reallives13

In September 2001, a young Vietnamese woman died in Villawood Immigration Detention
Centre in Sydney. She is believed to have been brought to Australia when she was 12
years old on a family reunion migration application which was possibly fraudulent. It is
understood that upon arrival in Australia she was placed in a brothel and that she worked
continuously as a prostitute until her incarceration in Villawood after authorities detected
her as an "illegal immigrant". There was evidence of drug use on her body, with injection
scars on both arms. She was locked in solitary confinement in Villawood. Her dead body
was found lying face down in a pool of vomit.
In January 2002, there was a second death of a trafficked Vietnamese woman in Villawood.
This woman had made at least one previous suicide attempt. It is believed that she died in
hospital from injuries caused when she jumped out of a window from the first floor of the
women’s dormitory. To date, there has been no coronial inquest into the deaths.
When asked about these deaths and the possibility of giving trafficked women permanent
residency in return for testifying against people traffickers, a spokesman for the Minister for
Immigration, Mr Phillip Ruddock, said that if this were done "eventually you would find
instead of people claiming to be refugees, they would claim to be prostitutes who fear going
home" and besides "while there were genuine cases, most will not provide you with the
level of co-operation that will get prosecutions of the Mr Bigs. They are afraid of reprisals."
(1)
Women who are trafficked have much in common with women who seek asylum as
refugees. Because asylum seekers are vulnerable, they can be forced to rely on, or be
abducted by, traffickers. …Trafficked women may also have grounds to seek asylum
because they have suffered gender based persecution. Refugee and asylum seeker
arrivals have been politicised, which has lead to the criminalisation of illegal migration at
the expense of approaches which would protect victims of trafficking. This politicisation has
decreased the willingness of governments to attempt to solve the problem of people
trafficking and caused a consequent failure to protect the victims of the international crime
of trafficking. Although both refugees and trafficked women may have minimal control over
their choice to travel to Australia, as a group they are subject to detention, stigmatisation
and possible expulsion because they have broken Australia’s border laws.

Trafficking, smuggling, refugees and asylum seekers: some important distinctions

Trafficking has been defined in the UN Trafficking Protocol as trapping a victim by means of
threats, force or other forms of coercion or by abuse of vulnerability and transporting them
for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation includes such treatment as prostitution, slavery
or the removal of organs. (2) Trafficking is to be contrasted with "smuggling" which involves
transferring someone across a border for profit, in other words, procurement for financial
or material benefit of the illegal entry of a person into a state of which the person smuggled
is not a national or permanent resident. (3)
Smuggling does not necessarily entail the abuse of a smuggled person’s human rights,
indeed, smuggling encompasses the actions of Oscar Schindler or of some of the sailors
who smuggled Jewish people to safety during the holocaust. Someone can smuggle
someone across a border without abusing the smuggled person’s human rights.
A trafficker, on the other hand, by definition exploits the victim of trafficking. This is not to
deny the involvement of deplorable international crime rackets in smuggling, or the
substitutability of the crimes of arms dealing, money laundering, narcotics trade, smuggling
and trafficking as lucrative activities engaged in by the same persons. However, trafficking
"specifically targets the trafficked person as an object of exploitation and inherently
involves a violation of human rights" (4) and is a human rights problem serious enough to
warrant being addressed specifically.
Importantly, the smuggling relationship is a finite relationship, ending once the smuggled
person has paid the money and taken the journey. After arrival in the country of
destination, the smuggled person typically owes no further debt or servitude to the
smuggler. At its root, trafficking encompasses the continual exploitation of the victim in an
attempt to pay off an often insurmountable financial amount or service due.
There is no definition of "trafficking" in Australian legislation.(5) The absence of such a
definition and the absence of a specific crime of trafficking in Australian law illustrates a
lack of willingness (or interest) to respond to the problem of trafficking. An examination of
Australian government responses to trafficking illustrates that the Australian Government
focuses on smuggling rather than trafficking.(6) For example, at present there is no
Australian team or officer dedicated to the investigation of people trafficking or slavery and
sexual servitude crimes.(7) There is, according to Adrian McKnight of the Australian
Federal Police (AFP), a combined AFP/DIMIA (Department of Immigration and Multicultural
and Indigenous Affairs) people smuggling team which, he claims, is concerned with issues
of illegal immigration, including people trafficking and sexual slavery (8), but trafficking and
sexual slavery are, at best, subsets of the more high profile and more highly politicised
issue of people smuggling.
Trafficking of women is a serious human rights problem and according to Senator Ian
MacDonald’s second reading speech for the recently introduced Commonwealth sexual
slavery laws, "intelligence from Australian and overseas sources confirms that the problem
is a significant one for Australia".(9)
One example of the occurrence of trafficking in Australia involved Mr Gary Glazner and his
associates who brought 20 to 40 Thai women to Australia to work as prostitutes. The
women were made to work in oppressive conditions: they were required to perform 500
"sexual services" of half an hour before they would receive any financial payment. (10) Mr
Glazner was convicted under the "Prostitution Control Act" for operating an unregistered
brothel, but the lack of specific anti-trafficking laws at the time of his case meant that he
was not prosecuted for his involvement in trafficking. Despite the scale of the problem,
there has not been one prosecution of a trafficker under the Commonwealth sexual slavery
laws which were purportedly introduced to address trafficking. Not only has Australia
chosen not to sign or ratify the UN Trafficking Protocol, Australia has failed to utilise its own
sexual slavery laws: not one prosecution under these laws has taken place and in some
states, including Victoria, equivalent state laws prohibiting state based sexual slavery have
not been introduced.