The recent film Amazing Grace celebrated the work of William Wilberforce, who worked to free the world from slavery.

When I learnt about William long ago in primary school, I assumed that slavery in the world had now finished. How wrong I was!

A recently released Australian film, The Jammed, tells the sordid story of another form of slavery that is alive and well in our own country.

Relying on factual court documents and other verified sources, it tells of the illegal trade of young Asian women being brought into Australia for the sex industry.

Young girls are smuggled illegally into this country from Asian countries. They are promised jobs as waitresses, child-minders or other similar roles.

They are lured into this situation against a background of grinding poverty that sometimes even entices families to virtually sell their daughters into slavery.

Social workers and church workers in the well-known areas of this trade testify that some of these girls are well below the legal age for sexual consent.

Maybe when the scriptures talk about money being the source of all evil, they really mean that the absence of money can be the cause of extraordinary evil.

It seems that poverty is not just one of the main sources of terrorism and violence in the world, but also a part of the jigsaw that produces this sordid slave trade in our own country.

It does seem that it is easy to raise the Australian consciousness against having refugees enter Australia once they are classified as an illegal immigrants. Our government spends millions of dollars in stopping these people enter our country.

And yet while the illegal entry of young girls for the Australian sex industry is reasonably well documented, and certainly is well known among social and church workers, it seems that a blind eye is being turned to this situation by the government. Or maybe it just doesn't matter because they are Asian girls, and therefore it's not so important, or not politically productive to act.

After all, it is the oldest profession in the world!

The legitimacy of the sex industry in our country is a completely separate issue.

The issue here is that young girls are being lured here on false promises, smuggled into Australia, and then forced to work in the sex industry without payment to somehow pay off an undocumented debt.