Ticket to Nowhere
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald | March 8, 2001
Ticket to Nowhere
Russian women are sought after for the international sex trade.
by Craig Nelson
Above, A Russian poster that says “Try West”.
Russian girls are being lured to richer countries with the promise of a new life, only to find the reality is a locked room and 20 tricks a day. Craig Nelson reports.
Mariana had to admit that her friend had a point when she said: “Why stay here?” They’d both grown up in Chelyabinsk, Russia, a soot-encrusted city in the southern Urals, heart of one of the most polluted regions on earth and shrouded much of the year in countless shades of grey.
While her friend was enjoying the Mediterranean sun in Israel, Mariana was scrambling to stay afloat in a post-industrial, post-communist hell.
So, buoyed by her friend’s vague promise of a $1,000-a-month job, she boarded a plane and flew to Israel. Her hopes were quickly dashed.
In the coastal city of Ashdod, Mariana was met by two male acquaintances of her friend. They packed her into a car and then handed her over to another group of men, who took her passport and drove her to a one-storey grey building in nearby Tel Aviv. “All you have to do is pay us back,” she recalls one of the Russian-speaking men saying. Mariana, 23, had been sold into sexual bondage for $10,000.
Prostitution and sexual slavery are hardly new, and Israel is scarcely the only destination for trafficked women. Yet, aided by loosened borders and the Internet, the buying and selling of human flesh for the worldwide sex industry is now organised crime’s fastest-growing business, the United Nations says.
“Trafficking is the ugly face of globalisation,” says Pino Arlacchi, executive director of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention in Vienna.
The impoverishment of Russia and Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union has opened the flourishing cross-border sex trade to the most lucrative commodity of all: white women. Russian and Eastern European women have replaced Asian women as the trade’s most valuable cargo, law enforcement officials and anti-trafficking activists say.
So sought after are Russian women for the sex trade that the Australian Embassy in Moscow installed a tape recording last month to warn Russian girls against accepting jobs as nannies, maids, dancers, barmaids or models in Australia. It is the first embassy in the Russian capital to do so.
“It’s a preventative strategy,” the ambassador, Ruth Pearce, says. “We wanted to outline the jobs that aren’t generally available in Australia for foreigners.”
For Mariana, who asked that her full name not be published for fear of her safety, there were no warnings.
The brothel routine was brutal and efficient. She worked seven days a week, servicing up to 20 customers a day, both Jewish and Arab. Condoms and anti-bacterial soap were provided.
A man stood guard near the door of her room, furnished sparely with a bed, a dresser, a shower and a sink. She was isolated from the outside world, except for a woman who stopped each day to sell food to her and the other Russian girls. Telephone calls home to assure her parents that “work” was fine were monitored.
After about five months, Mariana was allowed to leave the one-storey grey building with a driver to meet clients at a Tel Aviv hotel. Three days later, a group of men drugged her in a cabana behind the hotel.
“Do what we say. Don’t kick and don’t scream. There’s no point in fighting,” she remembers them saying before they gang-raped her. Desperate, she tried to escape the brothel but was caught.
Finally, a sympathetic customer whom Mariana would describe only as a “Polish Jew” tipped off police. They raided the brothel, jailed Mariana and deported her two weeks later to Russia. Six months after departing Chelyabinsk, Mariana, an only child, returned to Russia, penniless.
Looking back, Mariana strikes a worldly wise tone and insists no-one is to blame for her nightmare. Besides, she shrugs: “For me to get mad doesn’t solve anything. If you close the border and put up a wall, the prices will increase.”
It’s with no apparent irony that Mariana, the child of a barricaded communist empire, invokes the icons of free trade and open borders. Yet, they helped fuel the smuggling last year of 100,000 women from Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union into international prostitution, the US Government estimates.
At the root of the flourishing trade in Slavic women is economic desperation. Average wages in Russia are $110 a month. A third of the country’s population – or 48 million people – earn less than $1 a day, the Labour Ministry says. Two-thirds of Russia’s 12.6 million unemployed are women.
Another factor causing young women to leave Russia is the simple yearning to see a world long cut off from them. During the Soviet era, foreign travel was sharply restricted, and the State-run media drew a repellent picture of life abroad to suit its anti-Western views.
In today’s Russia, enormously popular reruns of Santa Barbara are often viewed not as fiction but as documentaries pointing to a life tantalisingly within reach. Young women, visions of Pretty Woman dancing in their heads, are easily lured by newspaper advertisements offering phony jobs as dancers and waitresses in exotic locales.
But the surge in trafficking is not fed by lies and ignorance alone. Some Russian women accept overseas jobs, knowing they will be expected to work as prostitutes. They believe they can turn a few tricks, earn big money and return home, says Mariana Solomatova, an anti-trafficking activist in Chelyabinsk.
The problem is, they often lose control, falling prey to gangs and brothel owners who imprison, enslave and beat them.
For the trapped, there is little legal recourse. Trafficking is not illegal in most countries, including Russia, and Russian authorities are largely indifferent. “Why should we care if our prostitutes go abroad?” Solomatova quotes a Chelyabinsk prosecutor as saying.
With few if any risks, business is surging. Besides legal impunity, the trade in human beings has yet another appeal to organised crime: by contrast to illicit narcotics, which are used once, trafficked women pay out for a number of years.
A mix of Moscow-based crime gangs and small-time entrepreneurs are a dominant force in the trade, operating networks that run Slavic women east to Japan and South-East Asia, and west to the Balkans and Europe, according to Sally Stoecker, of the Transnational Crime and Corruption Centre at American University in Washington, DC. The traffickers provide transportation, security, false documents and contacts with brothel owners overseas.
Their merchandise is in great demand. “Russian women are thought to be more educated, more beautiful and more white than Asian women,” says Doros Michael, of the Immigrant Support Action Group in Cyprus, where women from the countries of the former Soviet Union – entering the country legally as “artists” – dominate the eastern Mediterranean island’s sex industry.
For Arlacchi, the booming trade in humans means nothing less than a resurgence of slavery, though on a scale far bigger than the slave trade between Africa and the New World.
In four centuries, about 12 million slaves were forcibly moved from Africa to the New World, Arlacchi says. By contrast, he says, up to 200 million people worldwide – many women and children ensnared in the sex trade – may be in the grips of traffickers.
“We must absolutely stop it. We have more and more victims, more and more geographical areas involved and more criminal groups than ever seeking a piece of the business,” Arlacchi says.
Mariana was just one of the estimated 2,000 Russian women who enter the Israeli sex industry every year. Some arrive legally on tourist visas, says the executive director of the Israeli section of Amnesty International, Yael Weisz-Rind. Others come ashore from cruise ships at Haifa or Ashdod, or enter Israel with false papers issued by the network of Russian and local traffickers. Still others enter as new immigrants, receiving the basic allotment of benefits given to Jews from the former Soviet Union.
While prostitution is legal in Israel, brothels are not. Yet there are more than 200 brothels, 200 sex clubs and an unknown number of firms providing call girls in a sex industry worth between $110 million and $450 million a year, says Weisz-Rind, who wrote a report last year on the trafficking of women to Israel.
Israel had no specific laws against trafficking until June last year when the Knesset approved legislation making trafficking illegal and punishable by jail terms of up to 17 years. But, Weisz-Rind says, prosecutors and judges are not using their new clout. “We don’t see any big action in this area. Judges aren’t behaving differently, handing down light sentences. The networks and pimps just go back and import more women to Israel.”
Nearly 18 months after her ordeal, Mariana, now a second-year law student, is just trying to forget. But the past is difficult to escape.
Going home was her single preoccupation while trapped in Israel, she says. Yet it is no longer a refuge. The friend who enticed her to Israel has returned to Chelyabinsk, though they don’t speak to each other anymore. It turned out she had been working as a prostitute in Israel, too.
The man who arranged her travel documents has also reappeared. Mariana has learnt he is a relative of the two men in Israel who had bought her for $10,000.
But more than the betrayals, it is the memories of suffering alone, without the knowledge of those dearest to her, that has left the deepest scar: “The most hurtful thing is that my parents don’t know what happened to me. They couldn’t stand to hear what happened …”
With that, Mariana’s voice falters and her eyes well with tears.
