Victor Malarek writes and speaks on the new global sex trade (12/21/03)

Victor Malarek writes and speaks on the new global sex trade

by Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO - Even standing room was tight at the Canadian Ukrainian Art Foundation gallery on October 9 when Victor Malarek began to speak: "When I set out to tell the tragic stories that make up the heart and soul of this book - the issue of trafficking of girls and women from the former Soviet Union, I knew I was in for a tough and at times dangerous journey. What I had not anticipated was how upsetting and depressing it would turn out to be - The Natashas took me into situations that nightmares are made of."

One of Canada's foremost investigative journalists, Mr. Malarek has written for The Globe and Mail, has been the host of CBC's investigative documentary program "the fifth estate" and is now an investigative journalist on CTV's current-affairs show "W-5."

"The Natashas: the New Global Sex Trade," (Viking Canada, 2003, $36), is Mr. Malarek's fourth book and pursues the story of the most recent wave of trafficking - the buying and selling of flesh for the worldwide sex industry. One of the most appalling aspects of this trade is the targeting of orphans throughout Eastern Europe. Girls must leave orphanages when they graduate, usually at the age of 16 or 17 and, having no money for living expenses or any education or training to get a job, they easily fall prey to bogus job offers in other countries. One of the sponsors of Mr. Malarek's book launch was the Help us Help the Children fund, which works with orphanages in Ukraine and has been confronted with the problem of what happens to the teenagers who "graduate" from the orphanages.

In the past three decades there have been four waves of trafficking, with the latest from Eastern and Central Europe, dubbed the fourth wave whose "speed and proportion is staggering," Mr. Malarek writes. In its 2003 trafficking report, the U.S. State Deptartment estimates that approximately 800,000 to 900,000 persons are trafficked across international borders worldwide and 25 percent of this trade is traffic from Eastern and Central Europe. Ten years ago it was non-existent. "The Natashas" is an investigation to find out how it happened and why it continues to thrive.

The most formidable menace in this trade, according to Mr. Malarek, is Russian organized crime syndicates that have formed a powerful global criminal axis with other international organized crime organizations. Enmeshed in this business are Ukrainian, Polish, Israeli, Czech, Georgian, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Albanian gangs. Trusting and desperate women, with no future in sight at home, fall prey to seemingly legitimate job offers in other countries and end up sold to pimps in brothels and strip clubs.

"It is a business characterized by brutality, violence and tyranny. What happens to most trafficked women, whether they were tricked, abducted or willing, is criminal. They are forced into situations of profound terror, comparable to being held hostage. They are immediately deprived of their travel documents and their every movement is tightly controlled and restricted. Usually they live on the premises, where they work locked in rooms, under constant guard and in fear of extreme violence and threats. Their documents are taken away from them as well as all the money they earn," Mr. Malarek writes.

Although the prime mover of the trade is organized crime, Mr. Malarek points out that trafficking could not exist to the extent it does without official complicity and corruption. It is impossible to run an underground sex-trafficking enterprise. To make money, brothel owners and pimps have to make their victims readily available to clients.

Even if not actively corrupt, most governments are indifferent to the problem. In typical brothel raids throughout the world, foreign "prostitutes" - or victims, as Mr. Malarek prefers to call them - are rounded up and charged. For the most part, the authorities don't treat these women as victims of crime; they are regarded simply as illegal immigrants. No attempt is made to determine whether they were trafficked. They are processed for immigration or labor violations and deported as quickly as possible. In many of the sending countries, in spite of the fact that the trafficked women are local and the recruiters are local, the attitude is "out of sight, out of mind." This complacency plays directly into the hands of organized crime, Mr. Malarek emphasizes.

According to an Israeli human rights lawyer quoted in the book, "The attitude of Israeli society in general and Israeli authorities in particular to the issue of trafficking in women is tainted by indifference, prejudice and ignorance, thus making trafficking a profitable and risk-free business."

Why does trafficking exist? Although there are massive profits to be made for trafficking women into prostitution, the sex trade also relies on the hypocrisy of society. "In 1995, 50,000 NATO peacekeepers marched into Bosnia to restore law and order. A number of Serbian fighters were rounded up, charged with rape and sent to stand trial for war crimes. But in the peacetime that followed, thousands of women and girls - abducted from Eastern Europe and forced to work as sex slaves in the bars and brothels became fair game for the thousands of U.N. peacekeepers and international aid workers who poured into the region. The irony is ugly," Mr. Malarek concludes.

Mr. Malarek quotes the police commander of the Tel Aviv district who said, in 2001, "There are now about 200,000 foreign workers and tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the Tel Aviv area. What can you do? They simply need sex services." But, according to an Israeli human rights lawyer, "This claim borders on the ridiculous, since the prostitutes themselves claim that the biggest users are Israeli men, then Arab men and then migrant workers In the north part of Tel Aviv, the biggest group of Israelis frequenting the brothels are the religious men."

Others play the charity card - "These chicks are poor and I'm helping to feed their families" - which Mr. Malarek calls the absolute height of hypocrisy. "The actions of these global sex prowlers are directly responsible for the explosion in the trafficking of women and girls."

Mr. Malarek describes some attempts to deal with the problem. He writes about people, like the Canadian police officer Gordon Moon who signed up in June 2000 to work as an international cop for the United Nations in Kosovo. He formed the Trafficking and Prostitution Investigation Unit and raids of flesh pits began. Mr. Moon is quoted as saying that 95 percent of the women and girls pulled out of those places were trafficked. He writes about the work of LaStrada - a nongovernmental organization in Kyiv dedicated to fighting trafficking - and how it affected the rescue of a woman trafficked in Montenegro, where a Serb and his Ukrainian wife had invited a group of Ukrainian women to work as waitresses at their restaurant but sold them to a nightclub owner. But such investigations and rescue attempts are on an individual basis. Broader initiatives are usually thwarted by corruption or politics.

Mr. Malarek describes what happened to the Victims of Trafficking and the Violence Protection Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in October 2000 which, he says, was heralded as a hopeful sign that the United States would use its power and influence to coerce complacent and complicit governments into action against trafficking. One of the sticks was the publication of annual State Department reports on how countries were dealing with the problem of trafficking and ranking them into three tiers: Tier 1 was for nations fully compliant with the minimum standards; Tier 2 for those who were making significant effort; and the infamous Tier 3 for those who were not even trying. Beginning in 2003, countries in Tier 3 would be subject to economic sanctions.

In the first year, 23 countries ended up in Tier 3 including Greece, Russia, South Korea and Israel - the Unites States' major ally in the Middle East. This was seen as a signal that the U.S. was serious about the issue. But after the first report, Mr. Malarek writes, "cell phones started ringing all over Washington" and by the third report in 2003, when sanctions were to kick in, Russia, South Korea and Israel had all managed to jump out of Tier 3, with South Korea where, the U.S. was reminded, it had a hundred military bases, pole-vaulting from Tier 3 to Tier 1 in a single year.

By 2003, the only countries that were still in Tier 3 were (except for Greece) of no significant interest to the United States. Undersecretary Paula Dobriansky appeared before the House Committee on International Relations and said that, in ranking the countries, political considerations were not a factor, Mr. Malarek reports. She claimed that what constitutes significant effort is a judgment call which different people see differently.

Why is trafficking continuing to thrive? The main reason, of course, is the amount of money to be made out of the sex trade. But there is also the fear of those unwilling to testify while the ones willing to testify find themselves facing cops who are not willing to investigate, Mr. Malarek notes. Women caught in the sex trade live in fear of deportation to their home countries where the contact men who had sent them in the first place wait with open arms.

Mr. Malarek points out that there is a link between legalized prostitution in countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Australia and the trafficking for the sex trade. There are few Dutch women in the brothels of Amsterdam and in Germany, 75 percent of those involved in legal prostitution are foreigners, 80 percent of whom come from Central and Eastern European countries.

Mr. Malarek concludes that "the only thing that will send the thugs involved in trafficking scurrying back into their rat holes is the full force of the law - unwavering prosecution, heavy prison time and confiscation of all profits amassed on the backs of these women. Applying the full force of law is also the only way to get through to the corrupt cops and public officials that enable the trade to thrive."

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