Australia steps up sex slave fight

Australia has unveiled a four-year plan to stamp out the flow of women and girls being trafficked into the country to work as sex slaves following a public outcry about a trade riddle with drugs and violence. Justice Minister Chris Ellison said on Monday the A$20 million (7.5 million pounds) initiative would include a 23-member mobile strike team to investigate people trafficking and sexual servitude and a new migration officer based in Thailand to focus on the trade. "Australia will not tolerate this repugnant trade which deals with women and children in a sexually exploitative manner," Ellison told reporters. The government has been unable to quantify the extent of the problem but support group Project Respect, which represents women brought to Australia as sex slaves, believes there could be up to 1,000 women involved in Australia at any one time. Brothel sources have said sex slaves or "contract girls" are most often Thai, Chinese, Filipino, Korean or Indonesian. Most are aged from 18 to their early 20s but some are as young as 12 and they are forced to pay off debt contracts of up to A$50,000 to traffickers after reaching Australia which can take years. The trade hit the spotlight this year following the inquest into the death of a 27-year-old Thai woman, heroin addict Puongtong Simaplee, who choked to death on her vomit in a Sydney detention centre after 15 years as a prostitute in Australia. Ellison said Interpol had ranked people trafficking as one of the world`s top three criminal activities. "Thailand is an area of deep concern...but of course there are other emerging countries of interest such as Cambodia, Vietnam and China. We can`t be complacent, this is an international problem and we are treating it as such," he said. Ellison said the Australian Crime Commission was trying to identify the scale of the problem in Australia, which introduced anti-sex slave laws in 1998. The recent focus on the problem has sparked greater action, with Australian Federal Police charging eight people with sexual servitude, slavery and deceptive recruiting offences in recent months -- the first charges under the five-year-old laws. In Australia slavery carries a penalty of up to 25 years in jail, people convicted of sexual servitude face up to 15 years in jail and deceptive recruiting carries a penalty of up to seven years in jail.