Harry Pollard:
<<Real people love the free market, and so they should.>>
Stephen Henighan:
<<These women are transported westward to be "broken" by being raped
and beaten. In cities such as Belgrade, Yugoslavia, stunned women
stand naked in secluded apartments waiting to be bought by pimps. A
woman can sell for as little as $500 or as much as $10,000. After
being sold, she will be locked in a room, fed one meal a day,
tortured with cigarette burns to destroy her self-esteem, and forced
to have sex with up to a dozen men a day, seven days a week, until
exhaustion or disease wipe out her market value. The pimp makes back
his investment in less than a week.>>
100,000's Of East European Women Sold For Sex
"The Natashas - The New Global Sex Trade"
From Stephen Henighan
Book By Victor Malarek
Viking Canada, 304 pages, $36
10-20-2003
In June, 2002, I was walking down Knyaz Aleksandar I, a
pedestrianized shopping street in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, with a Bulgarian
friend. Home appliances and racks of designer clothes filled the
display windows of the stores. In a patronizing Western way, I
commented approvingly on Bulgaria's commercial vitality. My friend, a
hard-rock musician with two university degrees, politely corrected my
impression. Almost no one in Plovdiv, he said, could afford this
merchandise: The stores, which rarely made a sale, existed to launder
money for Bulgarian criminals who earned huge profits by smuggling
people from Russia to the West.
Until reading reporter Victor Malarek's angry book about the
trafficking of women from Eastern Europe, I grasped neither the scale
nor the implications of the activities that financed those Plovdiv
boutiques. According to Malarek, formerly an investigative reporter
at The Globe and Mail, now at W-FIVE, during the last decade,
hundreds of thousands of women from Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and
Romania have been sold into slavery as prostitutes.
Crime syndicates use a variety of methods to capture young women. A
girl walking down a road in Moldova is forced into a car. An
overflowing Romanian orphanage receives a visit from "social workers"
offering "apprentice programs" for adolescent girls. A young
Ukrainian woman desperate to help her starving parents responds to a
newspaper advertisement for au pairs to work in Germany. An ambitious
young graduate signs up with what appears to be a legitimate foreign
corporation at a job fair at a Russian university.
These women are transported westward to be "broken" by being raped
and beaten. In cities such as Belgrade, Yugoslavia, stunned women
stand naked in secluded apartments waiting to be bought by pimps. A
woman can sell for as little as $500 or as much as $10,000. After
being sold, she will be locked in a room, fed one meal a day,
tortured with cigarette burns to destroy her self-esteem, and forced
to have sex with up to a dozen men a day, seven days a week, until
exhaustion or disease wipe out her market value. The pimp makes back
his investment in less than a week.
The scale of this traffic is mind-numbing. In Germany, up to half a
million Eastern European women work as prostitutes. The streets of
Italy are lined with Romanian and Moldovan teenagers. Other serious
offenders include Greece, Turkey and South Korea, while some of the
"Natashas" end up in Toronto, Chicago or Los Angeles. Among Malarek's
most shocking claims is that on a per capita basis the two countries
with the most voracious appetites for Eastern European women are
Bosnia and Israel.
Prostitution in Bosnia sprang up to serve the United Nations troops
and international aid workers who flooded into the country at the end
of the war in former Yugoslavia. Malarek slams home the irony of
these supposed emissaries of civilization feeding a barbaric industry
with descriptions of 60-year-old U.S. military officers showing up at
social events with their 14-year-old sex slaves. UN police demand
"freebies" in return for curtailing raids on brothels packed with UN
soldiers. Malarek documents how attempts to clean up the Bosnian
cesspool have been blocked by UN brass and the U.S. private security
firm contracted to stock the UN police. He discovers similar
conditions on a visit to Kosovo.
In Israel, it is common to blame rampant prostitution on foreign
guest workers. But Malarek argues that these men lack the money to
buy sex. The Israeli "Natashas," smuggled in via Egypt, service an
estimated one million men a month. Many of the johns are Orthodox
Jews. Malarek quotes Israeli anti-prostitution campaigner Nissan Ben-
Ami: "You see a lot of . . . very, very religious men -- because
these men need sex but the women in their society cannot give it to
them when they want it. They also cannot masturbate because they
cannot waste their sperm. . . . These men also do not use condoms,
therefore they must pay the pimps more." [I guess that's the dark side
of "IQ maximization", huh Keith? ;-/ ] In every country where women
are trafficked, the police are involved. Enforcement is cosmetic and
judges refuse to believe a "foreign whore" over a local businessman.
International plans to crack down on trafficking collapsed earlier
this year when the United States backed out to avoid imposing
economic sanctions on Israel, Russia, South Korea and Greece.
This is a depressing book, crammed with ugly case histories.
Malarek's tabloid-style prose does not always do justice to his
diligent research. When every pimp is "scum," every enforcer is
"thuggish" and the rare honest cops are all "strapping six-footers,"
a cartoonish aura threatens the book's seriousness. The passages
written in the first person, where Malarek narrates his experiences
in Kosovo or on the notorious highway E-55 between Dresden and
Prague, brim with authenticity yet leave nagging questions.
Malarek's own Ukrainian-Canadian roots appear to fuel his anger at
the way women from different countries are stripped of their cultural
identities by the derisive term "Natashas." He reveals just enough of
his myriad motives for pursuing this story that we want to know more.
Similarly, he tells us how these women are exploited, but little
about where they come from. Many readers, I suspect, would have
appreciated a fuller introduction to the poverty, corruption and
fatal idealism about the West that afflict the women's homelands. It
may be hard to believe, but for many Eastern European young people
anything seems preferable to life at home -- until they discover what
can be meant by "anything."
-----
Stephen Henighan is the author of Lost Province: Adventures in a
Moldovan Family. He teaches at the University of Guelph.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from "The Natashas":
<<Target: Orphans
No doubt one of the most appalling aspects of the trade is the
targeting of orphans throughout Eastern Europe. In March, 2003, for
example, the U.S. State Department reported a "pattern of
trafficking" involving orphans in Moldova. According to the Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices, the girls at risk are those who
"must leave orphanages when they graduate," usually at sixteen or
seventeen. Most have no source of funds for living expenses or any
education or training to get a job. Traffickers often know precisely
when these girls are to be turned out of the institutions ("some
orphanage directors sold information . . . to traffickers") and are
waiting for them, job offers in hand. The State Department also notes
that throughout Russia, there are "reports of children being
kidnapped or purchased from . . . orphanages for sexual abuse and
child pornography" and that child prostitution is "widespread" in
orphanages in Ukraine. And in Romania, "many orphanages are complicit
in letting girls fall victim to trafficking networks."
Vast armies of Russian children who have run away from brutal
orphanages wander the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg.>>
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