communication with persons outside the program.
The Government of Japan does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so.The government conducted a comprehensive review of TITP and submitted a reform bill to the Diet that establishes a third-party management audit body with the capacity to punish perpetrators of forced labor and improves redress mechanisms for migrant workers. It also issued a revised national plan of action and established a minister-level committee to implement the plan.The government, however, did not develop or enact legislation that would fill key gaps in the law and thereby facilitate prosecutions of trafficking crimes.The government did not prosecute or convict forced labor perpetrators despite allegations of labor trafficking in the TITP, and the overall numbers of prosecutions and convictions decreased since 2013. The government did not develop specific protection and assistance measures for trafficking victims, such as establishing a nationwide network of shelters exclusively for trafficking victims apart from the existing network of shelters for victims of domestic violence. The government did not accede to the 2000 UN TIP Protocol.