A welcome step forward in the fight against human trafficking in Australia

We applaud the recent announcement by Senator the Honourable Marise Payne, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Women, that the Australian government has now approved the ratification of the International Labour Organization (ILO) Protocol of 2014 to Forced Labour Convention 1930 (No. 29).¹

Modern day slavery

Modern day slavery is alive and kicking, despite the popular belief that William Wilberforce² and his colleagues put paid to the practice back in 1807 with the British ‘Slave Trade Act’³ of 1807 and then the ‘Slavery Abolition Act’ of 1833⁴, the acts that “abolished” the slave trade in most of the British Empire.

Part of the modern version of slavery is the practice of trafficking people. This is defined as: ‘the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. (Article 3, paragraph (a)).⁵

In 2009 the United Nations published a Global Report on Trafficking in Persons⁶ based on data from 155 countries. At that time the Executive Director of UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) noted that convictions for trafficking were rare, with 40% of the countries covered by the report never having brought a single conviction.

In 30% of the countries that provided information, women were amongst the traffickers (in some countries more than 50%), and often those who themselves had been trafficked. Of those trafficked, 20% were children.⁶

The United Nations created a Protocol against Trafficking in Persons in 2003 and in the six years between its declaration and the 2009 report, of the countries providing data, those who had made a serious effort to implement the Protocol increased from 54 to 125 (of the 155). Great progress, but not nearly good enough!

How big a problem is this?

It is incredibly difficult to obtain meaningful statistics on the number of trafficked persons annually due to the covert nature of the activity and the reluctance of victims to report, due to fear of repercussions and shame. The Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative reports that in 2020, 108,613 individual cases of trafficking were identified.⁷ Due to the difficulties in positively identifying cases, this is very likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. The ILO estimates that 40 million people worldwide are currently enslaved.⁸