Australia

Please click on the drop-down menu for organizations who are working to combat sex trafficking.

Read below for an introduction to trafficking in Australia.

THE PROBLEM

Australia is a destination country for victims trafficked who are from East Asia, South East Asia, and Eastern Europe, particularly the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, and Thailand. There are several reports of migrants, particularly from India, the People’s Republic of China, and South Korea, who voluntarily migrate to work in Australia but are later coerced into exploitative conditions.

CAUSES

There are many causes of human trafficking to Australia. Project Respect argues that the demand for trafficked women in Australia is fueled by: 1) a lack of women in Australia prepared to do prostitution; 2) 'customer' demand for women seen as compliant; 3) 'customer' demand for women who they can be violent towards; and 4) racialized ideas that Asian women have certain qualities, for example that they are more compliant and will accept higher levels of violence.

Taken from http://www.humantrafficking.org/countries/australia/

THE JAMMED - MOVIE ON SLAVERY IN AUSTRALIA

** Please note some scenes are graphic and disturbing.

Legalising prostitution has not made the women working safer

(Article by Sydney Morning Herald, October 13, 2011)

Each week in Victoria, more than 60,000 men buy women in prostitution. Thanks to investigations like those carried out recently by The Age and Four Corners, we know that some of the women they buy have been trafficked.

Sex trafficking in Australia should not come as a surprise. Sex industry businesses find a burgeoning market here. According to the business research company IBISWorld, the Australian sex industry has ballooned over the past decade. High growth has forced pimps to forge international supply routes to source their ''product'', which, in the case of the sex industry, is mostly women and children. Asian women in particular are a consumer favourite.

Consumer Affairs licenses brothel and escort agency businesses. Prostitution was legalised in Victoria in 1984 to tackle three problems: illegal prostitution and police corruption, harm to women and street prostitution. More than 15 years later, these problems have grown worse, not better.

Estimates from police and the legal brothel industry put the number of illegal brothels at 400 in Victoria, four times the number of legal ones, and legal brothels are being used as fronts for illegal operators and criminal activity. Brothel owners have been caught bribing local government officials to warn them of licence checks.

Legalisation has not made women safer. A 1998 study found 40 per cent of clients do not use condoms. A woman in a Blackburn brothel this year was threatened by a client with a gun after she refused sex acts without a condom. Three academics who interviewed women in legal brothels in 2011 found that ''physical safety'' was one of their biggest concerns.

If legalising prostitution hasn't eliminated the problems of the sex industry, what will? We need to look to Sweden for the answer. The Swedish government criticises countries such as Australia that allow legal prostitution on the basis that it generates demand for the criminal activity of traffickers and organised crime. Swedish bureaucrats understand that prostitution and trafficking are two sides of the same coin. In 1999 they made pimps, traffickers, and prostitution ''clients'' liable for criminal prosecution.

(Find more under ‘Swedish Example’)