This week’s SoroptiVoice comes from
Theresa Lyford, SI South West Pacific’s Assistant Federation Programme Director.
Theresa talks about an organization that Clubs in the Region of Victoria,
Australia, have been involved with for the past few years called Project
Respect. This organisation advocated and worked with a Victorian State Government Report,
which looks into Trafficking of Women for Sexual Exploitation.
I, like many women in
Victoria, was astounded that in the
21st Century in a ‘developed’ country that we would still
have women being trafficked for sexual exploitation. For many of the younger
women this is something they just cannot seem to comprehend and yet this
insidious form of slavery is very much alive and well in our country, and in
this city we call home.
In June 2010 after nine months of
inquiry, the Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee in Victoria tabled a landmark
report into people trafficking. This was the first time a State Parliament in
Australia had held a full inquiry into sex trafficking and provided an overall
picture of trafficking globally and especially in trafficking responses in the
State of Victoria in Australia. For the full report please visit:
http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/dcpc/inquiries/sex%20trafficking/default.htm
The actual activity that led to this landmark report started in
August 2009 when the Parliament of Victoria requested that the Drugs and Crime
Prevention was to inquire into, consider and report to the Parliament no later
than 30 June 2010 on people trafficking for sex work including:
(i) the
extent and nature of trafficking people for the purposes of sex work into
Victoria from overseas;
(ii) the inter-relationship (if any) between the
unlicensed and licensed prostitution sectors in Victoria, and trafficking for
the purposes of sex work;
(iii) the current and
proposed intergovernmental and international strategies and initiatives in
relation to dealing with trafficking for the purposes of sex work; and
(iv) the need for
policy and legislative reform to combat trafficking for the purposes of sex
work, in Victoria.
Our Clubs in the Region of Victoria
have been involved with an organization called Project Respect for a number of
years and we had until last year a member who represented the Region of
Victoria on the Committee. Project Respect is a non-profit community-based
organization that aims to empower and support women in the sex industry,
including women trafficked to Australia. Their mission is to support women in
the sex industry to help prevent the exploitation and enslavement
of women by the industry.
They work daily with women in the sex
industry and also include those women who have been trafficked into Australia
for prostitution. Through a combination of providing holistic support and
individual counseling, referrals and information regarding services for health,
housing, the law, child custody, drug and alcohol and other issues, and support
for education and alternative employment pathways for these women so they are
able to find more secure and reliable work that is outside the sex industry.
The Organisation also undertakes a key role in lobbying the Australian
government, advocating for clients to community groups and also public
education in an overall attempt to try and reduce the incidence of women being
trafficked to Australia and by default to the State of Victoria for use in
brothels and street prostitution.
If you are interested, their website
is: www.projectrespect.org.au and here you can find out more about what the organization does and how
you and your Clubs could become involved.
So will Trafficking disappear in our
society? The jury is still out on this. Can we do something about this
insidious form of slavery of women and young girls? Yes we can. We need to
continue to undertake advocacy with our local Government representatives and
also with our State Senators and Members of Parliament. We need to be vocal in
our communities that we will no longer tolerate this form of slavery of women
in our society – it doesn’t matter what country they come from. They have the
right to live and work in employment of their choice rather than being bought
to a new country on a promise of work only to find themselves in another form of
slavery that they sought to get away from in their home country.
Let us work to
ensure that statistics like: “1000 women kept in sexual servitude in Australia
are forced to do prostitution for literally hundreds of men for no pay and no
real freedom” become a thing of the past and no longer feature in our society.
Theresa Lyford
SI South West Pacific