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Factbook on Global Sexual
Exploitation
Israel
Trafficking
There are no official numbers regarding the extent of prostitution and
the traffic of women in Israel, but there is a general consensus that it is becoming more
prevalent. (CEDAW Report, 8 April 1997)
There has been a steady increase in the numbers of foreign women involved in
prostitution who are arrested for illegal stays in Israel and who are detained before
being deported to their home-countries; in over 95% of the cases, they were from the
former USSR. The average time these women spend in prison is 50 days. The women themselves
are supposed to pay for their expenses to leave Israel, but when their resources are
inadequate, the Ministry of Interior finances their deportation from a special budget.
(Authorities, Neve Tirza women's prison, CEDAW Report, 8 April 1997)
Traffickers and pimps earned US$50,000 - 100,000 a year from each prostituted woman,
resulting in a US$450 million sex industry. ("A modern form of slavery," The
Jerusalem Post, 13 January 1998)
1,500 Russian and Ukrainian trafficked women have been deported from 1995-1997. (Michael
Specter, "Traffickers’ New Cargo: Naive Slavic Women," New York Times,
11 January 1998)
Russian women are bought and sold by pimps in Israel for prices ranging from US$5,000
to $20,000. (Police sources, "'Invisible' Women Shown In Russia's Demographics,"
Martina Vandenberg, St. Petersburg Times, 13 October 1997)
A small brothel with ten women can make up to 750,000 shekels a month (US $215,000).
(Michael Specter, "Traffickers’ New Cargo: Naive Slavic Women," New York
Times, 11 January 1998)
Women trafficked from Eastern Europe, were stripped and sold naked as slaves to Tel
Aviv traders for US$500-1,000. Smuggling, fraudulent documents, collaboration between
police and brothel owners are involved. There are routine brutal beatings and sexual
abuse. (New York Times 11 January 1998)
The non-profit Israel Women's Network estimates
that 70% of prostituted women in Tel Aviv, Israel's commercial center, come from the
former Soviet republics, and that about 1,000 women are brought into Israel illegally each
year. At any one time, as many as 100 women may be awaiting deportation in Neve Tirza
women's prison near Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion airport, a prison spokeswoman said. (Elisabeth
Eaves, "Israel not the promised land for Russian sex slaves", Reuters, 23 August
1998)
A poll by the Women's Network showed 44% of Israelis
believed all Russian immigrant women provided sexual services for pay. Illegal immigrants
in Israel, who are mostly Russian, are often stereotyped as having brought crime and
prostitution while exploiting Israeli laws enabling anyone with a Jewish grandparent to
immigrate.(Elisabeth Eaves, "Israel not the promised land for Russian sex
slaves," Reuters, 23 August 1998)
Official Response and Action
While trafficked women are frequently arrested as illegal
workers, the men who brought them to Israel -- many of whom are Israeli citizens -- are
not. Justice Ministry spokeswoman Etty Eshed said the government would think about making
legal changes to address trafficking in the "near future" but had no date or
plan for doing so. (Elisabeth Eaves, "Israel not the promised land for Russian sex
slaves," Reuters, 23 August 1998)
Police in Israel say they are powerless to stop the flow of
trafficked women until the laws change. "They (trafficked women) are very much afraid
to come to the police and complain, so the police really can't do anything," said
spokeswoman Linda Menuhin. "The problem is there is no law against trafficking
people, and no law against prostitution." Rachel Benziman, legal adviser to the
Israel Women's Network, said there are a variety of crimes -- rape, abduction, battery,
deceit and theft -- which the authorities rarely bother to prosecute for, even though they
have the power to do so. "It's not a problem of finding the right section in the
criminal code. It is more a problem of finding the women who will testify and finding the
motivation. When it comes to drug dealing, the police don't wait for someone to come into
their office and say they have found drugs. They look for it. We expect them to do the
same thing for the trafficking of women -- but they don't," she said. (Elisabeth
Eaves, "Israel not the promised land for Russian sex slaves," Reuters,
23 August 1998)
Policy and Law
Israel does not have a specific law against the sale of human beings. (Michael Specter,
"Traffickers’ New Cargo: Naive Slavic Women," New York Times, 11
January 1998)
There is no law related to bringing women from another country into Israel for
prostitution. (CEDAW Report, 8 April 1997)
If trafficked and prostituted women are caught they are deported. Since 1994, not one
woman has testified against a trafficker. (Betty Lahan, director of Neve Tirtsa Prison,
Michael Specter, "Traffickers’ New Cargo: Naive Slavic Women," New York
Times, 11 January 1998)
Case
One woman’s story:
Lyubov, 17, arrived in Israel from a Russian coal mining city
only to be sold into prostitution. Now she sits in a prison cell awaiting expulsion as an
illegal worker. Six months ago, a man in Lyubov's hometown told the young woman he could
get her a plane ticket, a visa and a job abroad. She entered Israel with a tour group and
was met by a hotel owner who befriended her and gave her a job as a cleaner in exchange
for a room. The hotel owner introduced her to friends, showed her around and taught her
some Hebrew until one day he told her to get out of his car and into another. Then he
drove away. "At first I didn't know I had been sold. Then my owner told me he had
bought me for $9,000," Lyubov said in an interview in a prison office. Her new
"owner," as she calls him, told her she would work as a call girl.
It was the beginning of a stint as an unpaid prostitute -- part
of an international crime phenomenon which women's groups see as a modern slave trade.
Lyubov's "owner" kept her and eight other women in two apartments. He never paid
any of them but instead said they were indebted to him for their plane tickets and every
expense incurred, from doctors' visits to haircuts. Transported to clients by drivers and
often under guard, Lyubov had sex with an average of six men a day for about $75 an hour.
All she could keep were tips. She worked round the clock, seven days a week, with no
holidays except for Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. "You have to
have very strong nerves to do this kind of work," she said.
Life in Russia was very difficult. "There were days when I
had nothing to eat," Lyubov said. She weighed 50 kg (110 pounds) when she left
Russia, and gained 20 kg (45 pounds) after arriving in Israel. She said circumstances had
made it hard for her to quit (leave her "owner"). "I came into this circle
and then it was very hard to get out. My papers were fake, I had no money, I had no
acquaintances and I was in an enclosed place," she said. The nearest police station
was across the road from the apartment where Lyubov was kept but she never went there,
inhibited, like many others, by the double bind of fear of her owner and fear of
deportation. "I kept hoping some day I would earn some money. But when they actually
caught me, I was relieved," she said. (Elisabeth Eaves, "Israel not the promised
land for Russian sex slaves," Reuters, 23 August 1998)
Prostitution
There are over 10,00 women in prostitution in Tel Aviv. (CEDAW Report, 8
April 1997)
Men pay for 25,000 acts of prostitution every day. There are 250,000 foreign male
workers who help create a demand for prostituted women. Women are held in apartments, bars
and brothels where they are bought by up to 15 men a day. They sleep in shifts, four to a
bed. (Police officials, Michael Specter, "Traffickers’ New Cargo: Naive Slavic
Women," New York Times, 11 January 1998)
The Russian mafia has moved into Israel to profit from trafficking and prostitution.
Police in Israel have been keeping around 30 organized key crime suspects under
surveillance. (Kevin Connolly, "How Russia’s mafia is taking over Israel’s
underworld," BBC, 3 April 1998)
£2.5 billion (US$4 billion) of organized crime money from the former Soviet Union has
been invested in Israeli real estate, businesses and banks in the past seven years.
Gregory Lerner, who was arrested in 1997 for defrauding four Russian banks of £70 million
(US$106 million), was reputedly sent to Israel to head up one of the money laundering
operations. One highly profitable area in which organized crime thrives is prostitution.
Dozens of brothels and peepshows have sprung up in Tel Aviv and Haifa in the last few
years. (Former police chief Asaf Hefetz, Kevin Connolly "How Russia’s mafia is
taking over Israel’s underworld" BBC, (3 April 1998)
Israel's
demand for prostituted women may be bolstered by three groups -- foreign workers, Orthodox
Jews and Arabs. Many of Israel's nearly 200,000 legal and illegal foreign workers are
young, unattached men likely to buy sex. (Elisabeth Eaves, "Israel not the promised
land for Russian sex slaves", Reuters, 23 August 1998)
Amir, a Tel Aviv pimp, said a woman could cost up
to $20,000, depending on her looks. "It's like a car. It depends how valuable she
is," he said, standing on a street lined with flashing lights advertising brothels
near Tel Aviv's old central bus station. Arabs and Orthodox Jews have "very strong
taboos against sexual connections outside of marriage and therefore go to a place where
they can do it more anonymously. It's a matter of supply and demand," he said.
(Elisabeth Eaves, "Israel not the promised land for Russian sex slaves,"
Reuters, 23 August 1998)
Health and Well-being
In Israel, there is a significant correlation between prostitution and drug abuse.
Of the 200 women prisoners in Neve-Tirza Women’s Prison, 70% are drug-addicts (mainly
to heroine, which is the most common drug in Israel);10% are in a process of getting
treated. Of the 80% with drug addictions, over 60% were involved in prostitution in order
to finance their addiction. (Neve Tirza prison's officials, CEDAW Report, 8 April 1997)
Case
The Tropicana in Tel Aviv is one of the busiest brothels. The women are all Russian.
There are 12 cubicles where 20 women work in shifts, 8 during the daytime, 12 at night.
Buyers are Israeli soldiers, business executives, tourists, and foreign workers. The
brothel owner said, "Israelis love Russian girls. They are blonde and good looking,
and they are desperate. They are ready to do anything for money." (Michael Specter,
"Traffickers’ New Cargo: Naive Slavic Women," New York Times, 11
January 1998)
Policy and Law
Within the legal framework it is theoretically possible to criminally charge the
clientele of the sex-industry under at least one section, namely section 210 of the Penal
Law-1977, which states that approaching a minor under 16 or an adult woman with indecent
insinuations is punishable by up to three months in prison. This section however, has
never been enforced against clients of prostitutes. (CEDAW Report, 8 April 1997)
The current Israeli legal framework for dealing with prostitution is based upon the
abolitionist approach. However, the current legal arrangement and its method of
enforcement suffer from inconsistencies and lack of protocol for dealing with the reality
of prostitution. (CEDAW Report, 8 April 1997)
Prostitution in itself is not, and has never been, a crime under Israeli law, and the
woman who engages in prostitution is not considered a criminal. The legal system engages
in selective prohibition, by criminalizing exploitive conducts that surround prostitution,
so that both the exploitative and practical aspects of prostitution are criminalized.
Engaging in prostitution as a client or sponsor is a criminal act, while prostitution
itself is not. (CEDAW Report, 8 April 1997)
"Procurement," defined as living off the profits or taking all or some
profits from a woman who engages in prostitution, and solicitation of a woman to engage in
prostitution, are crimes according to sections 199-201 of the Penal Law-1977, punishable
by 5 years in prison, and up to 7 years under aggravating circumstances. Such aggravated
circumstances include the following: when the woman is a minor under 18 years old; when
the woman is the perpetrator's daughter, wife, or when he is her custodian, teacher, or
otherwise in charge of her; when the perpetrator accused of soliciting was armed during
the act. Case law, however, had interpreted solicitation to mean proven engagement in
prostitution, thus making it much more difficult to prosecute for solicitation. Under
section 202 of the Penal Law, soliciting a woman to leave her home with the intention of
engaging her in prostitution is punishable by 5 years imprisonment, and if the woman is a
minor - by up to seven years. Soliciting a woman to leave the country for the same purpose
is also punishable by seven years. Section 207 imposes mandatory imprisonment on
perpetrators convicted under sections 199-202, with no possibility of a suspended
sentence. This is a highly unusual provision in the context of the Israeli criminal law
and indicates the gravity that the legislator had attributed to these crimes. (CEDAW
Report, 8 April 1997)
Laws against procurement and soliciting are rarely enforced. Instead, the prostitutes
themselves are often arrested, not for engaging in prostitution - since that is not a
criminal offense, but for related practices such as the enticement of others to engage in
indecent acts in public places, a felony punishable by three months in prison, according
to section 209(a). Usually prostitutes are released after several hours, but sometimes
they are charged under section 209(a), which was never intended to serve as a regulation
of prostitution, or under section 216(a)(5) which prohibits "strolling." Another
criminal offense directly applicable to women who engage in prostitution, is section
215(c) which states that being in a place for the purpose of engaging in prostitution, in
circumstances which pose disturbance to neighbors or obstruction of traffic is punishable
by up to one year in prison. (CEDAW Report, 8 April 1997)
Public Action
There has been a proliferation of sex industry advertisements in daily newspapers. An
ad-hoc public committee offered guidelines to publishers regarding these concerns. The
significant consequences of this initiative were: 1) the cessations of advertisements that
specifically mentioned or alluded to the age (under 18) of the women whose
sex-services were being advertised. 2) The moderation of the overall tone of these ads and
the pictures which accompany them. (CEDAW Report, 8 April 1997)
Pornography
There is a growing market for child-pornography in Israel. It is not
produced in Israel, but is imported and sold freely in response to growing demand. The use
of child pornography is explicitly dealt with under the section 214 of the Penal Code,
which prohibits the publication and presentation of obscene materials. (CEDAW Report, 8
April 1997)
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Factbook on Global Sexual Exploitation
Donna M. Hughes, Laura Joy Sporcic, Nadine Z. Mendelsohn and Vanessa Chirgwin
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