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Expendable humans

By Harry Throssell - posted Monday, 25 August 2008


“Slavery has been abolished throughout the world” commented former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr on ABC1’s Q&A show on August 14, (2008).

Perhaps he was referring to British Member of Parliament William Wilberforce ending legal slavery in the British Empire in 1833. But trafficking people is very much alive and well - or alive and sick - around the world, with Australia a lucrative market.

“Trafficking” involves moving people by force for the purpose of exploiting their labour, bodies, or organs; “smuggling” refers to helping people who wish to move across a national border.

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Caroline Cox of the British House of Lords, author of This Immoral Trade: Slavery in the 21st Century (2007) spoke on ABC Radio National’s Encounter program about her work on the exploitation and persecution of minority groups. “Every child in the world should have an idea of being someone to be cherished, and none should be called abeete, or slave”, she said. “But Wilberforce’s work is still not accomplished. Slavery exists … in many other parts of the world in different forms. International protest and prayer brought down apartheid; why are we silent about slavery?”

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, trafficking in persons has reached “epidemic proportions” during the past decade, involving 127 countries of origin, 98 transit countries and 137 destination countries. Financial estimates of the global trade in human beings vary from $500 million dollars a year to $32 billion, with only military and drug sales higher.

An International Labor Organisation Report shows 12.3 million people forced into slavery worldwide, while the US Free the Slaves organisation quotes 27 million, the proportion of women varying from 50 to 90 per cent. Most, including children, are destined for the sex trade, others in forced domestic work or other labour.

In Trafficked, Kathleen Maltzahn of Project Respect in Australia quoted a 2004 US Department of State report estimating 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children were trafficked across international borders each year and millions more within borders, at least half of them for sexual exploitation. One thousand women were brought to Australia each year making billions of dollars for criminal networks.

Most victims are from South-East Asia and Eastern Europe with Australia being in the second highest category of recipient countries.

In 2004 The Good Shepherd Sisters of Melbourne helped fund the first major research into human trafficking in Australia. Estimates ranged from under 100 to over 1,000 trafficked persons here at any one time, mostly involving Asian females. Extreme poverty was a major causative factor.

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Christine Carolan told ABC Radio National’s David Busch of a young woman trafficked into Australia. “She thought she was coming to look after Australian children, and when she came from Sydney airport to the house she saw toys on the floor and thought ‘these are for the children I’m going to mind’. But she was moved immediately to a brothel in Sydney and repeatedly raped until an Immigration raid freed her”. She was 14-years-old.

Maltzahn writes:

Women - often Thai women - were coming to Australia on the promise of decent conditions and good pay. Many knew they might be doing prostitution [but] a small minority had no inkling … Women told us of being lied to, raped, beaten and locked up, of having no control over how or if they had sex with customers, having to have sex when they were sick or menstruating, being deprived of their passports and threatened with violence and deportation. Some were sold from one trafficker to the next. All were paying off “debts” of at least $35,000.

Puongtong Simaplee left her farmer parents in the hills of Thailand at age 13 or so, travelled to Bangkok, on to Malaysia at age 15 where she did prostitution, was married for a time, and by 21 was sold into sexual slavery in Australia. She died in the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in 2001 at age 27 after vomiting into a bucket over a period of 65 hours.

Maltzahn: “Records show she had a heroin addiction, was homeless [and] was so physically underdeveloped that detention officials ordered a medical examination to establish if she was male or female. Her arms were marked by scars”. When she arrived at Villawood her weight was 37 kilos, when she died 72 hours later it was 31 kilos.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission made strong comments on the wretchedness of this young woman’s life and she has become symbolic of some of the worst aspects of trafficking. Attorney General in the Howard Federal Government Daryl Williams rejected Opposition calls for an enquiry into the sex slave trade in Australia.

Busch on Encounter in 2007: “Just as people were feeling good about the 200th anniversary of the end of Britain's Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Act … along came Australian film The Jammed. Shot in Melbourne and based on court documents, it put a fresh spotlight on the reality of the trafficking of young women into Australia”. The film details the physical and psychological conditions enslaved women endure, and explains how brothel owners are able to control them without fear they will run off to the police.

Good Samaritan Sister Pauline Coll co-ordinates some 40 religious congregations in Australia under Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking of Humans (ACRATH). In 2001 and 2004, the international leaders of 800 congregations of Catholic women religious declared the trafficking of women to be a global priority issue for their one million members.

Louise Cleary, a former world leader of the Brigidine Sisters, referred to ministering to young men in detention centres and becoming aware of small groups of women who were there one week, gone the next. It became clear the women were picked up in raids. “They appeared to be extremely cautious and untrusting ... we discovered they had been brought into the country against their will”.

Internationally the Salvation Army has also declared trafficking a high priority concern, with Commander Paul Moulds overseeing the Army's outreach programs in Sydney.

“There is a new understanding that some of the people we meet - girls standing on street corners - are in fact trafficked.”

Moulds talks about  girl working in the back streets of Kings Cross whose knowledge of the English language was limited but who was trying to communicate with Army workers. They became aware she was being coercively held, tried to become more active in helping her and found themselves in a risky situation. “On one occasion one of our workers was approached by someone obviously looking out for this girl … he pulled his jacket open and revealed a gun - he was making it clear ‘you stay away from our property’.”

The next week the girl had disappeared but later phoned from another Australian city still seeking help.

Moulds referred to a brothel customer who was so concerned about the poor condition of the girl he had been matched with he called the Immigration Department. They raided the brothel and liberated the girl.

Louise Reeves, a Sister of St Joseph and an immigration lawyer, works voluntarily in Sydney University of Technology Law Faculty’s Anti-Slavery Project. Some women, she said, come to Australia on a visitor or tourist visa knowing they want to work in the sex industry, but never dream they will be put in such exploitative situations: passports taken, herded from brothel to brothel, forced to work seven days a week non-stop until they have worked off a “debt”. Others arrive believing they are going to a job such as work in a restaurant so it is an enormous shock to be forced into a brothel within days and told they have several hundred clients to service.

“Sometimes the traffickers know the girls’ families. They can be blackmailed, photographed in compromising situations, they may have told their family they have quite a different job. There is coercion, debt, violence, often they have poor English, no understanding of our legal system, perhaps have developed drink and drugs problems.

“A woman may just roll up to the office, come in, sit there with tears rolling down her cheeks, she's literally in a desperate situation, she listens to her options, disappears and may not come back”.

Poverty the ultimate cause

In March this year Franciscans International opened a new office in Bangkok. The plan is to offer training programs, one of them for those working with people trapped in “contemporary forms of slavery and trafficking” with the major focus on prevention. “We're always going to have inhumanity, greed, injustice … But what is human-made we can do something about, and that is poverty”, said Julie Morgan.

When working in Cambodia Morgan had a group of young sex workers in a health education class. She realised some were no more than 12-years-old, perhaps the oldest 18. “You just knew what it was they were experiencing … sold by their parents because of the grinding poverty in which they live ... For some it's by an older brother or uncle … a 12-year-old girl was then worth about $US300, and if younger the price went up.

“It's a phenomenon deeply rooted in poverty.”

Morgan invited them to ask questions about life in Australia. The oldest said “What will you do to support us if we want to leave this work?”

A Cambodian staff member responded. “The problems in Cambodia are huge so we've got two priorities at the moment. The first is to help you with your health and our second is to help your parents with their vegetable and rice production because then if they're not so poor …” and she stopped. But, explained Morgan, “every single one of those kids from the eldest down nodded because they all knew that if their parents weren't so poor, the kids wouldn't have to be sold.

“People don't want to sell their kids but it's a situation so horrendous. For us in Australia where we can participate meaningfully is in campaigns like the Millennium Development Goals to eradicate extreme forms of poverty. This is where some of the solutions lie.”

Cleary agrees. “A key driver of making women and children susceptible to being trafficked is poverty. Through our networks in Nepal, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia … we've been able to see that poverty, and a lack of value being placed on the girl-child, have led young women to be trafficked. So we fundamentally believe that there is a need for the world community to give much greater attention to the Millennium Development Goals”.

Liz Hoban, an Australian academic and community development worker, works in rural Cambodia where she's developing a range of micro social enterprises for income generation, ranging from sewing and embroidery workshops to a flower farm, all designed to counter the lure of job prospects touted by traffickers.

She described a family where the mother died of AIDS, the father was currently ill with the disease and was expected to die within 12 months, so the oldest of five children, aged 17, was the breadwinner, doing daily labour on road construction for $1.50 to $2 a day.

About her future she said someone had already come to the village and asked her to go to Thailand. Someone would organise the day she was to meet the taxi out on the road. Hoban asked what she'd be doing in Thailand, she didn't really know but thought she'd be working in the construction industry just over the border. Asked if she wanted to go she replied “No, because my father is ill and my mother is dead and I am in charge of this family”.

“So it's as innocent as that”, commented Hoban. “This young girl has no education so she's ripe for the picking by the recruiters.”

However, the girl joined a local project learning sewing skills so eventually she can have her own business. The organisation also has a savings scheme. “And she's safe”, said Hoban, “She won't be lost across the Thai border. She'll stay in her village with her family”.

Ms Joy Ngozi Ezeilo of Nigeria, a human rights lawyer and professor at the University of Nigeria assumed her position as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, especially women and children, on August 1, 2008.

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About the Author

Harry Throssell originally trained in social work in UK, taught at the University of Queensland for a decade in the 1960s and 70s, and since then has worked as a journalist. His blog Journospeak, can be found here.

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