Slavery Precedent: First Sex Slavery Conviction in Australian Court

Canberra woman, Watcharaporn Nantahkhum, has been found guilty of six offenses relating to the imprisonment and forced sex-slavery of a Thai woman in the ACT Supreme Court this week. Ms Nantahkhum pled ‘not guilty’, via an interpreter in December 2010, to charges including “possessing a slave, allowing non-citizens to work illegally in Australia and be exploited, and perverting the course of justice”. Today she has officially lost her bid for freedom, becoming the first person to be charged with possessing a slave in Australian history.

Ms Nantahkhum has been remanded in custody awaiting sentencing, which could lead to a conviction of up to 25 years in prison.

In response to this news, the Australian Christian Lobby is calling for harsher penalties for people found to have paid for sex in these sorts of sex-slavery operations. Affirming that punishing the traders is not enough of a deterrent, the ACL wants to punish people who support the illegal prostitution and slavery industry.

“Could the men who purchased sex honestly say they did not suspect the woman’s situation?... Why aren’t these men culpable for their actions?” said ACL managing director Jim Wallace today.

A fair question, some might say, given the example of laws enacted in Sweden that punish the purchase of sex for money, but not the sale. Similar laws have since been enacted in Norway and Iceland with varying degrees of success. This notion does pass the culpability to those facilitating and funding the illegal sex trade without punishing the actual workers who, as this case demonstrates, are often not willing participants. However, there comes an inherent risk of entrapment and corruption with such a plan, which is one of the key arguments against such a scheme.

On the flipside, making the purchase of sex illegal simply criminalises the whole enterprise, so it is a clear and sly move towards new anti-prostitution legislation on the part of the ACL, who are not now and have never been supporters of legalised prostitution. The question then becomes whether the legitimate sex industry, in the places where prostitution is legalised, is worth saving from these sorts of reforms or whether public opinion is supportive of plans to slowly dismantle the industry and brush the whole legalised prostitution debacle under the rug again.

The ACL have yet to garner much support for the idea, but it’s one of those ideas that will linger, as prostitution is an issue that rears its ugly head every few years and the Christian Lobby, inevitably, will froth at the mouths and shout and smear ugly rhetoric across billboards and televisions like so many pissed off media apes, and someone will take this idea firmly into the public arena where, if society has its wits about it, the idea will finally be beaten to death under a gavel and the confused stares of a million political pundits who regard the notion as either a cheap compromise to Christian ideals, or an attack on personal liberties.

Suffice it to say, today’s verdict in Canberra sets a solid precedent for future human trafficking and sex slavery operations, but will continue to serve as ammunition for the conservative right to attack the methods used to regulate and control the sex industry, and the government’s failure to stamp out illegal prostitution rackets. As ever, it remains a delicate issue.

Ms Nantahkum faces sentencing in the ACT Supreme Court in May.

Karl Anderson