Victor Malarek - The Natashas

But when she arrived in Abu Dhabi she was taken to a brothel where a pimp told her that he had bought her for $7000. From that moment on she was to work as a prostitute until she paid off her so-called debt. After three months of captivity, Tanya managed to escape. She bolted to a nearby police station and recounted her tale. Incredibly, she was charged with prostitution and sentenced to three years in a desert prison. In 2001, psychologically crushed and ashamed, Tanya was released. Nothing had happened to her pimp. Branded a prostitute by the Muslim nation, she was summarily deported back to her Ukraine.

In another case documented by La Strada, a twenty-three-year-old university graduate named Olexandra was lured from Chernihiv in northern Ukraine. Olexandra was a divorced mother of a two-year-old daughter and in dire financial straits. She was offered a well-paying job in Germany by a distant rela- tive, who boasted that her own daughter had worked there and had been very happy. And so in the summer of 1997 Olexandra and another young Ukrainian woman crossed into Poland to seek out the work. They were forcibly held in a building where they were beaten and raped. A few weeks later they were smuggled across a river into Germany, where Turkish pimps sold them several times. Along with Polish, Bulgarian and Czech women, Olexandra was forced to service clients in various German brothels. Later that fall the women were arrested in a police raid. Olexandra, now extremely ill, was deported to Ukraine, where she was diagnosed with a severe internal infection, hospitalized for three months and subjected to a number of invasive surgeries. The infection had been caused by her sex servitude abroad. Olexandra’s health, tragically, has not returned.

Even more disturbing is the use of trafficked women to lure new victims—the so-called second wave. For many trafficked women, it’s the only way of escaping the brutality of being forced to have unwanted sex with a dozen men a day. Their pimps give them the option of returning home if they promise to reel in a number of replacements. And the women are extremely convincing, often pulling up in luxury cars, wearing flashy jewelry and expensive clothes. In no time they’re surrounded by envious, naive teenage girls who readily fall for the grandiloquent tales of life in the golden West.

Another trap is the “matchmaking service” operating under the guise of an international introduction firm. These agencies, specializing in “mail-order brides” and often accessible to anyone with a computer, are usually nothing more than online brothels. According to the International Organization for Migration headquartered in Geneva, the vast majority of mail-order-bride agencies in the former Soviet Union are owned and run by organized crime. With countless victims clinging to the fairy-tale hope of a blossoming romance and a better life in the West, the pickings are enormous and ridiculously easy. Women are literally lining up in droves. But when they finally venture out of the country to meet Mr. Right they’re delivered into the clutches of ruthless pimps, forced directly into prostitution by their new “husbands” or sold outright for sex.

Other victims have been lured across borders by new “boyfriends,” tempted by promises of a night on the town. They too find themselves forced into waiting vehicles, sold to pimps or traffickers for a wad of cash.

Perhaps one of the most terrifying recruitment tactics is outright abduction. The girls are simply taken. In many rural areas in Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria, women and girls have been kidnapped walking home along country roads. The situation is so serious that in some rural areas, parents have stopped sending their daughters to school to protect them from being stolen.

No doubt one of the most appalling aspects of the trade is the targeting of orphans throughout Eastern Europe. In March 2003, for example, the U.S. State Department reported a “pattern of trafficking” 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 information… to traffickers”) and are waiting for them, job offers in hand. The State Department also notes that throughout Russia, there are “reports of children being kidnapped or purchased from… orphanages for sexual abuse and child pornography” and that child prostitution is “widespread” in orphanages in Ukraine. And in Romania, “many orphanages are complicit in letting girls fall victim to trafficking networks.”

Vast armies of Russian children who have run away from brutal orphanages wander the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. They are called Bezprizornye . Their ranks are swelled by the Beznadzornye, street kids who have been abandoned by their parents. These hapless children are the tragic byproducts of the new Russia. According to official estimates there are no fewer than one million; many social workers say the numbers could easily be double that.

The problem, moreover, is permeating all the former Soviet republics. Throughout the Newly Independent States, children are being discarded at an alarming rate by parents and families that can no longer afford to keep them. According to police data in Ukraine, 12,000 children are abandoned by their parents every year. A Ministry of Internal Affairs document states that 100,000 children—14 percent under the age of seven—were registered as homeless in 2000. Half of these children wound up in orphanages. The number of orphans in nearby Romania, meanwhile, exceeds 60,000.

For the most part, these orphanages are nothing more than cold storage facilities. A 1998 Human Rights Watch investigation found that children in Russian orphanages “are exposed to appalling levels of cruelty and neglect. They may be beaten, locked in freezing rooms for days at a time, or sexually abused, and are often subjected to degrading treatment by staff.” It’s not surprising that thousands of children run away each year, taking their chances by living on the streets.

Orphanages in Ukraine, Romania and Russia are bursting at the seams and, with most having lost their state funding, they’re unable to support the crush of orphans they receive. It is a daily struggle to make ends meet. The very principles on which these institutions operate are grossly unsatisfactory and provide little real benefit to a child’s chances of leading a normal life after release. It’s hard enough attending to the children’s basic needs, let alone preparing them for independence once they reach the age of eighteen. Few have training for the drastic changes that life on their own will bring. Most don’t even know how to boil a pot of water. This lack of basic life skills makes these children—especially the girls—easy prey for exploiters lurking near the gates. Sometimes they’re targeted even before they reach the gate—identified and sold by orphanage workers. Directors of several orphanages in Russia, Ukraine, Romania and the Czech Republic admit their girls are being preyed upon by sex traffickers but lament that they simply don’t have the resources to deal with the situation.

In the fall of 1999 two recruiters culled girls from a number of orphanages in the Republic of Karelia in north- western Russia near the Finnish border. The recruiters, looking professional and persuasive, arrived with offers of job training for girls between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. The beleaguered staff was overjoyed that these benevolent souls were taking an interest in the welfare of their girls. They knew full well the harsh reality the girls faced once they were turned out from the institution on their eighteenth birthday, and now at least a handful were being offered a fighting chance of making it on the outside. Following formal interviews, several hopefuls were selected for training in the art of Chinese cooking at a school in China. Their travel and instruction were to be free, with the proviso that they intern for two years as waitresses after their training.