• Mentioning specific trafficking cases in the media or research informs the alleged traffickers, families of victims, and authorities of the informant’s identity.
• The Australian Guidelines for NGO’s Working With Trafficked People recommends “Staff and volunteers at NGOs must avoid… exposing a person to danger by breaching their privacy.” (page 10).
• Scarlet Alliance is committed to not discussing details of particular trafficking cases in the media or with researchers.
• There are very few cases of trafficking in Australia. Any information, no matter how obscure it seems, will potentially expose the individual identity of sex workers involved in the case. General location, the detention centre or police station involved, persons’ age or what country they are from, their skills/educational background or gender, the year or month when the individual sought assistance or travelled, the services that they accessed, regional accent or dialect of people involved, number of children they have, their age, religion, gender, their visa or relationship status. Any of this information could potentially disclose a persons identity.
• The Australian Institute of Criminology recognises: “The anti-trafficking response is relatively new, so the number of cases that have been identified…. is still fairly small. It can be difficult or even impossible to de-identify information or draw trends from such a small sample.”
