[9] Prior to its departure in 2012,[10] the UN peacekeeping force's UNPOL division assisted the police, including taking part in prostitution raids.
Timorese women, girls, and occasionally young men and boys from rural areas are led to the capital with the promise of better employment or education prospects and are subjected to sex trafficking; there are reports of official complicity in these practices.
Foreign women, including those from Cambodia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, are vulnerable to sex trafficking in Timor-Leste.
[7] According to immigration officials, police, and media sources, foreign women in prostitution, many of whom were possible victims of sex trafficking, were sometimes detained en masse during law enforcement raids and then deported without proper screening, or as a result of arresting officers’ inability to derive pertinent information from the women due to their having been coached to provide identical accounts.
For this reason, PNTL officers claimed they were not able to obtain sufficient evidence to prosecute the owners of a karaoke bar who may have subjected 67 foreign women to sex trafficking during the reporting period.