Stephen de Tarczynski/IPS, Melbourne - ’’Trafficking is our modern equivalent of slavery," said the minister for housing and the status of women, Tanya Plibersek, at July’s inaugural Australian Trafficking Forum.

The forum brought a range of government and non-government agencies together to address the complex issues involved in human trafficking and followed June’s first-ever National Roundtable on People Trafficking.

The roundtable also saw a concentration of key players from across the spectrum, including anti-trafficking NGOs, service providers and support organisations for victims of crime.

"People trafficking is a serious crime and a collaborative approach is needed to fight it," said the minister for home affairs, Bob Debus, who chaired the roundtable.

Along with Singapore and New Zealand, Australia is regarded as a "destination" for trafficked persons in the Asia Pacific. Other nations in the region tend to be viewed as a mixture of "source", "transit" and "destination" for those people who are trafficked.

Since Australia’s introduction of the Support for Victims of People Trafficking in 2004 — delivered jointly by the Office for Women and the Australian Federal Police — some 107 trafficked people have received support here. Of these, 65 percent were Thai nationals, while 18 percent hailed from South Korea.

However, the paucity of reliable information regarding people trafficking to Australia means that figures are unlikely to represent the full extent of the problem.

"There is no reliable data, there has been no sound research on the actual dimension of trafficking," says Jennifer Burn, director of the Anti-Slavery Project, a community-based anti-human trafficking organisation.

This lack of data was also an issue raised in a paper released last month by the Australian Institute of Criminology, a commonwealth statutory authority. Titled ‘Trafficking Women for Sexual Purposes’, the paper noted a range of reasons why trafficked women may not seek help and which therefore undermine available statistics.

These reasons include fears of what traffickers may do to the women or their families, concerns regarding financial pressures, desires "to get on with life", as well as not wanting to be involved in prolonged and intrusive court cases.

Additionally, factors related to a trafficked person’s background were also noted. There were likely to be different interpretations of what constituted "exploitation" and differing perceptions on debt and family obligation depending on where a person was originally from.

The fear of deportation was also a reason. "Since 2004 there has been a set of visas in place for people who are identified as being trafficked to Australia and these visas are for people who are assisting the police and prosecution in an investigation and a criminal trial," says Burn.

She told IPS that the Anti-Slavery Project is advocating for a more inclusive visa system.

"A lot of our work has been around the area of visas and we have seen that there are people who have been trafficked — there’s no doubt about the trafficking experience, there’s no doubt about the credibility of information — but they are not yet eligible for protection through the trafficking visa scheme just because they can’t, for a whole range of reasons, take part in a criminal investigation or a prosecution," says Burn.

Adding to the misrepresentation of human trafficking is, according to Burn, that figures of trafficked persons tend mostly to relate to women working in Australia’s sex industry. She says that it is these cases which attract most media attention.

That has undoubtedly been the case. There is the ongoing saga of Melbourne brothel owner Wei Tang — convicted in 2006 of possessing slaves — whose successful appeal is being challenged by the Director of Public Prosecutions in the High Court. There is also the case of the Sydney couple, Trevor McIvor and Kanokporn Tanuchit, who were found guilty in 2007 of possessing slaves after four Thai women were discovered in a room underneath a brothel. Both cases have attracted widespread media coverage.

But a recent report by Time Magazine alleging that children in India have been stolen from their parents and trafficked to Australia via adoption agencies — which the immigration department is set to investigate — indicates that human trafficking can manifest itself in different ways.

Burn told IPS that a shift in focus could be observed at the recent forum on human trafficking. While she says that people hitherto identified as being trafficked tend to be women who are working in the sex industry, "it is clear that there are [trafficked] people working in other industries as well’’.

"The whole area of general labour exploitation is an area that is unexplored and we have seen some people working in agriculture who are in a very extreme situation of labour exploitation," she says.

Despite the complexity of human trafficking and the problems involved with identifying those who are trafficked and the difficulties of bringing the traffickers and "slave owners" to justice, Burn is confident that that this modern form of slavery can be eradicated.

She says that Australia’s natural barrier of isolation —"unlike the situation that exists in North America or Europe, for example, where the borders are porous and much easier to access" — provides authorities with ample screening opportunities of new arrivals at airports around the country.

Failing detection on arrival, "we think that if we can alert people to the reality of trafficking — if we can talk about how to identify trafficking to the community at large — then it’s more likely that trafficked people will be identified and protected," says Burn.

By interrupting the trafficking of people, Burn hopes that traffickers’ loss of profits — combined with successful prosecutions of those behind the operation — will be a major deterrent.

"I think that these kinds of strategies will go a long way towards eliminating trafficking in Australia," she opines.

And Burn welcomes the new collaborative approach aimed at reaching this end. Tackling the problem "really does require good coordination between all people who are working to eradicate trafficking," she says.