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Georgina Costello

"Sex Slaves are Getting the Wrong Message"

The Australian

June 26, 2003

THE news that Australian Federal Police are making the first prosecution of people traffickers under Australia's sexual slavery legislation is good news for those concerned about the victims of this insidious trade.

But there are two fundamental problems preventing police from catching more sex slave traders.
One, Australia's sexual slavery laws are insufficient to properly attack sexual slave traders who exploit South-East Asian prostitutes. Two, there is a failure by police and the Department of Immigration to recognise that well-supported victims of trafficking are more likely to make star witnesses.
Until these two problems are solved, the pressure on AFP and the Government to address issues relating to trafficking for sexual slavery (which has been immense this year, following revelations that there are victims of sexual slavery in Australia) must continue to build apace.
According to AFP, three alleged traffickers recruited three women to Australia to work in public relations and hospitality. Instead, when they arrived here, the women were expected to work as prostitutes. Under Australia's sexual slavery laws, it is a crime to induce another person to come here by pretending the work does not involve prostitution. But the deception of many women trafficked to Australia for prostitution involves deceit about the nature of the prostitution, rather than the fact that the work involves prostitution at all. This type of deception is not illegal under Australia's deceptive recruiting laws. This is a serious flaw in the legislation and demonstrates an inappropriate moral distinction.
Women from South-East Asian nations may be compelled – or may choose – to work in prostitution to support themselves and their families. An opportunity to come here to engage in this work is likely to be seen as lucrative. Unfortunately, women who arrange to come to Australia to work as prostitutes are extremely vulnerable to exploitation. Typically, English is a second language, visa issues are in the hands of (often shonky) migration agents paid by those arranging the journey, and the woman must pay huge sums to those organising the trip, which becomes a debt to be repaid. In the context of this vulnerability, women have arrived to be told by the traffickers who have brought them here that they have to perform 500 or 750 or even 1000 sexual acts of half an hour each before they will receive any income for their work.
Traffickers are in a strong position to coerce prostitutes from South-East Asia to comply with this sort of unfair contract. The woman is likely to be afraid of immigration officials, suspicious of police (the traffickers have been known to tell the women that police are paid to turn a blind eye to their presence) and anxious to pay off the huge debt they owe to the trafficker for the "privilege" of coming to Australia. In these circumstances, the women are likely to comply with commands that they perform sexual acts in unsafe and undesirable ways and are unlikely to approach authorities who may be able to assist them.
To date, neither the Department of Immigration nor the local or federal police have been able to point to any policies or procedures in place in relation to their interaction with victims of sexual slavery. Nor can these authorities point to a set of services they make available to victims of trafficking, such as counselling, housing, migration advice and healthcare. Instead, women who by every indication have been victims of sexual slavery are regularly held in immigration detention centres (like Puangthong Simaplee, who died in Villawood) or deported. Such an approach is unlikely to build the trust required to encourage victims of sexual slavery to testify against those who enslaved them.
Typically, a woman reaches the, say, 500th sexual act required to pay off her debt bondage, is dobbed in to immigration by the trafficker and returns to her country of origin physically harmed, afraid of the traffickers, with no profit from the journey and muted by fear from speaking about her ordeal. The choice made by our legislators to outlaw deceptive recruiting only for those who did not plan to come here for prostitution of any kind speaks volumes about our country's ambivalent approach to prostitution.
Prostitution is legal in Australia, at least in some regulated forms. Yet it seems that the silent message in our sex slavery laws is that those who come to Australia for prostitution but are used as sex slaves deserve to be deceived.
Melbourne lawyer Georgina Costello is a fellow at OzProspect, a non-partisan public policy think tank.