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Book Review The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade A review by Borys Prokopovych The “Natashas ” are part of a vast new underground economy—the trafficking of women and children. Groups like Amnesty International and UNICEF have been sounding the alarm about this modern day slavery for years. Now a new book by reporter Victor Malarek—The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade (Viking, Toronto, Canada, 2003. 274 pages, $36)—paints a harrowing picture of this merchandising of human beings. According to the UN, the buying and selling of human flesh for the worldwide sex industry is organized crime's fastest growing business with up to 2 million people worldwide—mostly women and children—trafficked into the sex trade every year. The name “Natasha” is the generic name given to the estimated 900,000 girls and women who are trafficked over international borders into sexual slavery each year. Most of these women are smuggled into the Middle East, Asia, and North America. The trafficking of human beings is now the third-largest moneymaking venture in the world, after illegal weap ons and drugs, generating about $12 billion a year in illicit income. Malarek's book begins with the story of Ma rika, a 19-year old Ukrainian woman who accepts a job as a waitress in Tel Aviv that she found through a job agency. As soon as she gets off the plane, she is whisked away with three other girls and locked in a room with no beds, no food, and no water. The next day they are told to disrobe and are looked over by the owner. He tells them they have been purchased for $10,000 each and will be his property until they can pay him $20,000. Their only way to make money is to have sex with men unknown to them. They are beaten and raped when they disobey any of the owners' and clients' demands. In the two years he spent researching this hei nous international problem, Victor Malarek has gath ered hundreds of these stories The trafficking of women is, in essence, modem slavery. Lured by the promise of jobs overseas, millions of women leave their homes, hoping to reduce the poverty in which their families live or simply to escape political oppres sion. When they apply for these generally nonexistent jobs, they are kidnapped by traffickers, smuggled across borders, and sold into sexual slavery. For the traffickers, it is a lucrative enterprise. It is very much a “win-win” type of business: the “exporter” can make several thousand dollars a head, with very little overhead, while the “owner” can usually make back his initial investment within a few days. By forcing the women under his control to work as many as 15 hours a day, six or seven days a week, and paying them only enough for food and cigarettes, a pimp can rake in anywhere from $75,000 to $250,000 per woman, according to the police agency Interpol. Moreover the “risk-benefit ratio” is much better than mnning guns or peddling drugs because legal sanctions tend to be much lighter—when they are enforced at all. There is no lack of raw material. In the old Soviet bloc, the return of capitalism since 1990 has been an unmitigated disaster for the great majority of the population. Unemployment is rampant, the social safety net has been all but destroyed, and living standards have collapsed—in short, there is destitution on a colossal scale. Desperate people are easy prey. An ad in a local paper promising jobs in the West as secretaries, models, waitresses or nannies nets hundreds of applicants. Or there are orphanages where a crop of 16 or 17-year-olds can easily be “harvested,” since the cash-strapped institutions are only too glad to have these children taken off their hands, and some officials knowingly collude with a supposedly long- lost “uncle” or “aunt” who suddenly turns up to take a girl “home.” “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, БЕРЕЗЕНЬ 2004 17
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