A MAJOR conference on human trafficking starts in Wellington on Wednesday, with one of the organisers alleging New Zealanders are helping drive demand for sex and labour slaves.
The Salvation Army is hosting the three-day Pacific Trafficking in
Persons Forum, and Salvation Army justice advocate Chris Frazer said
that recession is feeding the global supply of sex and labour slaves.
Deteriorating
household living standards in countries where traffickers source their
victims are making the impoverished more vulnerable to profiteering
traffickers, Frazer said.
A recent report released by anti-child
sex trafficking network ECPAT and The Body Shop highlighted the
increasing vulnerability of children and young people being coerced or
conned into prostitution or the production of child pornography.
Frazer
said New Zealanders who surf the internet for pornography were likely
to be contributing to misery of those trafficked for the production of
pornography, and most New Zealand homes would contain items or
components of products that had been produced by slave labour.
Products
from industries as diverse as clothing, sports shoes, coffee,
chocolate, sugar, fireworks, glassware, jewellery and mobile phones and
laptops had been found to have been made with slave labour.
"These
are not one-off crimes against mainly children and women - the victims
suffer day after day, year after year and the damage to their lives is
often permanent," she said.
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The evidence
for trafficked labour in the Pacific was anecdotal but significant, and
it was time for a Pacific focus on the issue, she said.
Prostitutes
Collective national coordinator Catherine Healy said people often
claimed there was human trafficking in New Zealand but her organisation
had not found evidence of this.
"We're the only organisation
working hands-on nationwide with sex workers and we're not seeing any
evidence of trafficking," she said.
Healy said the 2009 US
report Trafficking in Persons defined a person as "trafficked" if they
are working as a prostitute and aged younger than 18, and New Zealand
had scored badly on this scale.
The American research said Fiji
was a source country for children trafficked for the purposes of labour
and commercial sexual exploitation, and a destination country for women
from a number of countries trafficked for the purposes of commercial
sexual exploitation.
More than 21 Pacific nations are
represented at the forum, including Fiji, Palau, Papua New Guinea,
Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-L'este and Western Samoa.
The
forum, co-hosted by the Australian Institute of Criminology and the
Pacific Immigration Directors' Conference, is being held at the Quality
Hotel and includes speakers from government departments and
non-government organisations from the Pacific region as well as UN and
law enforcement agencies. – NZPA
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