trafficked

Are you one of the men who helped kill Puangthong? - smh.com.au

Are you one of the men who helped kill Puangthong?

By Miranda Devine
May 4 2003
The Sun-Herald

The last 71 hours of Puangthong Simaplee's life are recorded with brutal precision in the NSW Coroner's report into her death at Villawood detention centre, in a pool of her own vomit.

At 27, she weighed a mere 31kilograms - as much as a seven-year-old child - by the time her heart gave out at 1am on September 26, 2001.

The face in her mug shot is young and sweet. But when she was arrested by immigration officers at a Surry Hills brothel she told them she had been sold by her parents at the age of 12 to human traffickers in her home village in Thailand, and smuggled into Australia as a prostitute two years later.

She was addicted to heroin, which she smoked and injected, infected with hepatitis C and had become so thin that when she was first taken to Villawood, nurses weren't sure from her muscular arms and flat chest whether she was female.

After she died, police found a bank account in Thailand to which she had been sending money to her parents, who confirmed she was their daughter before asking for government assistance to bury her.

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Once you know this background, Coroner Carl Milovanovich's report of her final hours is especially heart-wrenching.

On Simaplee's first night in detention,

she began vomiting due to heroin withdrawal. Despite being given medication to stop her vomiting, she continued to fill the bedside bucket with a substance that, over the next two days, would go from a dark bile colour to a bright red that staff thought was due to the cordial a doctor had given her. Her room stank so much staff didn't like going in.

An autopsy showed she died from the "consequences of heroin withdrawal", exacerbated by malnutrition and pneumonia.

So Simaplee died as she had lived, alone, suffering and without dignity. Only in death has her life come to mean something.

Politicians from across the spectrum have taken up the need to combat human trafficking, the so-called sex slave industry - from morals crusader Brian Harradine to Democrats Senator Brian Greig and Sydney Labor MP Tanya Plibersek.

"She lived a life of rape and violence and now she's dead while the men who used her and the criminals who profited go unpunished," Plibersek said on the ABC Insiders program.

You have to wonder at the cold hearts and warped desire of the Australian men who paid to have sex in Surry Hills with such a sick, unhappy, emaciated child-woman. Each one helped kill her.

But if there is not much we can do to change the circumstances in her home village that forced her into prostitution, there is much more Australian authorities can do to stop the slave traders, said by Harradine to be one of the fastest growing global crimes.

"This is not just an immigration crime but a crime against humanity," Kathleen Maltzahn, spokeswoman for sex worker support group Project Respect, said on Friday.

There were as many as 1000 more Simaplees in Australia right now, she said, "contracted" as prostitutes, forced to have sex with thousands of men to pay off the $30,000 to $50,000 debt they "owe" their masters, and who were not permitted to "refuse customers, types of sexual acts or sex without a condom".

But Maltzahn says we are deporting the witnesses who could testify against the criminals who enslaved them.

The Federal Government is cracking down on people-smuggling. But buying 12-year-old girls to use as prostitutes would seem to be a far worse crime.

It is no good simply rounding up these women in occasional raids on brothels and deporting them to an even more awful existence. By any definition, they are displaced people. In Britain, according to Harradine, when such women are given access to support services, their willingness to testify against the traffickers increases, "with up to 50 per cent testifying".

It would be worth giving amnesty to illegal immigrants in the sex industry if their evidence could convict even one of their tormentors.