Dear Pauline,

Welcome to Project Respect's news bulletin for March 2010.  If you would like to support Project Respect's work, you can do so here. 

Project Respect offers vital services to women in the sex industry. So that our supporters and friends understand the nature and impact of our work, and are informed about the issues facing women in the sex industry, we will now be including a short report about our work in all future bulletins!

So far this year, Project Respect has maintained its comprehensive outreach program with visits to 30 brothels so far throughout Melbourne. We’ve also continued intensive casework with a number of women. Some of the particular issues women have been dealing with this year include: coping with the effects of extremely sexual abuse; mental health problems, some of which have required hospital stays; alcohol dependency; drug addiction, crime and jail terms; sexual servitude; threats to their and their family’s safety; housing insecurity and homelessness; and physical ill health.

Project Respect has supported women by helping them to find stable accommodation, including at our shelter for victims of trafficking; organising specialist sexual assault counselling; advocating for women to other services; visiting them in hospital and bringing them things which will occupy them; referring to drug and alcohol counselling; visiting women in prison; emotional and social support; and linking women up with community health services.

Women have also had great positives! A number of women now have long-term housing, with all their furniture, and are making gardens and linking in with their local community. Women have returned to study; one is completing VCE. We are supporting women to pursue victims of crime compensation claims. Women were employed by Project Respect for a catering job, as part of our Noodle Bar project.

For the organisation, we have a vacancy for a paid position as Manager of the noodle bar. See more information at http://projectrespect.org.au/news/job-vacancy-mar-10 .

We are also reopening our volunteer program! There will be a number of positions available for motivated people in research, law and policy reform, training, administration, communications, website maintenance, and fundraising. Please fill in a volunteer application form and return to Project Respect; you can find the form here: http://projectrespect.org.au/career.

For people who are interested in supporting Project Respect’s vital work through organising your own fundraiser or through setting up an employee contribution program at your workplace, please contact me to discuss how we can support you in this.

Best wishes,

Nina Vallins, Executive Director.

NATIONAL

Is it OK to bash women if they are selling sex?, The Age, March 16th, 2010

NO DOUBT there are some readers who don't much care about the welfare of women who engage in street sex work in our cities. Street prostitution is a reality that middle Australia prefers to ignore, or just to condemn outright. And that's where the trouble begins.

Fairtrade Easter chocolate campaign to stop child trafficking, Cath News, March 5th, 2010

Good Shepherd Mission & Justice and the Australian Catholic Religious Against Trafficking in Humans are launching a Fairtrade Easter Chocolate campaign to stop child trafficking into West African cocoa plantations. This campaign will also send a message to chocolate producers who do not use Fairtrade chocolate, the organisations said in a media statement.

Criminals infiltrating legal brothel industry, The Herald Sun, February 22, 2010

About 20 per cent of Victoria's 95 legal brothels are allegedly controlled by shadowy figures who illegally pay licence holders to let them run their bordellos.

Students recruited into prostitutions as part of an Asian-dominated racket, The Herald Sun, January 21, 2010

Students are being recruited into Victoria's legal and illegal brothels by college staff, immigration agents and solicitors as part of an Asian-dominated racket. 

INTERNATIONAL

While Thierry is a sex-worker activist and Cath is an anti-prostitution one, believe it or not we do have some common ground: both of us are trade unionists, for instance, and both of us identify as feminists. Obviously our analyses on prostitution/sex work are also very different. But despite our different opinions, there's one thing we do agree on: sex workers shouldn't be criminalised

9.5M trafficked in Asia-Pacific as of 2005, Inquirer Global Nation, January 21, 2010

MANILA, Philippines—An estimated 9.49 million people were in forced labor in the Asia-Pacific region as of 2005, with a significant number believed to be in the Mekong region, according to United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO).

Haiti detains 'child traffickers', The Age, January 31, 2010

An American church group was detained by Haitian police on yesterday as it tried to bus 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic, allegedly without proper documents.

Police 'ignore' rights of trafficking victims, The Guardian, February 9th, 2010

The police and immigration services may be illegally ignoring the human rights of foreign women who have been forced into prostitution, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission has alleged.

Prevention, Prosection, and Protection -- Human Trafficking, UN Chronicle, 2010

Fifty years ago, the abomination of slavery seemed like a thing of the past. But history has a way of repeating itself. Today, we find that human slavery is once again a sickening reality. At this moment, men, women and children are being trafficked and exploited all over the world: 2.4 million have been trafficked into forced labour worldwide of these, 600,000 to 800,000 are trafficked across borders each year and 12,000 children are working as slaves on cocoa plantations in West Africa. It is impossible to ever reach a consensus on the true scale of the problem but, regardless of the figures, what matters is that human trafficking is big and getting bigger.

Chinese Women Taught To Avoid Human Traffickers, Malaysian National News Agency, March 8th, 2010

Human trafficking in China is a serious and long-term issue. The problem is particularly serious in rural areas. In Guizhou, women were abducted and sold as cheap or slave labour. The province also holding classes in March to teach hundreds of rural women on how to protect themselves from the region's increasing trafficking problem.

Human Trafficking / Edited by Maggy Lee

Human Trafficking provides a critical engagement with the key debates on human trade. It addresses the subject within the broader context of global crime and the internationalisation of crime control. The book takes a broadly discursive approach and draws on historical, comparative as well as the latest empirical material to illustrate and inform the discussion of the major trends in human trafficking. The book helps to develop fresh theoretical insights into globalisation, exclusion and governance, and identifies a new research agenda that will ensure the book is of interest to advanced level students as well as academic scholars.

Epilogue : Human trafficking seen from the future / Stephan Parmentier, European journal of criminology 7(1) Jan 2010: 95-100

An overview article on the global and lcoal contexts of trafficking, and the theoretical and law enforcement models emergging around the issue.

Just passing through? International legal obligations and policies of transit countries in combating trafficking in persons / Benjamin Perrin, European journal of criminology 7(1) Jan 2010: 11-28

This article identifies several key characteristics and accountabilities of transit countries.