Russian Women Fight Sex Trafficking
By Anna Dolgov
Originally published by The Associated Press, May 16, 2001
MOSCOW (AP) — Yulia was sold into slavery by her boyfriend.
A 19-year-old from a drab industrial town in eastern Russia, she had been living an ordinary life only a few months ago: going to college, dating, looking for work to pay for tuition. Jobs were scarce and pay was meager, as in most Russian provinces.
"I met a guy and we got really close," she said. "After a while, he learned that I could dance, and suggested that I go abroad to earn good money."
The agency he took her to offered young women jobs as waitresses, nannies or dancers in foreign countries, Yulia said. But once she was abroad, she was locked in a rundown building with dozens of other women and teen-age girls, beaten, threatened, and forced to work as a prostitute, she said.
An estimated 50,000 women from the former Soviet Union are trafficked abroad every year and forced into sexual slavery, according to human rights groups who launched a campaign Wednesday to end the cruel practice. To ensure compliance from the women, traffickers usually confiscate passports, then beat, rape or drug the women, victims and rights groups say.
Yulia's captors told her she owed hundreds of dollars in job placement fees and airfare, and that her parents would be hurt if she didn't comply, she said.
Yulia and other victims interviewed by The Associated Press asked that their identities and where they worked be withheld, for fear of persecution by the traffickers.
"Russian women are threatened by thousands of criminal predators who place ads in newspapers about good jobs abroad, jobs that in reality don't exist," said Valentina Gorchakova, the head of the Angel coalition of 43 women's groups in Russia.
The network of modern-day slavery covers the world, according to reports by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United Nations and human rights groups. Women are sent to Western Europe, The Middle East, Japan, Canada, and the United States.
Profits from trafficking in women reach $7 billion to $12 billion a year, according to U.N. estimates cited by Gorchakova. The network of traffickers enslaves an estimated 2 million victims, with between 50,000 and 100,000 women and children brought to the United States every year for sexual exploitation.
A few are eventually allowed to return home or manage to escape. Most are resold and put into increasingly harsh conditions, said Juliette Engel, founding director of the Miramed Institute, which is trying to fight trafficking.
"They get trapped into it and they think if they cooperate, they'll get out of it," Engel said. "But they just get deeper into it."
Yulia said she was kept in a cold house slated for demolition, with cracks in the cement floor, no hot water, bars on the windows, and a video camera tracking the women's movements. They were allowed to go outside for 30 minutes a day, and fined if they stayed out longer.
"There were fines for everything: if you looked sad when you sat at the bar, if you went to the bathroom for longer than five minutes, if you tried to refuse to go with a man," she said.
Yulia said two young Russian women held with her were killed in the three months that she spent in the makeshift prison.
Another former victim, Irina, said she was just 17 when a friend brought her to an agency offering young women jobs abroad.
"It was a horrible brothel," Irina said. "We weren't allowed to use the telephone, weren't allowed to go outside, not even to buy something to eat … We were like zombies."
The Angel coalition and Miramed launched the anti-trafficking campaign Wednesday, in which activists in six Russian cities are to hand out some 600,000 brochures and leaflets on the streets and in schools to young women and teen-age girls.
Yulia returned home last month. Still pretty, she looks much older than her 19 years, with dull pain and suffering in her eyes. She has dropped out of college, having missed three months of classes, and is penniless. Her health is seriously damaged, she said, without elaborating. "I took some medical tests, and they are bad," she said. "Not completely terrible, but bad."
