industry & reform
have a professional ability to be able to care for people who are
vulnerable. That’s definitely the case for St Vincent’s.
So we wanted to be able to make sure that we were putting the
right information, practices and education into the hands of our
clinicians and frontline staff, so they would be best equipped to be
able to help people when they do present.
For those who may not be familiar with trafficking and modern
slavery, what are some of the ways people are exploited? What
might staff encounter?
The three main ways that we understand people are coming
into human trafficking, and the types of exploitation they
experience, are sexual exploitation, forced marriage and forced
labour. Our friends at ACRATH are helping us to understand this
issue a lot more, but their information tells us that traffickers
are well organised, and often they’re in large, international
criminal organisations.
People come into trafficking through different ways. It might be
through ads offering opportunities to work here or to work abroad.
Recruiters might even be someone that a person might know
or trust – they might be a friend. In the case of forced marriage,
it’s also family members that become the human traffickers that
lead people into slavery. It’s often the case too that people who
are vulnerable are exploited the most. So people coming from a
range of backgrounds – they might be undocumented migrants
or at-risk youth; they might be in a country not knowing the
language, alone and therefore further at risk of being exploited
into human trafficking.
What are some ways that treating or supporting trafficked
people may be unique?
Well, what we think about is that there’s an extra vulnerability
to people who are trafficked, and for that reason it’s not as easy
as just saying that a person might be able to escape by alerting
someone to their scenario.
People who are trafficked are vulnerable for a number of
different reasons, and that might be that they first of all feel a
sense of shame or foolishness, that they’ve made a terrible mistake
and blame themselves, when in fact they’ve been a victim of a
wider sting or wider situation.
The threats that people who are in modern-day slavery
encounter might be physical threats, or psychological threats
against the person’s family, and the punishments that they’d
receive through reporting or alerting the trafficker to the fact that
they are looking to escape are very real.
So people are stuck in a situation, they have no money, no
passport, sometimes no friends, a language barrier, and are afraid
of deportation, or afraid of the shame they might bring upon their
family, or have been trapped because of a debt bondage.
Now, when a person presents at our hospital, there’s a very
limited opportunity to be able to understand and identify that
they may be a victim of human trafficking. So it will require
some really good education, and some really careful policies
and procedures in our hospital setting, to help people to safely
recognise that they are a victim of human trafficking, and
then be able to put them in touch with the support they might
need, which currently is through the Australian Federal Police.
Although, sometimes people are nervous about going down
that track because of the threats that they’ve received. So there’s
a sensitivity about people identifying themselves as modern‑day
slaves, and then the very real threat that they feel that if they
do report it or try and escape, that they or their family may
be subject to violence. In a hospital setting, we have to tread
really carefully.
Our healthcare practitioners, our frontline staff are great at
being able to identify and care for people with complex needs,
but we know that they don’t want to further endanger the person
who is coming to them for healthcare needs, but who also might
be trafficked.
What are some of the ways that healthcare organisations
may unknowingly be supporting human trafficking or
modern slavery?
Well, we’re going to go on a very big learning curve in this aspect.
What we’re going to do is investigate our supply chains and the
goods we’re procuring, and that might be everything from medical
equipment to cotton sheets, gowns, maybe even chocolate sold in
fundraising. Hospitals and healthcare do a lot of fundraising, and
we want to make sure the goods have been produced without the
use of enslaved or forced labour.
So this is really what we need to look into, and there’s some
great support in the community at the moment: Federal Labor’s
call for the introductory of a Modern Slavery Act; the government’s
inquiry into establishing a Modern Slavery Act; the Business
Council of Australia’s support of this. So it’s a really good pace now
that healthcare – perhaps St Vincent’s is the first, with others to
follow – as an industry says: “This is important to us too.”
In what ways do you hope the project will create change within
the health and aged care sectors?
I think what it’ll do, or what will be fantastic if it could do, is if
we’re able to help our practitioners to identify some of the signs,
the health signs that people have been a victim of modern-day
slavery. Some of those signs might be things that are fairly usual
for people to present with in our emergency departments or our
hospitals, but if we’re looking at them with different eyes, from the
perspective of trafficking, it might reveal to us a different story.
For example, people who present with workplace injuries.
We know that traffickers, particularly those in situations where
they’re putting people in forced labour, often have dodgy
workplace practices. We also know that people who are forced
to work and are exploited are expected to work even when
they’re sick, so that exacerbates their illness and causes them to
deteriorate even further, and not even be able to recover from
minor ailments.
We also think that it’s important to look at pregnancies that
haven’t been monitored properly, and one of the unfortunate
scenarios is when there’s been a forced marriage, there might
be a 14-year-old girl who’s become pregnant. Often they
won’t present to hospitals, because that would alert a person
or a practitioner to the fact that there’s been an underage
marriage or an exploitation of a minor. So pregnancies that are
unmonitored would also be an interesting sign for us to notice,
and for our practitioners to notice that something dodgy is
going on here.
Healthcare organisations – with the right education, the
right frame, and the right support to know what to do when
they identify a person that’s been trafficked – have a fantastic
opportunity to help those people to realise the situation they’re
in, to be able to make the right referrals and to help people as to
what to do next. The fact that people who are trafficked do often
present at hospitals gives us a unique opportunity to help. ■
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