Traffickers exploit victims in commercial sex establishments, hotels, private homes, and massage parlours in Fiji, and sometimes utilize websites and cell phone applications to facilitate the exploitation of sex trafficking victims.
This has been highlighted in the US State Department 2025 Trafficking In Persons Report which states that about 20 percent of respondents to a 2023 prevalence study identified either experiencing themselves or knowing someone who experienced trafficking indicators in the hospitality, retail, wholesale, food service, vehicle maintenance, storage, transportation, construction, agriculture, fisheries, and/or forestry sectors.
The report highlights that traffickers, including family members, taxi drivers, foreign tourists, businessmen, religious organisations, and crew members on foreign fishing vessels, among others, exploit foreign victims, including from Thailand and China, as well as Fijian women and children in sex trafficking.
It says increasingly, fraudulent websites are also used to recruit and exploit victims in labour trafficking.
The concerning US State Department report for yet another year says traffickers exploit Fijian and Chinese national women and children in massage parlours and commercial sex establishments operated by Chinese nationals, particularly in Suva.
In some cases, massage parlour owners arrange for female Fijian employees to engage in commercial sex acts with clients in hotels or commercial sex establishments.
The report says some Fijian children are also at risk of sex and labour trafficking, including domestic servitude, as families follow a traditional practice of sending them to live with relatives or families in larger cities, where they are vulnerable to exploitation in domestic servitude or sex trafficking in exchange for food, clothing, shelter, or school fees.
It further highlights that foreign yacht owners and foreigners hiring locally owned yachts dock in rural Fijian islands and seek young women, usually children, for marriage; some of these women and children subsequently become exploited in forced labour or sex trafficking.
It also says that taxi drivers or other facilitators transport Fijian child sex trafficking victims to hotels in popular tourist areas or to private yachts at the request of foreign tourists seeking commercial sex acts.
We have sought comments from the Police and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
They are yet to respond.
