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Brian Iselin on the Sex Slave Trade
The next Bennelong Institute event is on Tuesday, 4th May at Riverside Girls' High in Gladesville. The presenter will be Brian Iselin, a former officer of the Australian Federal Police, and formerly a United Nations adviser on combating human trafficking in South-East Asia. The presentation will talk about people trafficking - not of the "boat people" kind, but of slaves forced to work as prostitutes. Reportedly there are hundreds or even thousands of women brought into Australia for this purpose every year
Starting time is 7pm, at Riverside Girls High, Warf Rd, Huntley's Point.
Well, what can I say?
A late addition to this event was Kathleen Maltzham of Project Respect. Kathleen was very soft-spoken for a lobbyist - about half the lobbyists for the organisations I have worked with are women, and they all tend to speak fairly forcefully - but this is probably an advantage in her field work. She actually gets out and talks to the affected women, with her long work day including visits to brothels. Her softly-spoken voice is likely to help engender trust among th victims of the slave trade.
This is one of those issues that you really can't argue with, although it seems that until early this year governments, both federal and state, were denying that the problem exists. That's not surprising in itself - it is hard to believe that such a backward practice could survive into modern times.
I'm not sure how viable some of the solutions proposed by the speakers are. One of the things proposed by the speakers was to reduce demand for prostitution services, but in discussions after the event it seemed to be the consensus that there was no practical way to do it. The speakers suggested re-criminalising the purchase of prostitution services without re-criminalising the offering and sale of those services, but it seems to me that this takes the approach of treating all prostitutes as victims, which many claim emphatically that they are not. If a person rationally and without undue influence chooses to be a prostitute, then banning the purchase of those services would appear to me to be an interference with the rights of the prostitute.