Ukraine: Women sex trafficked

Off Our Backs, Apr 1998 by Douglas, Carol Anne

Irina had always assumed that her beauty would somehow rescue her from the poverty and hopelessness of village life. A few months ago, after answering an ad in a small Ukrainian newspaper, she slipped off a tour boat when it put in at Haifa, where she hoped to make money dancing naked on the tops of tables. Then, one morning, she was driven to a brothel, where her boss burned her passport before her eyes.

It happens every single day. Not just in Israel, which has deported nearly 1,500 Russian and Ukrainian women in the past three years, but throughout the world. The United Nations estimates that 4 million people (mostly women) are trafficked each year, forced through lies and coercion to work against their will in many types of servitude.

Many end up like Irina. Stunned and outraged by the sudden order to prostitute herself, she simply refused. She was beaten and raped before she succumbed. Then the brothel was raided, and she was brought to New Tirtsa, the only women's prison in Israel. Now, like hundreds of Ukranian and Russian women with no documents or obviously forged ones, she is waiting to be sent home.

Centered in Moscow and Kiev, the networks trafficking Russian and Ukrainian women run east to Japan and Thailand, where thousands of young Slavic women work against their will as prostitutes, and west to the Adriatic Coast and well beyond. The routes are controlled by Russian gangs based in Moscow.

Women often start their hellish journey assuming that they will get a job in a foreign country at wages they would never receive at home. They are told that they will pick oranges or work as dancers or waitresses. Others have decided to try their luck at prostitution, usually for what they assume will be a few lucrative months. They have no idea of the violence that awaits them.

The women are held in apartments, bars, and brothels, and required to service as many as 15 men a day. Often they sleep in shifts, four to a bed. Few ever testify. Those who do risk death. Last year in Istanbul, Turkey, two women were thrown to their deaths from a balcony while six of their Russian friends watched. In Serbia last year, a woman who refused to work as a prostitute was beheaded in public, according to a Ukrainian woman who escaped.

Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Belarus and Russia, have replaced Thailand and the Philippines as the epicenter of the global business in trafficking women. The Ukrainian problem has been worsened by a ravaged economy, an atrophied system of law enforcement, and criminal gangs. Most of the thousands of Ukrainian women who go abroad to work each year are illegal immigrants who are not being trafficked sexually. Often they apply for a legal visa -- to dance, or work in a bar -- and then stay after it expires. Many go to Turkey and Germany, where Russian crime groups are particularly powerful. Officials in Italy now estimate that at least 30,000 Ukrainian women are employed there illegally. Most women who immigrate are domestic workers, but a growing number are prostitutes, some of them having been promised work as domestics only to find out that the proposed jobs were a lie.

On a trip to Ukraine late last year, Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke out about the new slave trade that has developed rapidly there. The United States and the European Union have plans to work together to educate young women about the dangers of working abroad. Other initiatives, like stays of deportation for prisoners, victims' shelters, and counseling, have also been discussed.

--info from Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women Bulletin, February 1998