By Angela Matheson
As a clothing machinist in Manila unable to feed and house her small son, Susie accepted a job offer of sex work in Sydney. "I am here", she says, "to work hard, and in six months I will go home and buy a house and have some money left over."
As an illegal worker with a false passport organised by an international syndicate, 19-year-old Susie will not reveal her real name or where she works. Her brothel lies somewhere in Sydney's west, where she has sex with up to 20 men during 12-hour shifts. Her clients often refuse to use condoms, but she is afraid to object for fear that the syndicate will turn her over to immigration officials.
Her passport and return air ticket were taken from her on arrival. She has worked without pay for two months and will continue to do so until she has paid off a $20,000 debt set by the syndicate for arranging her job. She is taken to and from the brothel from a boarding house staffed by the syndicate in a minibus driven by a syndicate minder.
She lives in constant dread of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. "In the first month I got a pelvic infection and I used to cry just before I started my shift because I knew how much the sex was going to hurt", she says through a translator friend from a suburban phone box. "But I kept going to pay off my debt and soon I will be earning money."
One of thousands of women from Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and China trafficked to Australia and other First World countries by crime syndicates each year, Susie is the face of contemporary poverty. That her job as a debt-bonded sex worker is the best economic option available to her is a metaphor for most of the world's women, whose grinding impoverishment in the Third World is accelerating.
The conditions of her work in Australia contravene a fistful of United Nations conventions, including the Convention against Slavery, Servitude and Forced Labour, the Convention against Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of Prostitution of Others, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
Paying the World Bank
Countries like Australia, the USA and Germany are signatories to such conventions, but the presence of women like Susie in their cities is a result of the increasing poverty of developing nations due to the payment of interest on loans relentlessly extracted by First World institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
According to Aid Watch, a Sydney-based organisation monitoring Australian government overseas aid programs, Australia is a significant player in World Bank structural adjustment programs in the Philippines and Thailand which have resulted in spiralling poverty.
Aid Watch director Lee Rhiannon says, "These programs forced cutbacks in social services, health and other social spending and have caused enormous increases in poverty. This has forced young women from these countries to travel overseas to find illegal work as prostitutes and domestics to support their children and families."
She points out that Treasurer Ralph Willis is "one of only 20 governors from around the world who sit on the World Bank and help shape these austerity policies.
In the last financial year, Australia gave $120 million to the World Bank's International Development Association, which imposes austerity programs on South-east Asian countries. "Australia also has $2.6 billion worth of shares with the bank which are used for Third World loans, and a permanent executive to the World Bank stationed in Washington.
"The presence of Thai and Philippine women in Australia as illegal sex workers is a direct result of World Bank policies which are significantly shaped and imposed by Australia."
The UNICEF report "State of the World's Children" documents that 82% of the population of the Philippines have an income which cannot cover rent, medical care, schooling for their children or food which gives families basic nutritional requirements. A 1991 Oxfam study documented that in Thailand, children are dying from malnutrition and preventable disease, and bonded child labour, prostitution and illegal sweatshops support the debt repayment imposed by the IMF even though the principal of the loans has been repaid three times over.
Concerned bodies like the international Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human rights have repeatedly argued to the United Nations that First World colonisation and exploitation made Third World loans necessary, and as such, debt is "contemporary slavery" and interest payments a form of "national bondage".
Yet Australia fails to take account of the role its foreign policy plays in making the sex trade in Asian women viable, and rather than acting to apprehend the traffickers and the men who use the women, governments punish the women.
'Terrible, but ...'
Neither the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs nor the Federal Police — the two principal government departments responsible for dealing with illegal sex workers — believe they should take the wider human rights issues into account.
A spokesperson for the minister for immigration and ethnic affairs says human rights issues are outside the scope of the department. "It's terrible that Asian women are being treated this way by syndicates, but our responsibility is to prevent illegal immigration."
The Federal Police Special Crime Branch is currently involved in an operation to crack down on the trafficking of women. Code named Paper Tiger, the operation aims to target syndicate leaders and shut down trafficking operations. "The human rights issues are not something we can be expected to take on board", says media liaison officer Steve Simpson.
"How the Federal Police's mandate to stop the syndicates translates into action is that they will go out and raid parlours, the contractors walk away scot free, while the women are detained and deported", says Geoffrey Fysh, former project manager of the Surry Hills-based health organisation Sex Worker Outreach Project (SWOP). "And within a week the parlour is filled with new girls."
While the maximum penalty organisers of prostitution rackets receive under the Crimes Act is three years imprisonment, the fate of some of the deported women is chilling. "Thai women who haven't paid off their debt", says Fysh, "land in Bangkok where they may be immediately picked up by the syndicate and put on a flight to Tokyo, Hong Kong or Frankfurt to work out their contract. You can imagine how traumatic that is after a spell in the Villawood detention centre."
Bernadette McMenamin, director of the Melbourne office of the international organisation End Child Prostitution, says that the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs' policies place the women "at the bottom of the heap in their human right to be protected from exploitation and violence.
"An international human rights issue is treated by Australian immigration officials as the personal problem of the individual women rather than being seen as a modern form of slavery", she says. "This makes it impossible for the women to seek legal protection against the worst excesses of traffickers and their accomplices."
Health
The only NSW government-funded services providing support for illegal Asian sex workers are SWOP and the Sydney Sexual Health Centre (SHC), which operate under twilight zone conditions. Confronted by a situation where the incidence of a common sexually transmitted disease like gonorrhoea amongst Asian sex workers accounted for 89% of cases seen by the SHC in 1988-90, clinics and outreach workers give anonymous, free medical services and encourage workers to uphold their right to safe sex at work. They also provide counselling and supply information booklets in several languages about safe sex, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS.
"We don't have any communication with the Immigration Department or police and they probably don't want to know us either", says the director of SHC, Basil Donovan. The success of their intervention is borne out by the fact that rates of STDs drop significantly the longer the women are in the country.
While the combined focus of domestic laws, UN conventions and even human rights organisations is to use law enforcement to end sexual trafficking in women, Donovan believes such an approach is useless to the women. "That's coming at the problem from a white, middle-class point of view", he says. "Why would they want to stop coming here when conditions and pay are so much better than what they get in Asia? And if the women can't work here where they get medical checks with us every two weeks, their option is to end up in a Bangkok brothel where in all probability they'll catch AIDS and be dead within 10 years."
His view is backed by two researchers and former workers at SWOP, Linda Brockett and Alison Murray, who argue in a new book, Sex Workers and Sex Work in Australia, that the economic advantages of working overseas for Asian women outweigh the risks and conditions.
"It comes down to how much money you have in your hand at the end of the night", said a Chinatown sex worker, May, to Brockett and Murray. "A good night in Sydney, I make $400. A good night in Bangkok I make $20. It's simple."
Fysh and Donovan opt for minor changes to the Immigration Act to offer some protection for the women. "Some people have suggested a special working visa for these women so they're not at the mercy of the contractors", says Fysh. "Ideally I'd like to see women in developing countries be able to make informed decisions about working in other countries, and have control and power to do that without a third party standing over them taking the money."
But with Australian immigration laws designed to let rich tourists in and keep the Third World out, a legitimate work visa for Asian sex workers is about as likely as the World Bank cancelling Third World debt. Federal Police predict increasing numbers of Asian women will turn to illegal traffickers, who at least provide them the chance of earning a living, denied to them by the rest of the world.
[First published, abridged, in the Sydney Morning Herald.]