RIGHTS-AUSTRALIA: Activists Hail Tougher Action on Trafficking

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Bob Burton

CANBERRA, Oct 14 2003 (IPS) - Community groups are celebrating their success in persuading the Australian government this week to boost efforts to counter the trafficking of women, mostly from South-east Asia, to this country for sexual slavery.

This, activists say, is no small achievement because it comes after years of disbelief by government officials that there are trafficked women in Australia.

Now, the coordinator of Project Respect, Kathleen Malzhen, says she is optimistic that a national conference, ‘Stop the Traffic’, to be held in Melbourne next week will hasten the development of detailed plans to counter the problem.

– It is quite an exciting time to be having this conference because we no longer have to argue about whether the trafficking is occurring," she said.

Two weeks ago, Project Respect – the leading support and advocacy group for women trafficked to Australia – released its submission to a government inquiry on the trafficking of women and outlined a ‘10-point plan’ to effectively counter the trade which is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars annually.

To Malzhen’s amazement, the Australian government announced earlier this week that it would provide an additional 14 million U.S. dollars to an expanded programme incorporating most of Project Respect’s key points on countering the trafficking of women to Australia.

Minister for Justice Sen Chris Ellison announced his intention to counter the ôrepugnant trade" by adopting measures ôfocusing on prevention, detection, prosecutions, supporting victims and international efforts".

As part of the additional efforts, the federal government will expand to 13 the existing 10-person Australian Federal Police Transnational Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking Team.

ôThe government has met almost all of the points in our plan. So we think it is a really important step forward," Malzhen said. ôThe focus now will be on the detail and the implementation, but if they train people properly and resource people properly then its looking interesting," she said.

ôThe conference will be one of the prime opportunities to really start fleshing out what the Australian response to trafficking is going to look like. It is an opportunity for making strong links between non-government organisations and government so that we have a really strong network to do something about it," she said.

A spokesman for Ellison said that arrangements for him to attend the conference were being finalised.

Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward, who is scheduled to speak at the conference, has welcomed the shift of government agencies to address the women as victims of ôgenerally extreme violence and disadvantage" perpetrated by the traffickers.

The government announcement also bypasses the slow response of government agencies to the problem thus far.

Only weeks ago, the Australian Crime Commission (ACC), the national crime oversight agency, revealed in its submission to the parliamentary inquiry that it had done little to investigate the problem.

ôAlthough the ACC is currently conducting an intelligence probe in cooperation with partner agencies, it has not yet sought a Board Authorisation and Determination to conduct an intelligence operation or investigation specifically in relation to people trafficking," it stated.

Because many of the trafficked women come from Thailand, Ellison announced that a new senior migration officer would be based in the Thai capital Bangkok.

Malhazen believes a broader approach is preferable. ôIt would be better if it was about trying to pick up what the traffickers are doing, who their couriers are, that sort of thing,” she said.

‘’Of course as things tighten in Thailand, already operators have shifted elsewhere,” she said. ‘’We already know that many more Korean women are coming into Sydney, so it would be a mistake for the government to think ‘we have just fixed Thailand’. They are going to be in for a shock.”

Once in Australia, the women are obliged to pay off their travel and visas by working between 500 and 1,000 prostitution jobs for their ‘owner’ before they earn anything for themselves.

According to Project Respect, which provides support services to many of the trafficked women, the women’s new ‘owners’ often assert their control by sexually assaulting them and holding them in captivity in locked accommodation centres.

The dramatic turnaround in government policy reflects a government sensitive to media revelations about what police sources describe as a flourishing trade. The number of trafficked women are hard to come by, but one estimate uses the figure of some 1,000 women mostly from South-east Asia.

Earlier this year, Ellison himself had dismissed the suggestion that sexual servitude was a significant problem in Australia.

ôWe have not found that there is a slavery chain where people are brought into Australia under force and are trafficked in that manner. Internationally there is the smuggling and moving of people against their will. Domestically, we have not found evidence to support that sort of activity," Ellison told the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee in February.

Fueling public concern about the trafficking of women into Australia was a damning coroner’s report into the death of a 27-year-old Thai woman, Puongtong Simaplee, two years ago.

Puongtong, who was trafficked into Australia at the age of 12 and forced to work as a prostitute, became a heroin addict. In September 2001 she died in the Villawood Detention centre, where she was being held as an illegal immigrant after being denied adequate medical support.

The coroner’s report noted the lack of action to combat the entrapment of women like Puongtong in the sexual trafficking trade.