• Kathleen Maltzahn

05 August 2008In this extract from her new book KATHLEEN MALTZAHN describes how the federal government’s attitude to the trafficking of women for prostitution began to change just six years ago, through the efforts of community activists and two journalists from the Australian .

IN LATE 2002, I received a phone call from Charandev Singh, a human rights advocate at the Brimbank Community Legal Centre in Melbourne’s outer west. We had never met, but Singh had heard that Project Respect, where I worked, had been following the case of a young woman who had died in the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in Sydney.

Puongtong Simaplee died on 27 September 2001, and the manner of her death was noticed by Senator Brian Harradine. In parliament Harradine asked Senator Ellison, the minister representing the minister for immigration and multicultural affairs, whether he was “aware that the death of the young girl occurred after she had been in a distressed state and crying for over a period of three or four days and was obviously in need of special care.” Senator Ellison replied that the “detainee had been in detention since 23 September as a result of a major compliance operation in Sydney targeting several premises associated with the sex industry and people smuggling within that industry.”

We were concerned. In 2001, we had received funding from the Myer Foundation to research trafficking, and we had uncovered a pattern of the detention and deportation of trafficked women. Victims of crime, it seemed, were being treated like criminals - held in immigration detention and deported without recourse to justice. We did not know anything about the young woman who had died, but her death raised significant questions.

But while the news was disturbing, we weren’t sure what to do about it. A few months before, I had sat in on the coronial inquiry into the death of another woman who had died having been at Villawood. Vietnamese woman Thi Hang Le had come to Australia in 1997 on a student visa. In 2000 her request for a new student visa was rejected; she was detained on 4 July 2001 and taken to Villawood. By 13 January 2002 she was dead.

At the time, the coronial inquiry made me think she couldn’t have been trafficked - none of the cases of trafficking our research had uncovered had involved student visas. Now, having seen student visas regularly used as a way to get trafficked women into Australia, I am not as confident that Thi Hang Le wasn’t a victim of trafficking. Such questions, though, were not within the purview of the inquiry, even if there had been official concern about trafficking at that time.

Thi Hang Le was transferred to a psychiatric unit at Bankstown Hospital, seemingly having attempted to jump off a balcony. She tried to escape at least twice, and finally succeeded. On 12 December, after some six months outside Villawood, she was captured after a storekeeper found her stealing food in his shop. He didn’t want her charged, he said, but as a detention centre escapee she was taken straight back to Villawood. She weighed 42 kilos, down from 56 kilos when she had been detained in July.

In Villawood, she again tried to jump off a balcony, and was again transferred to the psychiatric unit. Villawood staff said she was now terrified of men. She refused food and medication, and staff held her down to administer drugs. By 8 January she was on fifteen-minute watches. She was clearly not well. Immigration, however, had a job to do - they had set 13 January as Thi Hang Le’s deportation date and nothing, it seemed, was going to change that date. Remarkably, after a short consultation, medical staff agreed that she was well enough to travel. She was transferred back to Villawood in preparation for leaving the country. On 13 January, the day she was due to be deported, Le jumped again, from the first storey of a building. This time the impact was fatal.

Sitting in on the coronial inquiry, it was evident to me that many of the facts in Thi Hang Le’s case were unclear, witnesses had been deported, records were contradictory, and the actions of Australasian Correctional Management, the organisation contracted to run Villawood, were deeply problematic. Despite this, the coroner took little more than the morning to hear the case. We were concerned that the same thing would happen with Puongtong Simaplee’s inquiry, but we had no idea that we could do anything about it. Charandev Singh’s phone call solved the problem.

Singh is a prison activist with a profound understanding of the coronial process, particularly in relation to deaths in custody. When he rang, he had been involved in eleven coronial inquiries into deaths in prisons and immigration detention. He also has one of the finest minds I have ever encountered. He suggested that Project Respect seek legal standing at the coronial inquiry. With little idea about what this meant, and even less about what it would entail, we agreed. We had no funding for such a venture, had little support and were already overworked, but the more we found out about trafficking in Australia, the clearer it became that immigration detention of trafficked women had to be addressed.

In the year leading up to Singh’s call, Project Respect had had more and more contact with trafficked women. A clear pattern had emerged. Women - at that time often Thai women - were coming to Australia on the promise of decent conditions and good pay. Many knew they might be doing prostitution, or at least would be connected to the sex industry through karaoke bars or strip clubs. Some, a small minority, had no inkling that they would have anything to do with prostitution. Either way, their experience was similar. 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 women were sold on from one trafficker to the next. All were paying off “debts” of at least $35,000. Some escaped and, if found, were beaten and fined. They saw all the same things happening to other women.

Many said they believed that women had been killed for running away, and I was shown a gruesome photo of a tortured Thai woman slumped in a rice field. Women I’d met in brothels and other people connected with the sex industry said they knew the runaway contract girl in the picture. Whether the photo was staged or real, its impact was the same - women believed they were expendable. The violence they had seen and experienced had taught them that their life under contract in Australia was worth little and crimes could be committed against them with impunity. Life was hard and frightening. As one woman told us, “I thought easy, but very hard.” Another woman told us that she would “never do contract again.” “Something stuck in here,” she said, touching her chest, “never happy, can’t sleep, bad dream every sleep, very bad feeling.”

Many of the women had experienced poverty in their homeland and wanted to help their parents, educate their siblings or feed their children. Some were leaving behind violence - abusive husbands, bosses who harassed them. Others were simply in search of a new life, adventure, a good job - all the things Australians in their twenties are looking for when they set off on backpacker holidays. Some had done prostitution before, either in their home country or abroad, and they consistently said that where the experience in another country had been difficult - “Macau was too hard,” one woman said, “it feels like in jail” - they expected that prostitution in Australia would be easier.

At that time, despite the many crimes committed against the women, if they were found by the Department of Immigration to be in breach of their visa conditions they were put in detention and deported. No charges were laid: even leaving aside the federal sexual slavery legislation, crimes under state law - rape, battery and imprisonment - were going undetected by the authorities. Compounding the women’s fear of deportation, traffickers themselves threatened to and in fact at times did report women to immigration authorities.

It was difficult to know how many women were being trafficked. The authorities weren’t counting - they didn’t believe trafficking existed - and it was hard for a small organisation like ours to come up with national estimates. There were three significant barriers to documenting trafficking cases. First, victims were fearful of both immigration authorities and traffickers, and so were often reluctant to tell their stories. Second, there was little official documentation of trafficking, and no prosecutions to establish how it worked. Third, and obviously, the very nature of trafficking makes it difficult to reach victims, and even when we found women (for example, during outreach to brothels) it was often not safe to talk openly to them about their experiences. In the face of inaction by other bodies, however, we tried to do the sums ourselves. In March 2004, a year after the 2003 coronial inquiry into Puongtong Simaplee’s death, Project Respect compiled a case-by-case list of trafficking victims. In only six weeks of research in early 2004 we documented 300 cases in Australia, the great bulk trafficking for prostitution.

This research was clearly partial. We weren’t able, for example, to travel to Perth or Adelaide to investigate in more detail stories we had heard of trafficking there. The work was done quickly with few resources, based on interviews with trafficked women themselves, with other people connected to the sex industry, and with NGOs and unions. What it showed, however, was that even a fairly cursory exploration found far too many victims. It reinforced our belief that the estimate we had come up with a year earlier, around the time of the 2003 coronial inquiry, was reasonable - we believed that up to 1000 women could be being trafficked to Australia yearly.

International estimates were high. The 2004 Trafficking in Persons Report, from the US Department of State, said that each year “an estimated 600,000-800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked across international borders (some international and non-governmental organizations place the number far higher), and the trade is growing.” Millions more, it found, were trafficked within borders. “The US government,” it added, “estimates that over half of all victims trafficked internationally are trafficked for sexual exploitation.” The United Nations and the US government both estimated that criminal networks made seven billion dollars every year from trafficking people.

Numbers are clearly important - they help governments determine the scale of their response, and are a benchmark for charting success or failure in addressing the problem. But knowing the numbers is not enough. In the words of Professor Liz Kelly from the London Metropolitan University’s Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, a highly respected researcher in this area, “having a sense of the scale of trafficking tells us only part of the picture Equally as important is understanding trafficking methods; where women are trafficked from, [and] their experiences of procurement, migration and treatment after arrival” in the destination country. What the coronial inquiry into the death of Puongtong Simaplee did was start people asking these sorts of questions - what sort of crimes were foreign women in Australia experiencing, how were traffickers able to exploit women in this way, why were authorities missing the problem, and what were trafficked women doing to survive in the absence of a humane government response?

Arriving at the point where trafficking was being discussed at all was testament to Charandev Singh’s skill and inordinate hard work. Months before the case, when we had little reason to expect that we would get legal standing, let alone anything more than that, he was clear. We needed a legal strategy, he said, and a media strategy, and he proceeded to pull them together. He was formally employed three days a week by Brimbank Community Legal Centre to work on issues like ours, but he worked day and night on our case, far beyond the hours he was paid for. We had little information to go on at that stage. Our cause received a boost, however - albeit a saddening one - when the coroner’s office told Singh that Puongtong Simaplee had indeed been trafficked, and that this had happened when she was a child.

The first step in the legal strategy was to gain legal standing, to argue that Project Respect should be represented at the coronial inquiry as “a person of sufficient interest in the subject matter” of the inquest. Singh argued that, in a long line of such parties at coronial inquiries, Project Respect could bring expertise and unique knowledge about trafficking that would help the court. The areas that concerned us, we stated in our application, were the medical and welfare services and assessments provided to Simaplee, the decision to send her to Villawood rather than to a health facility, and the fact that the Department of Immigration and Australasian Correctional Management were aware that Simaplee had probably been trafficked and yet acted as they did. Among a number of statements, not all true, Puongtong Simaplee had told Department of Immigration official Daniel Bell that she was from a hill tribe in Thailand, had come to Australia fifteen years before, and had been sold by her parents.

The case was scheduled for 12 March. Much to my surprise, the coroner gave us standing. But my sense that the coroner was not entirely open to our participation was soon confirmed. As the inquiry began, he set the parameters. “This is not an enquiry into the sex industry,” he told the court. “This is not an enquiry into immigration detention.” This position impacted immediately on what we were allowed to ask. When we asked questions relating to the sex industry or trafficking, our lawyer was told she was out of line. Having been given legal standing solely on the basis of our expertise on trafficking, we were told we could not ask questions on that issue.

So we didn’t. At least not immediately. Having read through the brief again and again, it was devastatingly clear that Puongtong Simaplee had died without reason. There was no doubt she was vulnerable. Court documents show that before her detention she had a heroin addiction, was homeless and, in the words of an older friend, was “not in a positive state of mind.” She 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. (Her boyfriend told police that she marked herself when she did something wrong so she could remember why she did it.) A title search of the brothel she had been picked up in showed that at the time of her detention it was owned by Kean Chang. Puongtong Simaplee also told immigration officials that she had been trafficked as a child. But these things shouldn’t have killed her. She had survived 27 years, many of them hard, but it wasn’t until she entered an Australian government institution that she died.

Dr Allan Carla, a pathologist at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Glebe, told the court that her life could have been saved with “simple measures,” such as placing her on a drip. She had given Villawood officials precise information about the medication she needed to withdraw from the heroin in her system, but was ignored. She was left in a room with a bucket of faeces and urine because the staff thought cleaning it up might motivate her. Handover processes were so poor that staff coming onto new shifts didn’t know that Simaplee had been vomiting since she had arrived. When she had arrived at Villawood, Puongtong’s weight was noted as 37 kilos. When she died less than 72 hours later, she weighed 31 kilos.

For the two days of witnesses, we asked questions about Simaplee’s medical treatment, welfare measures and the processes in place at Villawood to protect vulnerable detainees. The coroner made it clear, however, that his court was not the place for further conversations about what role trafficking had played in getting this woman into Australia and ultimately immigration detention. “This is not a human rights court,” he said succinctly.

It was here that Charandev Singh’s second strategy kicked in. We took the questions we weren’t allowed to ask within the coronial inquiry and asked them outside. It’s a well-worn approach of course, but in this case the strategy of using the legal process as much as we could and then working with the media to raise questions that weren’t allowed in the hearing was crucial.

Crucial, but not without risk. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to work out what some members of the media could do with the story of a heroin-addicted Asian prostitute. The Department of Immigration had already set the tone in its 2001 media release on Simaplee’s death. A Thai drug addict, the release said, had died from overdose in Villawood in a pool of her own vomit. The text seems since to have been removed from the department’s website.

We were fortunate though. Singh had previously dealt with Australian journalist Elisabeth Wynhausen on stories about immigration detention, and he knew we could trust her to tell the story fairly. I know now that Wynhausen is an award-winning journalist and book author who worked for twelve years in New York as correspondent for the Age and the National Times and had also worked for the Bulletin, but at that time all I really knew was that Singh trusted her.

I first met her in November 2002 when I walked, dazed, out of a long night in a brothel, having heard story after story from women who had been trafficked to Australia. A train ride later, unwashed and sleep-deprived, in a cafe over the road from the Australian’s shiny headquarters, I blurted out what I had spent the last months listening to. Wynhausen listened for a bit, cut me off, fired questions at me, interrupted a bit more, and told the waiter off for wishing her Merry Christmas. For a community worker schooled in letting people speak, it was a surprise, but I was sold. I could tell she understood the issues.

By the time the coronial inquiry began in early 2003, Wynhausen was ready to go, and the Australian soon teamed her up with its new investigative editor, Natalie O’Brien, who a couple of years before had uncovered the truth about the “children overboard” story. The Australian’s stories began with Puongtong Simaplee’s death and the fact that despite her claims that she had been trafficked into Australia as a child, and despite her vulnerability, neither the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre nor the Department of Immigration took the steps needed to address these issues and keep the young woman alive. Many news agencies jumped on the story that Puongtong Simaplee had been trafficked to Australia as a child - a statement that was not investigated in the coronial inquiry and was later shown to be untrue - but Wynhausen and O’Brien saw the broader story.

The child-trafficking claim pulled in media outlets that might not ordinarily have bothered with a death-in-custody story. In Sydney in particular, the coverage seemed intense, as newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and usually conservative talkback radio programs expressed outrage at her death. Undeterred by the fact that its own back pages included numerous advertisements for dubious brothels, the Daily Telegraph’s editorial proclaimed that trafficking was a “loathsome practice” and Simaplee’s death a tragic cruelty.

In time, it became clear that Puongtong Simaplee had not been trafficked to Australia when she was a child. While the deputy coroner said that it was not the role of the coronial process to investigate if Simaplee’s claim was true, other people thought it was a question that should be addressed, and a Bangkok-based journalist went looking for her parents. I had been unconvinced by the claim that Puongtong Simaplee had been sold by her parents. Although the coroner’s office had told Singh that Simaplee had been trafficked as a child, the suggestion that she had been sold was, in my view, a whole different charge, and one that needed as much investigation as the question of the trafficking.

Although stories of Asian parents selling their children into prostitution have become part of our folklore, it is hard to find evidence that the practice is in any way widespread. It’s not that it has never happened, it is just that it happens far less frequently than popular imagination would have us believe. Chris Payne’s 2005 documentary, Trafficked, about “Ning,” a young teenaged girl found in a Sydney brothel in 1995 after Papertiger was disbanded - the girl who Senator Ian Macdonald referred to in his second reading speech on the 1999 Slavery and Sexual Servitude Bill - suggests it is very likely that Ning’s father accepted payment for her, and may have suspected she would be prostituted. At the very least, it is clear that he did little to ensure his daughter would be going to a safe job and, from her testimony during the documentary, she cannot confidently say that he didn’t sell her into prostitution.

My experience, though, is that this was the exception to the norm, but one, regrettably, that fitted many people’s stereotypes. Later, I met with UNESCO officials in Bangkok who were investigating the selling of children into prostitution. They said that despite the many allegations there were few documented cases. Talk of parents selling their girls was neat - the reality was far messier. Kids ran away from home because of violence, traffickers lured them away with promises of money, parents thought their girls were going to acceptable jobs where they would be free from hunger and hardship, military in places like Burma abducted and prostituted girls, and in all these scenarios, prostitution flourished because some men were happy to have sex with girls regardless of their welfare. The sale of daughters by deviant parents was a simple explanation of child prostitution, but not one that reflected the reality.

From the work done by the Bangkok journalist who investigated Puongtong Simaplee’s life prior to her journey to Australia and by Chris Payne and Trafficked documentary-makers Stella Zammataro and Luigi Acquisto, some facts about Puongtong Simaplee’s life are clear. Her farmer parents told Payne and Acquisto, and both men believe them, that at twelve or fourteen “Noi,” as she was nicknamed, left their village in northern Thailand and travelled with a young friend by bus to Bangkok. By fifteen she had been to Malaysia. She married at some point around this time, but her relationship later broke down. By 21, she had been trafficked to Australia.

It seems likely, from the facts we know, that she did prostitution in Malaysia, and it is likely too that her travel to Malaysia was facilitated by middle men. We will never know if she and her friend left home entirely of their own volition and then ended up in prostitution in Bangkok, or if she was trafficked from her home into prostitution in the capital.

Many news outlets lost interest once it was established that Puongtong Simaplee had not been trafficked into Australia as a child. In contrast, Wynhausen and O’Brien had just begun. In the months that followed the coronial inquiry, they ran story after story about trafficking: about bungled immigration raids, about women’s shock and despair at the violence they’d faced in Australia, about the authorities’ deafness to allegations of crime.

After years of steadfast inaction, the official response, when it finally came, was surprisingly swift. By the second day of the Australian’s stories, the federal government had set up a high-level interdepartmental committee. At last, the Department of Immigration, the Attorney-General’s Department, the (then) Office for the Status of Women and other government departments were talking to each other about trafficking. The Australian’s stories made sure that those initial discussions didn’t stop there - the government knew that this was not a one-off media flurry. The Australian promised - and delivered - ongoing scrutiny on the previously invisible subject of trafficking. It was the beginning of a genuine shift by the federal government on trafficking. •

Kathleen Maltzahn was founding director of Project Respect. This is an extract from Trafficked, published by UNSW Press.

APO readers can purchase a copy of Trafficked direct from the publisher at a 20 per cent discount, via this link.

Photo: Andrew Jeffrey