Jana, not her real name, is Indonesian. She trusted a man to take her to work in Tanjung Pinang, near Batam Island, also in Indonesia. When that job didn’t work out, she trusted another man who offered her a job, but this time she was sold into a brothel. She is not alone; a study carried out in 2003 by the Women’s Journal Foundation (YJP) found that as many as 5,000 women and children were trafficked to Batam island that year. Jana, now 26 years old, was forced to work as a prostitute for a month before an NGO rescued her and she was taken to a shelter. She is very cautious about the police, but was admitted to the Kramat Jati Police Hospital in Central Jakarta, the first free medical recovery centre to be opened by the authorities for the victims of human trafficking.
The case highlights the desperate problem with sex trafficking on and around Batam Island. It also shows that you don’t have to cross borders to be trafficked.

The Australian government passed a new law on Tuesday which toughened the penalties against human trafficking. Trafficking of adults into the country now carries a 12 year sentence and trafficking of children a 20 year sentence. The law is particularly helpful in that it creates a new category which criminalises the trafficking of people within the country, a crime which now carries a 12 year sentence. It was reported this week that more than 1000 women are being held in slavery in Australia. The passing of this law is a step towards ending this crime. It now needs to be effectively implemented.

A former garment factory owner in American Samoa has been convicted in Hawaii of enslaving, staving and beating his employees. He was ordered to pay $1.8 million in restitution and sentenced to 40 years in jail. This is the worst case of human trafficking into forced labour to be tried in the United States.
Kil Soo Lee was convicted of extortion, money laundering and 11 counts of involuntary servitude at the Daewoosa Samoa Ltd. The factory made clothes for J.C. Penny and others before it closed. More than 200 Chinese and Vietnamese workers were held at the factory for more than two years until they were freed by the US National Labour Relations Board and the Department of Labour.
The case underlines the possibility of large scale slave labour being used to supply major retailers. It is very important that retailers are aware of working conditions in the factories of all their suppliers.

More than 1000 women are being held as slaves in Australia today according to a leading human rights advocacy group. Jennifer Stanger, co-director of the Anti-Slavery Project based at the University of Technology, Sydney, said that an alarming number of women who wanted to migrate to Australia were being deceived so that when they arrived they were being sold into slavery.
“I believe the numbers are probably greater and if more research was undertaken we would find that more women and men and possibly children were being trafficked into industries such as agriculture, factory work and domestic work,” she said.
Often the women were caught by traffickers using what she termed the “Bait and switch” scheme, meaning they would be told what their working conditions would be in Australia, but when they arrived the work would be very different, often in the sex industry. They would also be told that they had incurred debts to the traffickers which they did not know about previously. They would be threatened with violence if they did not comply.
According to the US State Department report on Trafficking in Persons, many of the women trafficked into Australia are from central and eastern Europe. Although the Australian government does comply with the minimum standards required in the fight against human trafficking, there is still much to be discovered about the problem of human trafficking in the country.

Italian police have broken up an Italian/Bulgarian human trafficking ring which sold women to become sex slaves and men to work in slave labour. They were also active in selling babies. Police and anti-Mafia authorities in the southern Italian city of Catanzaro have ordered the arrest of 57 people of whom 25 have so far been brought into custody. The ring used travel agencies in Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries to help traffic people who wanted to start a new life in Italy, but when they arrived they were sold for cash and forced into slavery. In one case a woman was sold to an Italian man as his personal sex slave, in another a man was sold to work as a shepherd in south Italy without wages.
“We seem to have returned to the times of slavery,” Mariano Lombardi, the Catanzaro state prosecutor, said.