Contact Admin. Yemen is a country of origin and, to a much lesser extent, a transit and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking. Some Yemeni children, mostly boys, migrate to the Yemeni cities of Aden and Sanaa, or travel across the northern border to Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, to Oman where they end up working in forced labor in domestic service, small shops, or as beggars.
Some of these children are forced into prostitution by traffickers, border patrols, other security officials, and their employers once they arrive in Saudi Arabia. Some parents may have refrained from sending their children to Saudi Arabia for fear of them encountering violence in northern Yemen, while other Yemeni children attempting to reach Saudi Arabia were abducted by rebel groups to serve as combatants. A Saudi study conducted in reported that most beggars in Saudi Arabia are Yemenis between the ages of 16 and The Yemeni government and international NGOs estimate that there are approximately 1.
In addition, some sources report that the practice of chattel slavery still exists in Yemen; while no official statistics exist detailing this practice, sources report that there could be to men, women, and children sold or inherited as slaves in Yemen, including in the Al-Zohrah district of Al-Hudaydah Governorate, west of Sanaa, and the Kuaidinah and Khairan Al-Muharraq districts of the Hajjah Governorate, north of the capital.
To a lesser extent, Yemen is also a source country for girls subjected to sex trafficking within the country and in Saudi Arabia. Girls as young as 15 are exploited for commercial sex in hotels and clubs in the governorates of Sanaa, Aden, and Taiz.
The majority of child sex tourists in Yemen originate from Saudi Arabia, with a smaller number possibly coming from other Gulf nations. Yemeni girls who marry Saudi tourists often do not realize the temporary and exploitative nature of these agreements, and some are subjected to sex trafficking or abandoned on the streets of Saudi Arabia.
