Australia is a destination country for victims trafficked from East Asia and South East Asia, particularly the People’s Republic of China , the Republic of Korea , and Thailand . There are also indications that women are at times trafficked from Europe and Latin America . The majority of women trafficked to Australia in recent times appear to be Thai and Korean women.

There is no agreement on the size of the problem in Australia . Forced sex work is the most visible end-result of trafficking in Australia but there is no evidence that it is the most common. The Australian NGO Project Respect estimates that there are typically up to 1,000 women in Australia under contract at any one time in sexual  servitude (this figure does not include those who have been trafficked but already paid off their debt) while the Australian government has given the figure of those trafficked as between 100 and 400 people. 

Most attention is focused on prostitution; the incidence of trafficking in other industries is suggested through media reports of individual workers who have been identified in trafficking and slavery type circumstances.

At this stage, there has been no rigorous and substantive research into the dimension of trafficking in Australia and the Australian Institute of Criminology has flagged this as an area of priority for research.