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During the last decade, hundreds of thousands of women from Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Roma nia have been sold into slavery as prostitutes. Crime syndicates use a variety of methods to capture young women. Malarek provides copious examples. 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, des perate to help her starving parents, responds to a newspaper ad to work in Germany. An ambitious young graduate signs up with what appears to be a legitimate foreign corporation during a job fair at a Russian university. The author's description of what occurs next makes the reader cringe. The women, entrusting their lives to unscrupulous traffickers, are packed off to various training centres, particularly in the Balkans. Transported westward to be “broken,” they are raped, beaten, and terrorized into submission. Then they are ready to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, often in much the same way as a cattle sale. In cities such as Belgrade, Yugoslavia, stunned women stand naked in secluded apartments waiting to be bought by pimps. Here, a woman can be sold 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, burned with cigarettes 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. In Germany, up to half a million Eastern European women work as prostitutes. The streets of Italy are lined with Romanian and Moldovan teenag ers. Other serious offenders include Greece, Turkey, and South Korea; many of the “Natashas” also end up in Toronto, Chicago, or Los Angeles. Among Ma- larek's most shocking claims is that on a per capita basis the two countries with the most voracious appe tites for Eastern European women are Bosnia and Is rael. With respect to Bosnia, Malarek provides an unsavory explanation. 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 the former Yugoslavia. Malarek underscores the irony of these supposed emissaries of civilization feeding a barbaric industry with descriptions: 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. At a place called the Arizona Market in northwestern Bosnia, “The girls appear naked on stage with numbers in their hands. Men walk up, touch their flesh, inspect their skin and even look into their mouths before they make a bid.” In Israel, it is common to blame rampant pros titution on foreign guest workers. But Malarek argues that these men lack the money to buy sex. Israel's “Na tashas,” smuggled in via Egypt, service an estimated one million men a month. Many of the "clients" 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." In every country where women are trafficked, the police are involved. Enforcement is cosmetic and judges refuse to take the word of a “foreign whore” over that of a local businessman. International plans to crack down on trafficking collapsed earlier this year when the United States backed out of the projected plans to avoid imposing economic sanctions on Israel, Russia, South Korea, and Greece. Corruption opens borders and secures whatever documents are needed. The women are locked up when they are not working and have no contact with the outside world. The few who are brave enough to go to the police find themselves treated as criminals: typically they are jailed and deported as illegal aliens. Given that the police are often "customers" themselves, the sense of isolation and helplessness these women feel must be overwhelming. Brutal measures, including murder, are used against anyone attempting to escape. But for those who do manage it or who are deported, the nightmare does not end: as many as half of them end up being re- trafficked. Usually the ordeal ends only when the women are no longer marketable, often because they have contracted AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease. Then they are simply tossed aside like garbage, to make way for fresh recruits. Inevitably, the horror of it all drives some of them to suicide. Malarek posits that the most appalling aspects of the trade is the targeting of orphans throughout Eastern Europe and cites official statistics from gov ernment agencies. In March 2003, for example, the U.S. State Department reported a “pattern of traffick ing” 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 infor mation . . . to traffickers”) and are waiting for them, 18 “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, БЕРЕЗЕНЬ 2004 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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