Exit trafficking, gendered violence and borders

Guest post by Marie Segrave & Stefani Vasil. Marie Segrave is a Professor of Criminology, ARC Future Fellow, and co-lead of the Borders, Migration and Gendered Violence Research Hub at the University of Melbourne. Stefani Vasil is a lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Thomas More Law School. This post is part of a thematic series in occasion of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gendered Violence. 

Recently, Mohamed Ahmed Omer was convicted and sentenced to four-and-a-half years' jail for the crime of “exit trafficking” – an offence under Australia’s Commonwealth Criminal Code that pertains to coercing, forcing, threatening or deceiving someone to leave Australia against their will. This is the first conviction for this offence. The media’s reporting of this conviction described the offender as “a controlling and violent husband” who had “deliberately strand[ed] his wife overseas without a passport”.

Australia is the only country to have a specific offence of “exit trafficking”, which is distinct from offences that involve a person being trafficking into the country. Critically, exit trafficking sits under the umbrella of slavery and trafficking offences in Australian federal legislation. This is not an area of law that was designed originally or specifically to deal with gendered violence per se. While the area of law has expanded, and includes practices such as forced marriage, it sits apart from other areas of law and policy that are focused on and informed by more comprehensive understandings of gendered violence. Offences pertaining to gendered violence, particularly domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) are, for the most part, those that sit within the jurisdiction of states and territories. In this blog post we want to consider some of the issues raised by the intersections of gendered violence, particularly DFSV, and border crossings and consider some of the issues raised by the current legal framing of slavery and trafficking offences, including exit trafficking. 

In our recently released book, The Borders of Violence, we dedicate a chapter to interrogating the intersections of gendered violence, including the ways that violence crosses borders, the operation of the migration system and offences related to trafficking and slavery-like practices. We focus on the increasing push in Australia to merge slavery-like practices and the rhetoric of modern slavery into the same sphere as gendered violence. This is often led by organizations and experts who do not reflect on the intersections between these issues (and their overlap) or consider the implications of these developments. Here we draw on some key issues raised in Chapter Five, Beyond the law: trafficking, slavery, servitude, forced labour and abandonment.

In our book, we argue that there is often only mere recognition that there are “overlaps” between trafficking, slavery and DFSV. As a consequence, we suggest that the silence around the intersections of DFSV, migration and bordering practices require close examination. We do so because this work is important in advancing understanding, but also because it offers a timely examination of the role of the state in sustaining violence through the demarcation of crimes and migration law and regulation. 

We interrogate the legal definition of exit trafficking based on the understanding that the articulation of specific offences in law impacts how we understand and “see” exploitative practices and whether or not we “see” gendered violence. We draw on the important work on abandonment, for example, led by scholars whose focus is most often South Asian women’s experiences (for example see work of Sundari Anitha and colleagues and the work of Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee, 2013), to consider this practice beyond the specificity of marriage and women’s labour among South Asian communities. 

The book provides a number of examples from two major studies, based on analysis of 400 case files from a specialist domestic and family violence services and interviews with victim survivors, all of whom were temporary migrants when they experienced DFSV in Australia. 

We note 11 cases where victim-survivors were “returned” or taken to their country of origin under some false pretense and/or under coercion, and left there, with the perpetrator having taken their identification papers, limited their movement and/or withdrawn sponsorship (as the perpetrator returned to or had remained in Australia). We stress that this data is based on a single year in one Australian state, and these stories are only those of women who returned to Australia. We know nothing about women who may have had similar experiences  but who were then unable to return for whatever reason, such as ongoing abuse in their country of origin, or because of financial or other welfare circumstances impacting their ability to fly back to Australia. The identification of this crime and what is both captured (or not) in Commonwealth Criminal Code law and un/seen by policing agencies has not been the subject of close examination. We suggest that characterising these practices as “exit trafficking” creates a blinkered view, as it focuses on the way in which a person leaves Australia. In so doing it completely underestimates the harm to victim-survivors and also fails to recognise the connection to the DFSV occurring prior to and/or after the border crossing.

While there is a substantive and important evidence based focus on the concept and criminality of abandonment, especially led by colleagues such as Anitha Sundari, Anupama Roy, and Harshita Yalamarty, we argue that even the focus on this practice may limit the recognition of the full remit of violence and abuse that women experience across borders, when they are in their country of origin and when they are temporary migrants in the country of destination. 

While we cannot detail this account here, one key issue we raise in the context of the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence, is to bring to the fore the role of the border and the role of the state in sustaining gendered violence. Our research and our book details that “there is protection for abusers through all stages of the border crossing: violence and abuse enacted in and through the border crossing against women who hold temporary visas in Australia is largely unseen and enters legally fraught territory”. Offences such as exit trafficking do not capture the complexity of what the women in our studies experienced in Australia, and once they had left Australia or following their return. More specifically, exit trafficking does not capture the relationship between the abuse that occurs before a woman enters Australia, after she has migrated, and after the perpetrator’s efforts to abandon her. The varied, complex and intersecting  forms of violence and the role of borders and migration in facilitating it can be erased when we focus only on specific offences, including the offence of exit trafficking which is not recognised as a form of domestic and family violence. Such a focus suggests the issue is the nature of how someone came to cross a border. Our concern is that the crime of exit trafficking encourages a view of the border crossing that undermines any recognition of the cross border pervasiveness of domestic and family violence, and the role of the state in recognising that migration regimes are playing a key role in enabling and sustaining gender based violence.  

To see more:

The Borders of Violence: temporary migration and domestic and family violence.

Please join us for the book launch event on the 18th December: register online. 

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