Victor Malarek - The Natashas

Later that evening, a law student took me to that very bar. It was dimly lit, smoke filled and reeked of body odor and cheap beer. Disco music crackled from two speakers perched on an elevated stage where a naked teenage girl moved awkwardly to the thumping beat. As she danced, she stared at herself in a floor-to-ceiling mirror at the edge of the stage. She looked morose and self-conscious. It was as though she was in a trance, and that the young woman she saw in the reflection was a stranger who had stolen her body.

A meaty bouncer escorted us to a booth at one end of the bar. From the corner of my eye I noticed the owner—a slug with a buzz cut in a black leather jacket—wave his hand at two girls sitting at a table near the front. They jumped up and rushed over to our table. “What is it you want?” a pale-looking girl with short brown hair asked in Ukrainian.

“Two beers,” I replied, realizing a second after responding in Ukrainian that it was clearly the wrong thing to say. The girl stared at me, wide-eyed, and retreated to the bar, exchanging furtive words with the owner. He picked up his cell phone and punched in a number. “I think we should drink our beers quickly and get out of here,” I told my companion. He nodded anxiously.

At that moment, another young woman took to the stage. She was obese and clearly on display for the sport and ridicule of the patrons. Holding on to a brass pole, she bounced to the music while a phalanx of men at the edge of the stage whistled and laughed. While she spun her way around the pole, the previous dancer reappeared from a back room in a beige negligee. The owner ordered her to a darkened corner where a greasy middle-aged man sat hunched over a bottle of cheap red wine. The moment she sat down he started groping her, forcing his hand up and down her top. As he pawed her she kept her eyes closed, as if in prayer. A moment later, the two retreated to a room behind the bar.

We were just finishing our drinks when five local goons sauntered over to our table. One of them said something to me. The tone was definitely threatening. I turned to my guide.

“He wants to know who you are and why we are here.” “Tell him we were thirsty and came in for a beer.”

A number of words were exchanged. “He said to finish the beer and get out of here. He doesn’t like your face.”

We got up and left.

THE LEVEL OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE and psychological intimidation used to control these women is deliberate and extreme. It’s meant to instill fear—to crush them, destroy their will, force them to comply. There are reports of women being mutilated and murdered as punishment for refusing to engage in the sex trade. Women have been killed as examples to other women for daring to resist. According to Italian police, a foreign prostitute is murdered each month in that country alone. In Istanbul, Turkey, two Ukrainian women were thrown off a high-rise balcony while six Russian captives watched in horror. In Serbia, a Ukrainian woman was purportedly beheaded in front of a group of trafficked girls. A Russian woman was strangled by her pimp in May 1996 when she refused to hand over a $20 tip she received from a client. Her Israeli pimp dumped her body near the West Bank town of Ramallah so that police would believe she had been murdered by Arabs. And in 2000, the bodies of two Moldovan women were found floating in a river near the Arizona Market. Their hands were tied behind their backs, their feet attached to concrete blocks and their mouths taped shut—all marks of execution-style killings. On the tape over their mouths, their killers had scrawled the words “Organization for Security and Co-operation in

Europe.” Under its mandate, the OSCE has been trying to bring civil order to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Then there are the countless cases of women like Irini Penkina, who simply give up and take their own lives. The appalling circumstances behind Irini’s suicide in Greece rocked the cradle of democracy, but the public outrage was short-lived. The twenty-year-old from Belarus was found dead in an apartment in the northern port city of Thessalonica in October 1998. A perfunctory police investigation concluded that she had killed herself in despair at being forced by her Greek pimp to service more than a dozen men a day. Irini knotted black pantyhose around her neck and strung the other end around a pipe above the toilet bowl in her closet-sized bathroom. Her twenty-three-year-old roommate found her body. There was no suicide note.

Investigators learned that she had left her homeland with the promise of a waitressing job in Greece. When she arrived, she was brutalized into submission and then imprisoned in a stifling bordello in a town notorious for prostitution. She and three other women—a Bulgarian, a Moldovan and a Ukrainian—were rarely allowed to leave the apartment, except under the watchful eye of a thuggish guard. Their pimp forced them to service a blur of sex tourists and locals scurrying into the dank apartment at all hours of the day and night. He was arrested and charged with luring the women into prostitution and procuring them, but was later acquitted for lack of evidence.

IN EVERY METROPOLIS around the globe, trafficked girls mingle freely with the women who choose to take money for sex. On the surface, it’s hard to tell them apart. They dress and look the same. They have the same inviting expression. They smile, they pose, they flaunt and they strut. That’s what prospective clients and the public see in the bars or streets.

But that’s also what the pimps make certain they see. What they miss entirely is the darker side of the trade. It’s an ugly side, hidden behind heavy padlocked doors in rooms with iron bars on the windows and armed thugs in the hall. There, the striking blonde smiling coyly on the street may have been beaten with electrical wires the evening before. Behind these walls, the sweet-looking brunette who stands shyly on a corner with the innocent gaze of seventeen-year-old schoolgirl may have just been indoctrinated into the trade by two guards and a pimp intent on “breaking her in.” This is the side that keeps them on the street and this is the side that keeps the smiles on their lips. They stay because they fear what will happen if they run… and they smile because they know what will happen if they don’t.

If their “clients” looked closely at the bodies they’re using, they just might see some of the telltale signs—bruises peeking through under cheap flesh-colored makeup, whip marks on the buttocks, cigarette burns on the arms. If they paused long enough, while reaching their climax, to actually look into these women’s eyes, they might see frustration, revulsion, fear, depression, resignation, anger, shame… And if they asked the woman they’re with why she does what she does and actually took the time to dig into her past, they might hear how she was kidnapped from an orphanage in Ukraine, smuggled out of the country, sold at an auction and forced onto the street by a money-grubbing pimp who forces her to bring in $500 a night.

In short, they’re forced to do whatever it takes with whoever asks, as long as he pays, and they’re forced to do it with a smile on their face, a sparkle in their eyes and a moan on their lips… exactly as trained in the breaking grounds.

IN THE SOURCE COUNTRIES of Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Eastern Europe, the illegal trafficking of women is fueled by a desperate need for a better life. In the destination nations, it is driven by an insatiable, self-indulgent appetite for purchased sex. The force that brings them together is organized crime, notorious for reacting swiftly to attractive market forces. But in this situation, unlike the illegal trade of guns and drugs, the risks for criminals are minimal and the profits extremely high.