The Cambodian and Malaysian governments’ failure to regulate recruiters and employers leaves Cambodian migrant domestic workers exposed to a wide range of abuses. Tens of thousands of Cambodian women and girls who migrate to Malaysia have little protection against forced confinement in training centers, heavy debt burdens, and exploitative working conditions.

Being forced into domestic servitude is one of the most common forms of human trafficking. Yet it remains one of the most invisible, including meager media coverage and law enforcement efforts. On June 27, the US State Department released its Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, an annual ranking of how well -- or how badly -- countries around the world are doing to fight modern forms of slavery. The report is a sobering litany of horrific abuses, including against domestic workers, and the faltering efforts of many governments to stop these crimes.

It was 2008, and along Hamra Street, one of Beirut's main thoroughfares, women's rights demonstrators had placed a series of identical cutouts shaped like women's bodies. Painted red, each sign represented a migrant domestic worker who had died - and Human Rights Watch had discovered that they were dying in Lebanon at the shocking rate of one each week.