In the Anteroom of Hell
ADAM DUNN interviews VICTOR MALAREK on his book, The Natashas
Cobrapost News Features | Uploaded on 6 January 2006
The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade
By Victor Malarek (Arcade, 2005, 304 pages)
From the US State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs, 5/24/04:
Trafficking in persons is modern-day slavery, involving victims who are forced, defrauded or coerced into labor or sexual exploitation. Annually, about 600,000 to 800,000 people — mostly women and children — are trafficked across national borders which does not count millions trafficked within their own countries. People are snared into trafficking by many means. In some cases, physical force is used. In other cases, false promises are made regarding job opportunities or marriages in foreign countries to entrap victims.
The point is that such numbers are not verifiable. There is no accurate way to determine just how many people are force-fed into the ravenous maw of the sex industry, just as it is impossible to determine just how many billions of dollars are made from their bodies by those human only in name who know neither satiation nor mercy.
The figures change according to context — look at it from the standpoint of, say, immigration, law enforcement, or global HIV infection rates, and you will get different sets of figures each time. One way to try to give form to the horrific, all-too-human condition of sexual profiteering is to try to examine the problem by region.
This is where guys like Victor Malarek come in. His new book, The Natashas, (the title derives from the blanket term applied to any of the women imported from Eastern Europe, be they Latvian or Moldovan) attempts to define a calamity which defies definition. Throughout the nations comprising the Russian Federation and its immediate satellites on the European side, his book describes the workings of a vast coercion machine, squeezing currency from the bodies of those he says have become a global commodity in high demand.
Malarek, 56, a Ukrainian-Canadian whose investigative journalism has won him a number of prestigious Canadian press awards, attributes his initial interest in human trafficking to his ethnicity. “Because of my Ukrainian background, people call me, friends of mine,” he said in a telephone interview from Toronto. “I got a call from someone who’d been in Istanbul. He said it was so embarrassing walking through the bazaars and hearing these young women speaking Ukrainian, and then finding out they’re prostitutes.” Malarek began combing through wire stories, US State Department reports, even CIA reports, before “I decided to pick a couple of areas to visit and see what’s going on.”
Victor Malarek (left) and a map (right) showing the global network of prostitution he covers in his book. Author photo by Tibor Kolley
This was not entirely unfamiliar territory for Malarek. Aside from his professional experience in crime and war-zone reporting, he brought a special quality to his inquiry, one which his trade may well frown upon: empathy. Shuffled through a succession of Montreal foster homes, the young Malarek spent four years in a “Dickensian” juvenile facility: “180 boys from 10 to 17, warehoused and controlled by fear. The staff was sadistic, and most of the boys, who were from broken homes like me, were pent up with rage. Not a good mix.” Years later, the same scenario gave Malarek his calling in investigative reporting. “[In 1971] I learned through a couple of boys that had escaped from a Juvenile Detention Centre that three boys had hanged themselves with skate laces in their cells around the Christmas holidays,” he said. “These boys had been transferred to the institution from treatment centers because the staff wanted the holidays off. Trouble is, these boys had no one that wanted to take them so they were placed in solitary confinement in the cells. Their only crime was they were mentally unstable. They had not broken any laws.”
Malarek’s inclination to uncover instances of child abuse drove him around the world in search of trafficked girls. He interviewed prostitutes along the infamous Highway E-55 meat market near the Czech-German border. He posed as a john in Tel Aviv’s brothel district to gain information from the pimps. In Italy he witnessed Catholic salvage operations (Sisters of the Night, nuns who comb the back roads trying to rescue trafficked women, and Regina Pacis, a fortified safe house for rescued prostitutes run by an unflinching priest).
It was while accompanying police on a brothel raid in Ferrazaj, Kosovo, that Malarek lost his impartiality. “The thing that caught me was the fear in these girls’ eyes,” he said. “I remember a young girl, when I got her passport, I looked at her picture. It was this beautiful face of a 16-year old that said, ‘I’ve got passport, now I’m going to see the world.’ Then you take that picture and hold it up to her face, now she’s 17, she’s gone through maybe a thousand men, she looked like she’s aged decades, and scared to death…[she] looked like my teenage daughter.” Ferrazaj also taught Malarek why so few of these women ever go to the authorities for help: “They’ve been beaten and raped. They’ve been told, ‘Open your mouth and see what happens to you and your family.’ ...the girls also don’t trust [police] officers, who go in for freebies during the daytime.” Nor are peacekeeping troops trusted. Charges of sex offences by UN personnel run rampant through the Balkans; subsequently, UN peacekeepers were charged with exchanging food for sex in Congo."
The trafficking of East European women is, of course, directly linked to the ascent of Russian organized crime. While Malarek identifies five of the largest, the problem of rising ROC power worldwide (for long a red flag for the Interpol, Europol, the UN and the US State Department) is a tangled web that crosses ethnic and national boundaries. A Ukrainian syndicate may forcibly abduct girls from a village, use Albanian smugglers to get them to Russian-backed brothels in Germany, the US, Turkey or India. Or, more insidiously, women may be lured by promises of visas, passports, and good jobs in Europe or America, only to show up at the “agency” to find a pimp with a gang of thugs waiting for them. Those who resist (or not) are taken to a “breaking room”, such as the one described in the book by a survivor, a place Malarek fittingly calls “the anteroom of hell.”
Being rescued in no way guarantees things will improve for trafficked women, which accounts for their high rate of recidivism. “This is the saddest reality,” Malarek says. The women are forever tarred as whores, unwanted in their former homes. “Many have committed suicide. Many have had massive nervous breakdowns… they say upwards of 50% of rescued girls are re-trafficked. They try to escape their village, they go to a city and there’s only one thing they know how to do.”
More alarming is the rate of STD infection among trafficked women. The health implications of this are terrifying. The UN has reported explosive increases in reported cases of HIV, drug-resistant TB, and syphilis throughout the region, most visibly in Estonia, Ukraine and Russia. Support structures are nearly nonexistent: “You go back to a place like Moldova, hugely poor, it’s like the Haiti of Europe. They don’t have money even to fly the girls back, the IOM has to pay that. There’s nothing waiting for them in terms of rehabilitation.
“We feel good using the term rescue — but rescue to what? The nightmare continues. Something has to be done. These women have been brutalized, in nations you think would know better — Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, Israel, Japan, the US and Canada… these nations need to make some sort of restitution, because it’s their men and the sex trade they bring in that’s causing this. For those rescued, you have to pour in resources to help.”
There is a sadly familiar ring to this well-intended tirade, which conjures up memorable buzzwords and catch-phrases like “the war on drugs” and “Prohibition”. When it comes to human indulgence, governments attack the supply, not the demand, which time and again has only empowered the criminal element that supplies it. Perhaps if the underlying roots of why humans have distinguished themselves from the rest of the animal kingdom by sexual profiteering, then real progress might be made in stopping it.
(Cobrapost News Features)
Previous columns by ADAM DUNN:
Come One, Come All
All Together, For Now
Bad News from Home