Elena Jeffreys
April 4, 2008
The stereotype of the Asian sex slave captures the Australian imagination. When Puangthong Simaplee died in immigration detention in 2001, a story emerged of a girl trafficked to Australia at the age of 12 and forced to have sex as a slave. Her story was given under duress, after the Department of Immigration had taken her into detention, during the first phases of the pneumonia that eventually killed her.
Even when the federal police uncovered the Thai woman's high school diploma, proudly displayed in her family home, and discovered she did not arrive in Australia until aged 21, the image endured of pre-pubescent Asian girls chained to beds in back rooms with barred windows.
Media reports of a thousand sex slaves working in Australia have proved unfounded. But even when the coroner found no evidence that Simaplee was trafficked, the sex industry, not the detention system, continued to be the focus of coverage of her death.
The sensationalism surrounding the sex slave issue has created a government-funded rescue industry. This has diverted the focus from actual cases of trafficking in Australia and prevented an evidence-based response to the problem.
The federal police's transnational sexual exploitation and trafficking team, with the Immigration Department, has swept through the Asian brothels of Australia's capital cities, aided by an anti-trafficking package of tens of millions of dollars since 2003. The Australian Tax Office joined in and media were invited to the raids.
Non-English-speaking sex workers became the most overscrutinised sector of the sex industry. But the "sex slaves" remained elusive and trafficking was difficult to prosecute.
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission chimed in with the suggestion to make "consent" irrelevant, but even that could not create victims that did not exist.
The time has come for a new kind of response to trafficking, grounded in labour rights rather than moral hysteria.
While pictures of brothel raids make big news, labour rights for migrants, a less glamorous issue, are ignored. As the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women noted last year, Australian figures on trafficking "do not seem to take into account cases of labour exploitation".
If the Federal Government wants to improve the conditions of migrant sex workers, it needs to protect their rights as workers.
Introducing a visa to allow migrant sex workers to work in Australia legally for short periods of time would pull the carpet from under the trafficking nexus by allowing women to travel here independently to work. Greater access to generic working holiday visas for sex workers from our region would enable travel for work, without having to resort to a third party or "agent".
Treating migrant sex workers as a legitimate class of worker will get to the core of the trafficking issue. Decriminalising the sex industry in all states, and protecting workers from discrimination, would improve conditions in the long term.
Punitive approaches have been unsuccessful. The health, safety and human rights of the migrant sex workers in Australia must be prioritised.
Elena Jeffreys is the president of Scarlet Alliance, the Australian sex workers' association. She will participate in the "Security and future prosperity" stream of the 2020 summit.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/04/03/1206851098330.html
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