The Natashas - The New Global Sex Trade Book By
Victor Malarek
Published by Viking Canada, 304 pages, $36
Book Review by Stephen Henighan
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." 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.
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.
Excerpt from The Natashas.
