From Russia without Love: The "Fourth Wave" of Global Human Trafficking

Demokratizatsiya, Winter 2004 by Granville, Johanna

Another recent publication, Migrant Trafficking and Human Smuggling in Europe, aims to "assess the current state of knowledge" about how all forms of human trafficking (not just sex-related) operate in three countries: Poland, Hungary, and the Ukraine. The study is based on interviews of 108 trafficked migrants and 50 officials from a variety of agencies concerned with trafficking (IOM 200, 333). Because of its porous eastern border and geostrategic position in the center of Europe, Ukraine is one of the main transit points for illegal migrants. According to border guard data, Afghanistan (24 percent) is the most significant source of migrants, followed by Iraq (14 percent), India (13 percent), and Sri Lanka (9 percent)-not because of any special ties between these countries and Ukraine, but because of the latter's location (349). In contrast to the authors of Torgovlya Liud'mi, the authors of Migrant Trafficking (personnel in IOM) attribute the rise in illegal migration and trafficking less to global economic trends and more to tangible factors, such as the lack of effective visa policies, immigration controls, increased difficulty of entry into Western countries, expanded market for services that facilitate irregular migration, and lack of clear Ukrainian legislation to deter and combat trafficking activities (332, 344).

Migrant Trafficking is not truly comparative. Although each case study is constructed uniformly, complete with identical subheadings, the book lacks a concluding chapter to analyze all three cases. The beginning chapters contain summaries of trafficking in general but not comparisons across the three case studies.

Although the lifting of the Iron Curtain in 1989 precipitated trafficking from the former communist bloc countries, sex tourism and trafficking from Africa and Southeast Asia has flourished since the 1960s. For example, nearly every night in Thailand, pimps from brothels will take a virginal girl as young as eleven or twelve years old, by gunpoint, torture, or drug injection, to a hotel room rented for the occasion and beat her until she allows a Chinese or Thai man to deflower her. Believing that sex with a virgin will reawaken sexual virility and prolong life, wealthy Chinese and Sino-Thais (as well as Chinese sex tourists from Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong) willingly pay between five thousand and fifty thousand baht (two hundred to two thousand dollars) for the opportunity. Other Thai men do not think a girl's virginity provides yang (or coolness) to quench and slow the yin (or heat) of the aging process, but they still prefer virgins, fearing HIV infection and assuming that virgins cannot carry the virus. If a customer demands a virgin and the brothel happens to be short of one, the pimp will send thugs to the villages to kidnap one.

In Disposable People, Kevin Bales writes forcefully and eloquently, arousing indignation in the reader with his vignettes of individuals struggling to cope with their lives of entrapment. The book contains seven chapters describing the trafficking and forced prostitution and labor in Thailand, Mauritania, Brazil, Pakistan, and India. The first chapter contrasts the "old" slavery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the "new" slavery of today. Bales argues that the old slavery was characterized by legal ownership of slaves, high purchase cost, low profit, shortage of potential slaves, long-term relationships, and the importance of ethnic differences. By contrast, the new slavery is characterized by the absence of legal ownership, low purchase cost, high profit, surplus of potential slaves, short-term relationships, and the unimportance of ethnic differences (15). Some of the factors critical in the shift from the old to new slavery include the surge in the global population since World War II (from about 2 billion people to more than 5.7 billion) and the rapid social and economic change that has taken place in all countries, especially in those areas where slavery is most prevalent today-Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and Arab countries (12). As any economist would predict, the value of a commodity decreases as its quantity increases; human lives are no exception. Bales estimates that about 27 million "disposable" slaves exist in the world today. When they become ill and cannot work, they are replaced quickly with younger, healthier slaves.