A U S T R A L I A
Government under Pressure to Act on Sexual Slavery
by Bob Burton
CANBERRA — When 27-year-old Puongtong Simaplee from Thailand died in an immigration detention centre last year, she could not have known that her death would crystallise public debate on the plight of an estimated 1,000 sexual slaves trafficked to Australia and working in the country's brothels.
There is a greater willingness to address the issue following publicity about Simaplee's fate earlier this year, says Kathleen Malzhen, coordinator of Project Respect, a Melbourne-based support group for women trafficked to Australia.
"It has been encouraging in that only earlier this year, the minister for justice, Sen Chris Ellison, got up and said in the Senate there is no slave trade in Australia and that trafficking doesn't exist," she said. "That is clearly not his position any more and the government in general has been able to recognise that we do have a problem."
Simaplee, who was trafficked into Australia at the age of 12 and forced to work as a prostitute, became a heroin addict. After being discovered by immigration officials as an undocumented immigrant, she was held in the Villawood detention centre in the western suburbs of Sydney, where she died in September 2001 due to lack of appropriate medical support.
Coroner Carl Milovanovich not only found the operator of the detention centre at fault for lack of appropriate medical supervision of Simaplee, but went on to single out the problem of trafficking in women.
"It would seem that there is evidence that young women are enticed to this country on the premise that they will be provided with work and earn a good income, only to be exploited and forced to work in brothels," he wrote in his findings.
The findings of the coroner's inquiry into her death, handed down in April this year, rekindled debate about the lack of government investigation of the sexual slave trade, despite the passage in 1999 of amendments to the criminal code on slavery and sexual servitude.
The Australian federal government is under increasing pressure — from community groups, politicians and police alike — to initiate more effective legislation, ensure it is enforced and support the affected women with better access to services and information.
"A lot more needs to be done to make women safe whether they agree to testify or not," Malzhen said.
Project Respect, which operates on a meagre budget, has taken to visiting brothels to inform women about their rights. "We'd like to see more information going out to women about what their rights are what their entitlements are and what it means to be a victim of sexual slavery because often women don't know that it is illegal in Australia," she said.
In 1999, the head of the Victoria Police's Asian Squad, Detective Senior Sergeant Ivan Mckinney successfully prosecuted Gary Glazner, an organiser of a prostitution operation that was using trafficked women.
"Syndicate members would approach bar girls — mainly in Thailand — and the terms of their work would be explained to the girls before they came to Australia," he said.
The women would pay off their travel and visas by working 500 prostitution jobs for their owner before they earned anything — and then would be bound to work another 12 months in brothels. However, for most this results in them being held in captivity in locked accommodation centres and escorted to the brothels for work.
McKinney believes that the potential profits from the women — who were bought for up to 12,000 U.S. dollars by Glazner — were huge.
"We linked up to 40 women to him, so his initial profit without these ladies working for him for any period of time after the initial 500 jobs would be 1.2 million Australian dollars (780,000 dollars). That is minimum, absolute minimum," he explained at a seminar on the topic in Parliament House on Aug. 20.
The scale of the industry Australia-wide is unknown, but five years ago, Federal Attorney-General Daryl Williams estimated it was worth 33 million dollars.
Former Australian Federal Police (AFP) detective sergeant, Chris Payne, who headed 'Operation Papertiger' in Sydney between 1992 and 1995, agrees that the trade in 'contract girls' is lucrative, citing one organiser who commenced his business with two women in the early 1990s.
"By the end of that year he was employing eight and during that year he had grossed one million (Australian) dollars," he said.
'Operation Papertiger' made 100 arrests, including those of 10 organisers, during its three-year life. "All of this and we had never really ventured much further than walking distance from own headquarters in Goulbourn Street," Payne said. "Federal Police had in fact come across organised crime in human rights violations in the heart of Sydney."
Payne, who has left the AFP, is frustrated that the issue has not been taken as seriously by law enforcement agencies as it should. He believes that the lack of police investigations since his operation was shut down following a departmental restructure in 1995 has allowed the trade — estimated at the time to include approximately 300 women in Sydney alone — to flourish.
"They have gone from being isolated cases to large scale criminal enterprises," he said.
