The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade

6 A MATTER OF INDIFFERENCE

IN A TYPICAL BROTHEL RAID or street sweep in cosmopolitan cities throughout the world, foreign prostitutes are rounded up and charged. For the most part, the authorities don’t treat these women as victims of crime; they are regarded simply as illegal migrants. No attempt is made to determine whether they were trafficked. They are jailed, processed for immigration or labor violations and deported as quickly as possible. Innocent women, in other words, are stigmatized and then victimized over and over again.

Evidence of government complacency is staggering. International studies and reports are replete with examples of blatant and overwhelming insensitivity. Yet despite the damning reports detailing what’s been occurring openly throughout the Western world year after year, and despite the tragic testimonials of thousands of victims, the prevailing attitude among the very people who should know better crosses into the realm of criminal neglect.

Once in the clutches of traffickers and pimps, women get little sympathy from government officials or the public in general. Most times, they are met with apathy and scorn. After all, they’ve been working the streets. And it is there on the streets that they first slam up against the biggest hurdle of indifference—the police. They learn quickly that the man on the beat cares little about them and that there is absolutely no upside in running to him for protection. It is a complacency that plays directly into the hands of organized crime and makes it that much easier for low-life criminals to get into the trade.

Comments from officials like Gennadi Lepenko, chief of Interpol in Kyiv, Ukraine—“Women’s groups want to blow this all out of proportion”—serve only to exacerbate the situation. So do explanations such as the one offered to monitors with the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights in June 2000. According to K. Goryainov, a high-ranking bureaucrat with the Russian Ministry of the Interior,

It is precisely this kind of thinking that fosters apathy toward trafficking victims. And even in nations that talk the talk, pockets of indifference abound.

In Sweden, where the government has led a vociferous attack on traffickers, police in the northernmost province of Norrbotten were soundly criticized by the nation’s Central Police Command in February 2003 for laziness in their investigations of the sex trade. The Norrbotten police had information on dozens of Russian women believed to be imported into the province to work as prostitutes, the names of several men suspected of trafficking them to Sweden and numerous reported suspicions of trafficking in the area. And yet in the preceding year only one preliminary investigation had been launched.

Human Rights Watch uncovered a particularly disturbing example of benign indifference during a 2001 investigation of the trafficking trade in Greece. They learned that Romanian police had received a frantic call from a terrified mother in October 2000. Her daughter had just phoned pleading to be rescued from the Tutti Frutti bar on the Greek island of Kos where she was being held as a sex slave. The police immediately contacted the International Organization for Migration office in Bucharest. IOM staff fired off an urgent fax to Daniel Esdras, their counterpart in Athens. This communication was no vague missive—it listed the name of the island, the town, the bar where the young woman was being held, the trafficker’s name, his home and cell phone numbers, as well as the victim’s name, description and place of residence in Romania. The fax also included the name and numbers of a top official with the Greek Ministry of Public Order who had represented Greece at a recent UN-sponsored conference on trafficking human beings. With a contact like that, action was certain.

Esdras relayed the fax—entitled “Police Action to Rescue a Romanian Victim of Trafficking”—to the official. He also pleaded with Greek authorities not to deport the woman. “I told them the IOM would handle and pay for her repatriation,” Esdras said. Then he waited… and never received a reply.

A month later, during the Human Rights Watch fact-finding mission, Esdras recounted the incident of the Romanian woman. HRW investigators placed a call to the ministry to find out what had happened with the case and were shocked at what they learned. Little had been done. The police paid what amounted to a courtesy visit to the alleged trafficker, who said he had sent the woman back to Romania. The cops accepted the bar owner’s statement and left. That was the extent of the entire investigation.

So whatever happened to the young Romanian woman? Did she end up returning home? In response to an email sent April 18, 2002, Cristian Ionescu, an information officer at the IOM Bucharest office, wrote: “I regret to inform you that we have not been able to track this victim of human trafficking since then.” As this case so tragically illustrates, trafficked women cannot rely on Greek authorities for effective protection or for assistance with safe repatriation to their homeland.

Even where good laws exist, people trafficking is considered a far less serious crime than smuggling guns or drugs and so remains a low enforcement priority in most sending and destination countries. Officials in the receiving nations are quick to blame former Soviet states and East Bloc countries like Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria for allowing its most vulnerable women and girls to be trafficked virtually at will. Still, the hard reality is that most of the victims of trafficking end up in brothels in the European Union, North America, the Middle East and the Far East. It is the demand for cheap and available sex that has ignited the trafficking explosion in the receiving countries, and these nations are doing very little to stop it.

The complacency begins in gleaming government office towers and trickles all the way down to the gutters. If the political masters and senior bureaucrats don’t view the trafficking in women and girls as serious, that attitude will eventually infect every level of the legal system—from the courts to the cop on the beat. And this is precisely what has been happening worldwide.

In a high-profile trial that took place in Linz, Austria, in October 2001, Hellmuth Suessenbacher, known as the Carinthian Porno King, was convicted of trafficking fifty Romanian women into the local sex trade. They were initially hired as dancers and then forced into prostitution. To gasps of disbelief, Suessenbacher was sentenced to a mere two and a half years in prison. The convicted gangster appealed his sentence, and a year later Austria’s Court of Appeal reduced it to two years.

Indifference toward trafficked women appears to be par for the course in the office of Israel’s attorney general. It has issued guidelines to the police not to hassle brothels unless a woman complains that she’s being kept there against her will or a member of the public complains that the brothel is causing a disturbance. Ironically, these guidelines fly in the face of Israeli law. Although prostitution is not illegal, operating a brothel and pimping are.

Nomi Levenkron, an outspoken Israeli human rights lawyer, argues that the guidelines “bluntly ignore the reality known to all parties involved: that most of the women working in brothels are in fact kept there against their will and they are unable to file a complaint in the police station.”

In an interview at her tiny office at the Hotline for Migrant Workers in Tel Aviv, Levenkron charged that “the attitude of Israeli society in general and Israeli authorities in particular to the issue of trafficking in women is tainted by indifference, prejudice and ignorance. All these arise from the fact that even today we live in a predominantly male society, which is preoccupied with burning security issues and not humanitarian ones.”

Since the victims of trafficking are

One of the main culprits behind this growth is the judiciary, Levenkron continued. “Due to great workloads and often total ignorance and indifference, the courts dismiss the pimps and the traffickers with light punishments.”

Human rights advocates point out that while the maximum punishment for trading in human beings in Israel is sixteen years, sentencing overall amounts to a joke. Cases are routinely disposed of through plea bargains. Some of the decisions are unfathomable and an insult to the dignity and suffering of trafficked women. In March 2002, for example, an Israeli policeman was convicted of buying a trafficked woman and of warning brothel owners about impending police raids. His sentence: six months’ community service. Although the judge noted that the plea bargain was “exceptionally lenient” considering the matter involved a corrupt cop, he nonetheless accepted the plea without challenge.

In another plea bargain involving two pimps, Judge Natan Amit leveled a sharp rebuke at Israeli authorities:

Yet Judge Amit also accepted the plea bargain, sentencing one pimp to community service and the other to three years.

For prosecutors, plea bargains are all about saving money on lengthy, expensive trials. It doesn’t matter if it results in a mere slap on the wrist; they earn a conviction and it appears as if something has been done. In the process, the women—the victims—are overlooked, and by not getting their day in court, they are victimized once again. Police and prosecutors argue that plea bargains are a necessary evil because trafficking cases are often weak and chances of a conviction are almost nil. They maintain that the women steadfastly refuse to come forward to testify, making it virtually impossible to build a criminal case against the pimps, brothel owners and traffickers.

When I asked Levenkron about this, she countered that it is simply not true. She has come across many cases where “the women are not informed by the police of their right to testify against their offenders. Furthermore, it is not difficult to understand the fear of these women.” They are very much aware of the fate that awaits them after the trial—“deportation to their home countries, where the contact men who had sent them in the first place wait ‘with open arms.’ It is easy to understand the fear of those unwilling to testify, while the ones willing to testify find themselves facing cops who are not willing to investigate.”

This is the dire reality that trafficked women face, not only in Israel but in most countries. They’re told by police and prosecutors that criminal charges will be laid against their tormentors but only if they agree to testify against them. These are women who have been brutalized and terrorized by their pimps. They are afraid for their very lives. Yet in the vast majority of cases they’re not offered witness protection. It’s no wonder that most choose deportation instead. Those who do summon the courage to testify live in constant fear of retribution once they’re deported, and with good reason. Many women who have testified have been killed upon their return. Levenkron knows of two cases in which women were murdered shortly after they testified against their pimps in 1995. “I haven’t seen the documents. I only heard it from the police. They told me two women were sent back home. A few days later a telegram came from the Russian embassy saying that both were killed.”

Amnesty International documented yet another case in which a woman who testified against her traffickers disappeared after being deported. The woman, named Tatiana, had arrived in Israel from Belarus in April 1998 on a tourist visa. She had been promised a job as a cleaner in the seaside resort of Eilat. All she wanted was a job that would pay her enough to support her mother and her six-year-old son back home. When she landed, a man pretending to be from the hotel met her at the airport. He drove her to a brothel where she was locked up and put to work against her will. Tatiana tried to escape on several occasions but was caught each time.

Her freedom came several months later in a police raid on the brothel. She was taken into custody as an illegal immigrant and detained in Neveh Tirza prison to await deportation. Three days after her arrest she found an anonymous note on her prison bunk. The author threatened to kill her and punish her family if she spoke out about her case. Tatiana was adamant about testifying against her captors, but was also terrified that if she did so they would track her down when she returned home. Her lawyers filed an urgent petition with the Israeli authorities explaining that if Tatiana was not given witness protection, it would be unreasonably dangerous for her to testify in court. The terse reply: Israeli police could not guarantee anyone’s safety outside the country.

Tatiana decided to testify nonetheless and in June 1999 she was deported. Before she was taken to the airport she made one final plea—that she be flown to Poland or Lithuania and allowed to cross into Belarus by car. Her request was denied, and she was shipped directly to Belarus. At the airport in Minsk she was reportedly met by a man who briskly escorted her to a waiting car. Tatiana’s fate after that is unknown.

WHILE IT’S DIFFICULT to comprehend the wall of complacency trafficked women face each and every day, there is an ugly reality behind it—racism. Most human rights activists working to stop the traffic don’t like to admit this publicly. It’s one of those hot-button subjects that percolates very near the surface but is best left for discussion behind closed doors. It’s a racism based in a community’s deep-seated fear that their men are out on the prowl and that innocent local girls will be sexually assaulted and raped. The cold translation: better them than ours.

In a comfortable apartment in a Tel Aviv suburb, Leah Gruenpeter-Gold and Nissan Ben-Ami, co-directors of the Awareness Center—the nongovernmental group that specializes in research on trafficking in women and prostitution in Israel— recall the day in June 2001 when “the pimps came to the Knesset.” The pimps had gathered to testify before a parliamentary committee looking into the trafficking issue in Israel. The opinions put forth would, at times, venture into the realm of the absurd.

Ben-Ami spoke of an Arab-Israeli lawyer who argued for the necessity of brothels:

Gruenpeter-Gold described the testimony of a man she referred to as the “lawyer to the pimps.”

The underlying message, Ben-Ami said with disgust, was clear: “You don’t want girls from your family or your own neighborhood to be prostitutes. You want girls from abroad.”

Yossi Sedbon, police commander of the Tel Aviv district, stunned participants at a conference on prostitution and trafficking at Beit Berl College in February 2001. He began by complaining that anyone “who thinks this phenomenon can be eliminated doesn’t know what he is talking about” and maintained that his officers were doing their best to combat the burgeoning sex trade. His tone, however, exuded not determination but resignation. He went on to blame those who he felt were directly responsible for creating the crisis: “There are now about 200,000 foreign workers and tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the Tel Aviv area. What can you do? They simply need sex services.”

Levenkron shook her head in disbelief.

The fact that racism—better them than our girls—is a reality in so many countries explains the rampant indifference toward trafficked women from all levels of government.

In an interview with the BBC’s current affairs TV show Assignment on August 17, 2002, Chief Superintendent Simon Humphrey of Scotland Yard, head of the London vice squad, suggested that trafficking in women hasn’t been a priority because the victims aren’t British:

Tinges of racism were evident in a formal presentation to South Korean government bureaucrats in 1996. An earnest Kim Kyoung Sa, president of the Korean Special Tourism Association, exhorted the committee to import “foreign entertainers” for the copious bars and strip clubs catering exclusively to U.S. soldiers from the nearby military bases in South Korea. Kim, a bar owner, lamented that Korean girls didn’t want to do this kind of work anymore, which, he noted, was good thing. Economic times had vastly improved in the country and Korean girls were no longer destitute. They now had jobs in factories and office towers where they didn’t have to take off their clothes to earn a living. This left the bar owners in the lurch. As a result, he explained, they needed fresh talent. To drive the point home, the club owner stressed that it was necessary to import foreign women so American soldiers would abstain from sexually harassing innocent Korean girls. As far as Kim and his cronies were concerned, his association was doing the government a big favor that would also contribute immensely to improving U.S.–Korean relations.

Sometimes racist attitudes find their way to the bench. Oleksander Mazur has seen it first-hand. In October 2001 I was sitting outside a courtroom in downtown Pristina, Kosovo, waiting for Mazur when he suddenly burst through the doors and stormed into the corridor.

The Ukrainian cop, on assignment with the United Nations as an international police officer, was absolutely livid. He’d been involved in the rescue of six young women from Moldova and Romania. The girls, barely teenagers, had been held as sex slaves in a cesspool of a brothel in nearby Ferrazaj. It had taken the policeman several days and incredible patience to convince them to testify against the brothel owners.

“I am told by the prosecutor that the judge does not want to believe the girls were forced to work as prostitutes. He thinks they are liars. He feels, Why should he take their word over the word of the bar owner? The man is corrupt. He does not want to hear the truth,” Mazur said, slamming his hand against the wall.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I am still trying to find out if the judge will hear the case this morning. We cannot hold these girls in Kosovo much longer. They must be sent back home, and if that happens, we have no case against the pimps.”

For several minutes he rants, complaining that despite all the raids on brothels and rescues of enslaved young women, in this unruly corner of the world there are few meaningful trials and virtually no convictions.

“This is because of the level of corruption. Judges suddenly drop cases and no one knows why. But I do. What you have is an Albanian judge sitting in judgment against an Albanian man whose accuser is a Moldovan woman who doesn’t speak the language.”

Mazur explains that the Albanian judge is faced with a case that pits his religion, his people and his culture against a woman he thinks of as nothing more than a whore. “Also the pimp, this bar owner, is a nice guy, an upstanding person in the community. He is rich and he is helping to finance the Kosovo Liberation Army. So he is a hero. All this is connected.”

IN THE NETHERWORLD of the illegal flesh trade, trafficked women repeatedly slam up against thick stone walls of complacency, racism and indifference. These are tremendous obstacles for the women to overcome. But if there is one factor that virtually seals their fate, it is corruption.