DREAMS OF
BETTER LIFE END IN A NIGHTMARE OF SEXUAL SLAVERY
Chicago
Tribune
January 3,
2001
By Dave Montgomery
Knight Ridder/Tribune
DNIPRODZERZHYNSK, Ukraine -- It was the simple
dream of working in an honest job for a modestly better life that got
Yelena into trouble. Like so many others, she ended up forced into sex
slavery and imprisoned in brothels and dreary hotel rooms while her
captors stood guard. "I can't tell you how many patrons I
had," said Yelena, who asked that her last name not be used.
"It was a very long chain of buying and selling and
reselling."
Interviewed in her hometown of Dniprodzerzhynsk, a
mill town of 284,000 on the Dnieper River, Yelena said she was trying to
leave a life of poverty to become a waitress in Yugoslavia. But shortly
after she crossed the border nine months ago, this single mother's
dreams of modest upward mobility disintegrated into a nightmare.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine
and neighboring Russia have emerged as leading exporters of women in
bondage. Even homeless children have fallen victim to unscrupulous sex
traffickers. The rise of the sex trade is a direct spin-off of the
collapse of austere yet relatively stable Soviet society, which has been
turned upside down by the chaotic entry of raw capitalism.
The ease with which women fall prey to the trade is
rooted partly in an unfortunate paradox of post-Soviet life: The
freedoms and social liberties suddenly bestowed on young women such as
Yelena over the past decade also have left them especially vulnerable to
exploitation.
No longer confined inside the predictable if
restrictive world of the Iron Curtain, women from the former Soviet
Union easily succumb to deceptive ads and word-of-mouth tales of jobs in
other countries, from secretaries to nightclub hostesses. And once they
fall prey to the false promises of a better life, many find it
impossible to escape the sordid world of the sex trade to return to a
normal life.
The push for women to leave the old Soviet areas is
powerful, because women account for up to 90 percent of the unemployed
and are usually the first fired. In the depressed industrial cities of
eastern Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of men and women alike are out of
work and barely subsisting. In Dniprodzerzhynsk, Yelena was making an
average of $15 a month selling newspapers on the street to support
herself and her 7-year-old daughter. Her utility bills had gone unpaid
for years, and her monthly income was barely enough to buy food for a
week. "If people had a good life here, they wouldn't look for work
abroad," said Yelena. "In spite of the fact I worked, it was
not enough to live on and there was no hope for tomorrow."
Under the circumstances, she was an easy target. At
31, Yelena's age and heavy build made her less marketable than the
willowy teenagers and 20-year-olds preferred by traffickers tricking or
abducting women into sexual slavery. But so voracious is the demand,
there are many women like her in the global sex market.
The misleading solicitation came from someone she
knew, a friend of a friend. In the spring of 1999, she met a woman named
Nadeshda through a mutual acquaintance. Nadeshda, whom Yelena described
as a charming woman in her middle 40s with dyed blond hair, persuaded
her and another friend to go to Yugoslavia, where she said a restaurant
owner was paying waitresses up to $200 a month. "We trusted
her," Yelena recalled. "I was a little afraid, but the desire
to have a good life was much stronger."
Leaving her daughter with her parents, Yelena and
her friend Ira joined another woman named Marina and headed to
Yugoslavia with Nadeshda. Instead of winding up in a fashionable
restaurant in a big city, as promised, they were taken to a seedy,
nameless cafe.The proprietor made it clear immediately that he expected
them to work as prostitutes, and reprimanded Nadeshda for bringing women
in their 30s instead of young girls.
Yelena and her companions refused, and later were
fired when Marina tried to kill herself with an overdose of pills.
Without money and unable to return home, the women accepted a man's
offer to find work in another town in Yugoslavia. "We thought we
were lucky," she recalled. "Now we know we were deeply
mistaken." They were taken to a two-room flat occupied by 10 other
women, all in their early 20s. "They were crying and afraid,"
Yelena recalled. "Before our arrival, nine or 10 men had come into
the flat and had sex with them against their will. We started talking to
the girls and it appeared we had been sold."
For Yelena, it was the start of what she described
as a pattern of "sell, sell, sell." Yelena said she was sold
and resold at least a dozen times for up to $2,000, in a human
trafficking network that took her from Yugoslavia through Albania and
into Italy. Locked in rooms without a telephone, she struggled to keep
her sanity by writing poetry and drawing on the walls.
Her last owner was a middle-aged Albanian who told
Yelena he paid $2,000 for her and insisted that she work off the price
through prostitution. She managed to escape when a sympathetic client
took her to a priest, who helped arrange her return to the Ukraine
through an international anti-trafficking organization called La Strada.
Since returning home, she has tried to resume a
sense of normality in the town from which she once sought escape.
"On the one hand, I'm happy to be home," she said. "On
the other hand, I feel certain difficulties psychologically. It's still
difficult to find a job; it's still difficult to bring up a child. It's
the same world I left." Tragic as it is, Yelena's tale is nothing
compared with the sorrow of homeless children who are bought and sold
like cattle. Most of the children in Russia's sex market are runaways,
with at least one alcoholic parent, but a growing number are orphans,
experts say.
In Vyborg, an ancient Northeast Russian city just
20 miles south of the Finnish border, male and female prostitutes as
young as 12 and 13 serve as an added lure to the city's vibrant tourist
trade. Finnish tourists often arrive in Vyborg with maps in hand,
showing the houses where they can purchase sex with teenagers for as
little as $10 an hour.
Vyborg police recently raided an apartment where a
Finnish man was running a prostitution ring with 14- and 15-year-old
girls. In St. Petersburg, about 88 miles to the southeast, police
recently broke up a sex ring operated by a middle-aged man nicknamed
"Cobra," who invited 10- to 12-year-old boys into an apartment
laden with vodka and food and sold their services to adult male clients
for $100 apiece.
The children's stories are much like that of Julia,
a 15-year-old blond with a ponytail. One night, after watching her
father drink himself into a stupor, as he had done night after night
throughout most of her life, she poured his vodka down the toilet. After
he finished beating her, she fled to a children's shelter in St.
Petersburg.
There, another girl persuaded her to meet two
Azerbaijani men at a cafe near a St. Petersburg subway station. Looking
downward as she clutched a small black and white stuffed dog, Julia
recalled the terrifying two weeks that followed.
The two men took Julia and her friend to an
apartment, where they were forced to stay in a room and have sex with
strangers. Once, a man ripped her clothes off and shoved her to the bed.
She ran into the kitchen to escape but was confronted by three other men
who ordered her back to the room.
When she was able to escape, she ran back to the
shelter but said she didn't go to police, afraid the men would hunt her
down and slash her face. Like most of the other victims, Julia felt
helpless." I just want to forget," she said. Thousands of
other women and children have equally tragic stories.
The U.S. government estimates that traffickers
abduct 55,000 women from Russia and 35,000 from Ukraine each year.
Precise statistics are impossible to acquire, given the shadowy nature
of the business, but analysts think the number of reported cases
constitutes no more than a third of the actual number.
The U.S. government believes that as many as
100,000 women are smuggled throughout all 15 former Soviet countries
annually and sold into international prostitution. The estimates are
compiled by U.S. intelligence analysts, based on extrapolations from the
number of known cases. Popular destinations include Germany, Albania,
Yugoslavia and Turkey, as well as distant countries such as Israel, the
United Arab Emirates, China and the United States.
An estimated 4,000 women from former Soviet
countries and Eastern Europe have been shipped to American cities.
Florida is a popular U.S. destination, with women being sent to Miami,
Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, Palm Beach and the Panhandle, according to U.S.
intelligence. Most of them are brought from Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic
States and Central Europe.
Some women knowingly cross the border to become
prostitutes, willing to accept the social stigma that goes with the
profession in exchange for a prospective good life. Prostitutes who work
the ring road around the Ukrainian capital of Kiev say they are
frequently approached by men offering jobs in foreign countries.
Valentina, a 23-year-old prostitute, said two men recently offered her a
job at a cafe in Germany and agreed to help arrange a passport and a
visa. A few weeks later, several men offered to escort her and a group
of friends to Israel for $1,000 a month plus a bonus. "Sure,
there's a risk, but it's a way to make money," she said. But
Valentina said she rejected the offers because she felt safer in Kiev.
Istanbul, a centuries-old city that links Asia and
Europe, is a major shipment point in sex trafficking. A 23-year-old
woman who identified herself as Lada described how she sought refuge
abroad three years ago to escape a broken marriage in her hometown of
Nishny Novgorod, Russia. A friend recruited her for a job in Istanbul's
garment industry but when she arrived, she was introduced to a chubby
bearded man named Mustafa. He took her to a hotel and gave her cheap
Turkish perfume and a flowered dress. He then introduced her to a
60-year-old client, adding: "I wish you luck. Now go to work."
When she refused, she said, Mustafa beat her and locked her in a
sixth-story apartment from which she was unable to escape. Fearing
further beatings, Lada said, she eventually complied and was forced to
have sex with dozens of men over the next three months. Although she
escaped, she said, she was unable to find work and drifted back into
prostitution.
Another young Russian prostitute working at an
outdoor restaurant in a red-light district in Istanbul said she was
attracted to the profession by the popular American film "Pretty
Woman." In the movie, Julia Roberts plays a prostitute who becomes
romantically entangled with a wealthy industrialist played by Richard
Gere.
For thousands of women their stories hardly have
that kind of happy ending.