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Expendable humans

By Harry Throssell - posted Monday, 25 August 2008


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.

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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’.”

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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.

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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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