Prostitution/Trafficking in Jewish Communities
Approximately 95 percent of teenage prostitutes have been sexually abused
1 in 100 U.S. children are victims of sex trade industry
The most commonly cited reason for engaging in prostitution by survivors of childhood sexual abuse, was that they were trying to regain some control over their lives and their bodies; exchanging sex for money was seen as one way to control men's access to them. -- prevent-abuse-now.com
Most prostitutes have been victimized, at some point in their lives, by sexual violence. More than 90% suffered childhood sexual abuse, often incest. Many others have been sexually assaulted in the course of working in prostitution. About 75% were violently raped as adults in situations not involving their work.
At least two-thirds of prostitutes began working in prostitution before the age of 16. Young women and men often enter prostitution as a way of escaping an abusive home situation. They see prostitution as their only means of survival.
Unfortunately at this point and time there has never been any reseach to find out what percentage of Jewish Survivors of sexual abuse also have histories of prostitution. The odds are that the statistics are no different then in other populations. If you know of any research or resources that would be helpful to Jewish Survivors of Childhood Abuse who have histories of Prostitution, or Adult survivors who got involved in Prostitution, please send the information to: VickiPolin@TheAwarenessCenter.org
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Articles
Pretty posers prop up Naked Tango (04/29/1992)
We must address Israeli prostitution as our problem (02/28/1998)
Selling Sex in Israel (2001)
Israeli, int'l police crack down on child pornography (01/28/2001)
A-G calls for crackdown on trafficking in women (08/01/2001)
Fighting the flesh trade (12/02/2001)
Blue-and-white slave trade (06/21/2002)
Young Girls At Risk (04/28/2003)
Victoria's, and Israel's, Ugly Secret (01/31/2004)
Panel hears grim details on child prostitution in Israel (02/10/2004)
Parents send kids to work as prostitutes (02/10/2004)
Police have list of 70 trafficking suspects, hearing told (02/18/2004)
Mothers pimping their daughters for food (02/29/2004)
Ex-sex slaves get help to testify (03/04/2004)
Prostitute's lawsuit (03/09/2004)
Study: Brothels earn $450m. a year (03/17/2004)
Three Knesset commissions of inquiry to shut down (03/17/2004)
Police may seize property of suspected trafficker in women (03/18/2004)
All for love (09/09/2005)
Law seeks to get tough on cyber sex with minors (01/09/2007)
The best little whorehouse in Haifa (02/07/2007)
Israel improves in addressing human trafficking problem (06/13/2007)
Haifa area brothels shut down (08/01/2007)
Case of The Zwi Migdal: Three Jewish Women Forced Into Prostitution in the Americas
For more cases of Prostitution: Clergy Abuse: Rabbis, Cantors and Other Trusted Officials
Sexual Trafficking - Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (07/12/2000)
Articles
Legal/Law Enforcement/Goverment
Pretty posers prop up Naked Tango
BY CATHERINE DUNPHY TORONTO STAR
The Toronto Star - April 29, 1992
You've seen those fashion spreads in some of the higher-concept glossies? Vogue magazine, for instance, where unreal meets surreal and real people are whitefaced into blankface?
They are mere lines and angles, reduced to a foot just so, a hat brim angled more so, the face - never as important as the image, the line - shadowed.
The look, such style, such sophistication, you've thought. But, a small unbidden voice inside may have piped up, so silly.
You've just summed up Naked Tango.
This is the directorial debut of Leonard Shrader, the man who wrote (and was nominated for an Oscar for) Kiss Of The Spider Woman. He wrote this one too. This, however, has less to do with the finished project than the fact that the co-producer (one Milena Canonero) is a costume designer. This movie is so heavy into poses, it should have been in Vogue. Or Madonna should've been in it.
Instead, languishing, leaning, lounging to the right and left (and never, never blocking the view of the memorable and fantastical moody sets) are Cesar-winning French actress Mathilda May and American Vincent D'Onofrio.
D'Onofrio can be seen to far better advantage right now in Robert Altman's The Player. He's the murdered writer.
May has worked in 23 other French and Italian language films, including Claude Chabrol's Le Cri d'hiboux, for which she won France's equivalent of an Oscar.
In Naked Tango she is a prop; he is a prop, too. As lovers who hate each other, occasionally she will clench, he glower, she quiver, his nostrils will flare.
Very occasionally.
Most of the time they arch their necks (her) or backs (him) and stand. Or dance. But never deliver.
Naked Tango is a bloodless, passionless rendering of a time and place rife with glamour and macabre mythology, and of a story that cannot possibly be true, but is.
And centring on and based on a dance banned in public until 1919. At first danced exclusively by men, the tango supposedly imitated the sinister, deadly moves of the street gangs flourishing in Buenos Aires then. When Valentino danced a fandangled tango in Four Horseman Of The Apocalypse, its secret was out and the dance was open to Europeanized (read sanitized) variations.
But in the underworld of Buenos Aires, it was always a naked mime of sinewy lust (not love), machismo, obsession and danger.
It was the dance of the gangster; it was danced in La Boca, the waterfront slum where legalized prostitution opened the door to white slavery and turf wars between different ethnic based mafia-type organizations.
In Naked Tango, a young bride (May) becomes a prisoner in a brothel when she bolts from her older, staid husband the judge (the veteran Spanish actor Fernando Rey). She assumes the identity of a young Polish Jew whose impoverished family have sold her into marriage in Argentina for a dowry.
But the traditional Jewish wedding is a sham, as is the ardent husband ( Bad Boys' Esai Morales) who is a sleek, feral gangster, under the thumb of an even crueller character, the tango master Cholo (D'Onofrio).
When this gangster meets the would-be whore, they don't talk, they dance. The violins throb, the high heels (his) writhe on the smooth floor as they slide into the shadows (for more artful camera work) into an abbatoir (in case we hadn't cottoned on to the dance/danger connection) and through Colossus-sized limbs of women in silk stockings, statuary in a brothel part Arabian night, part nightmare.
Shrader has made the whole thing impossible and improbable, yet this outlandish garish tale is true. Or at least fact-based.
There actually was a Zwi Migdal Society or Polish/Jewish Immigrants Self Help Society, a gangster-run operation that ruled the Buenos Aires waterfront for 24 years. At the height of its power, it had 400 members and ran 1,000 brothels filled with some 30,000 women they'd lured from Europe with promises of a traditional Jewish wedding.
As appalling as this heretofore hidden slice of history is, it is a powerhouse of a story. Think of the movie it might make.
Might still make.
As long as it, too, doesn't turn an electrifying true story into a dated dance poster.
Naked Tango
With Vincent D'Onofrio and Mathilda May. Written/directed by Leonard Shrader. R. At the Cumberland.
GRAPHIC: Photo Vincent D'Onofrio
We must address Israeli prostitution as our problem
By Leonard Fein
Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, San Francisco - November 24, 1998
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/9173/format/html/displaystory.html
It came as a shock: Jewish "women of the night."
That was all the way back in 1960, glimpsing the streetwalkers as I was driving through Jaffa. Instinctively, I did what just about all Jews who cared for Israel had long since learned to do: I made excuses and developed relatively benign rationales. File under goy k'chol hagoyim, a nation like all others, and just hope that file stays much, much smaller than the or lagoyim -- the lamp unto the nations file.
But before I'd had the time to tuck the matter away, a second and untuckable problem tumbled in. If there are Jewish whores, then Jewish pimps cannot be far behind. Jewish pimps? How can such a thing be? For the women they exploit, one can feel sympathy. But for the pimps? Vile, unacceptable. Where in your Zionist files do you lose them?
The answer is, of course, that you don't. The answer is that life is complicated, and Judaism is not a vaccine. The answer, if you hang around long enough, is Jewish arms merchants and Jewish bank robbers and Jewish wife-beaters and all manner of Jewish miscreants -- not, heaven forbid, in greater proportion than the foul of any other people, perhaps even, here and there, in smaller proportion. So why not Jewish pimps, too?
And you live with that answer and learn to handle all the bad stuff along with the decisive good. Your theory of Zion becomes more sophisticated, expansive enough to include Zion's manifest imperfections.
But then, suddenly, you learn that it's not garden-variety pimps you're encountering, petty hustlers out of Israel's underside. No, suddenly you learn that Israel has become a routine destination for the global trafficking of women, women coerced into prostitution.
The thousand such women brought into Israel annually derive principally from the countries of the former Soviet Union, and the way they get to Israel is that they are "purchased," each one costing between $10,000 and $20,000. And they are, of course, expected to repay the cost to their masters through what amounts to indentured servitude -- or, if you prefer the simpler and more straightforward, slavery.
Most of these women, these slaves, are in their early 20s, but some as young as 15, and even 12, have turned up in Tel Aviv. They are, according to the Haifa Police commander, routinely beaten, tortured, raped and drugged. They are isolated, deprived, threatened, their documents are destroyed. Indeed, they are told that if they are disobedient or seek to contact the police or the courts, their families back home will be punished.
How can such a monstrous crime persist? The answer, one supposes, is the same answer to the question asked about any country that makes room for trafficked women. Each woman earns between $50,000 and $100,000 a year for her pimp; the total turnover of the prostitution trade in Israel comes to some $450 million a year. And some Israeli experts believe that the Israeli police allow the pimps to operate because they make good snitches, they provide the police with information about other and presumably more serious crimes.
Chaim Nachman Bialik, the poet of the Hebrew renaissance, once said that he yearned for the day when there would be in (then) Palestine a Jewish jail, with a Jewish guard on the outside and a Jewish prisoner on the inside. But this? There is such a thing as "too normal."
The Israel Women's Network, Rabbis for Human Rights and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel are all "on the case," and the Supreme Court and Knesset may soon intervene to inhibit the trade. But no one predicts an early and genuinely comprehensive effort to put an end to it.
We are told that we should not wash Israel's dirty linen in public. But when the dirty linen is hanging out there for all to see, is it not proper that its energetic washing also be visible -- along with efforts to prevent the linen's soiling in the first place? After all, this is not a hawk vs. dove problem, nor an Orthodox vs. everybody else problem. It is about as basic a problem as you can have.
For those who operate in a traditional context, perhaps Purim, with its obvious references to the exploitation of women, will suffice. For all of us, we can now see the underside of globalization. Even if we are less emotionally engaged with the issue of women's slavery when it plays out in Kuwait or in Germany than when it plays out in Israel, our response to the Israeli manifestation cannot be successful if it is compartmentalized.
And anyway, those other women, the ones who are sold off to countries outside our scope of concern -- they, too, are women, girls really, and someone has to stand up for them, too. No?
The writer is founder and former editor of Moment magazine and a Boston-based writer for American Jewish newspapers.
Anna O's Other Story: Freud's Famous
Patient's Crusade Against White Slavery
by Harold Ticktin
Moment (Washington) - Aug 31, 1998
Anna O's Other Story: Freud's Famous Patient's Crusade Against White Slavery
WALLFLOWERS t the dance of Jewish history, sex, and crime have sat out almost all the numbers. Reticent to admit that Jewish mobsters trafficked in Jewish women, our historians concentrated instead on pogroms, keeping shweig (still) about our seamier side until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Only with the emergence of an earthier vein of Jewish literature -- from I.L. Peretz to Isaac Bashevis Singer, including even the saintly Sholom Aleichem and the roundly criticized Sholem Asch -- have some of the spicier aspects of Jewish history come to the fore.
No example is more interesting than the struggle against white slavery in Jewish communities from Constantinople to Buenos Aires, which would eventually involve one of Sigmund Freud's most important psychoanalyses, the famous case of "Anna O."
Purveyors of Jewish women to bordellos on five continents were aptly named "unclean ones." As with the reluctance of Jews to discuss Jewish alcoholism and violence, so it was with jewish involvement in whit e slavery. Often the trade was denied outright, despite an ultimately successful battle fought over a 70-year period by the organized Jewish community against Jewish pimps and brothel keepers who preyed principally on Jewish women from impoverished areas of the Russian empire, particularly Galicia.
The battle included a number of international conferences with active Jewish participation, and innumerable intra-Jewish meetings in Europe, the Americas, Turkey, and India, in which world Jewry simultaneously fought the "unclean ones" with- in the community and sought to deflate the all-too- easy assumption by gentiles that "the Jews caused it all."(*)
Prostitution may be the worlds oldest profession, but the numbers in its ranks have the 19th century, when rail- way systems spread rapidly across Eurasia to ports of embarkation such as Hamburg, London, and Le Havre.
The railroad spurred modernization, affecting Jewry like a lightning bolt. One could write a Ph.D. dissertation titled, "The Railroad in Jewish Literature 1875-1939." The nature of Jewish jokes changed, making for an indissoluble link between the Iron Horse and the bewildered Jew riding it. A joke that Freud was fond of tells of a Jewish man on his way from Warsaw to Baden-Baden, hassled and attacked at every railroad station because of his appearance. An acquaintance asks him where he's going. "To Baden-Baden, for my health," he answers, "if my constitution holds out." Another classic of the genre is Sholom Aleichem's "Two Anti-Semites," in which two Jews sharing a single railroad compartment are both reading anti-Semitic newspapers to deflect antagonism. When they discover the truth about their shared bacgrounds, they hum "Oyfn Pripichik" (a famous Yiddish song) together.
But transporting Jewish women from as far east as Bombay was no laughing matter. Perhaps because Jews simply did not see themselves as procurers, there was a long period of turning a blind eye to the extent and depth to which Mädchen-handlen flourished among Jews.
The tangled history of pimps and prostitutes faced with an outraged general and Jewish public is thoroughly explored in Edward J. Bristow's Prostitution and Prejudice.(1) Bristow documents a ready-made Jewish underworld eager to engage in pimping. The Buenos Aires branch of alfonsins (the Polish-Jewish epithet for pimps) even formed a fraternal society (Zwi Migdal), which maintained its own synagogue and cemetery.(2)
Although Jewish procurers dealt almost exclusively in Jewish women, they were successful enough to achieve 50 percent of the market in Hamburg, Eastern Europe, and South America, according to police records. The names alone conjure up a Jewish world: Aside from Harry the Mock, Crazy Itch, Charlie Argument, Ryfka the Cow, and an array of madams named Sadie, there is a supporting cast of alfonsins, bombiens (from Bombay), kaftismus (observant alfonsins), macks, freuenhandlers, and a host of other pejoratives.(3)
The weave which formed this history had many threads. Chief among them was the desperate poverty of five million Eastern European Jews virtually entombed in the Pale of Settlement. An uneducated Jewish girl (few were otherwise) could escape the ghetto by registering as a prostitute. Many of the pimps were Jewish men who, as boys, had been snatched from their homes and returned after 25 years of forced service in the Czarist Army. For many Jewish tavern keepers ("between the gates of purity and defilement," in the words of Chaim Nachman Bialik),(4) the transition from tavern keeping to brothel keeping was an easy one.
Still, while there are many causes, there are also no causes. Girls from backgrounds identical to those of prostitutes never entered the trade, and crazily enough, there were a number of success stories, such as Polly Adler's, which was popularly chronicled in her best-selling autobiography A House Is Not A Home.(5) Adler, born in Russia, was a female counterpart to Arnold Rothstein and Nicky Arnstein. Operating in New York during the '30s, she became the most celebrated madam of her day.
Paradoxically, aspects of Jewish religious life actually facilitated the trade. The most graphic example, a variation on the agunah (wives unable to prove the deaths of their disappeared husbands), was the practice of stillah chuppah (literally "silent chuppah"), that is, clandestine weddings done before witnesses and sealed with a gift. The stillah chuppah refers to an arcane point of Jewish law, not unlike common law, which holds that a rabbi is not necessary at a wedding ceremony. The presence of any attending adult (male) is sufficient in Jewish law to confer married status. Often practiced in precisely those districts where families were most desperate and unlearned in the subtleties of Jewish law, such marriages resulted, in what was referred to delicately as "irregular civil status." As Bristow explains, stillah chuppah enabled procurers to manoeuvre unsuspecting girls into compromising situations. Ruthless men would court them, marry them, and then coerce them to practice prostitution.... Such wives had no legal protection because their marriages were not registered in civil law. Yet, they thought themselves married and were recognized as such by traditional Jews.(6)
Books and plays often dealt with this touchy subject, which many would have preferred to leave alone. A prime example is Sholom Asch's play The God of Vengeance (1923), which portrayed the dilemma of a Jewish brothel keeper in New York, who attempts to separate the bordello he runs downstairs from the purity of his young daughter upstairs. The young daughter finds her way below, however, and has a lesbian affair with one of the I nafkes (whores). Prompted by the predictable rabbinic reaction to the play, I Vengeance was the first drama ever convicted of obscenity, a ruling later reversed by New York courts. Revived in recent years, Vengeance had a run in New York as recently as the fall of 1997.
Additional references to Jewish prostitution occur in the writings of Sholom Aleichem, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Aleichem's, The Gentlemen From Buenos Aires, features a Jewish procurer. Someone innocently asks him what he deals in. "Not in prayer books, my friend, not in prayer books," he replies, The story is set in Buenos Aires because -- along with Constantinople, Hamburg, Warsaw, New York, Rio De Janeiro, Manila, and, unexpectedly, Butte, Montana -- Buenos Aires was a principal destination for white slave traffickers right up to the beginning of World War II.
In one of Singer's early novels, The Magician of Lublin, the wife of an imprisoned gang member tells Yasha the Magician that she has an offer to go to America. "You mean New York?" asks Yasha. "No" she replies, "a different America." Yasha quickly informs her that in her circumstances "another America" means Buenos Aires and the offer is a veiled attempt to get her into a brothel.
Jews are represented in other fictional depictions of the trade of the time, such as Lincoln Steffen's Schloma, Daughter of Schmuhl, Elsa Jerusalem's The Red House; Sholem Asch's Mottke the Thief, Peretz Hirschbein's Miriam, and Moshe Richter's Schlaven Handler-Trafficker. One of modem Yiddish's three great progenitors, Mendele Mokher Sforim, weighed in with Valley of Tears.
Perhaps the most exotic reference comes from Rudyard Kipling, whose Ballad of Fisher's Boarding House, set in Calcutta's red-light district, included the following:
From Tarnau in Galicia
To Juan Bazar she came
To eat the bread of infamy
And take the wages of shame.(7)
Lest there be any doubt that the Galicia reference meant Jewesses, Lord Kitchener himself abetted the practice of encouraging European prostitutes -- largely Jewish -- for his troops in India, while discouraging English ones, to preserve "the moral character of the governing race." (8)
International Jewish prostitution was not eliminated until just before World War II. In the '20s and '30s, white slavery was actually a subbranch of the history of Jewish gangsters, boxers, and bootleggers.
The Jewish community faced the problem of how to work with the larger community to combat the international network of procurers. Jewish leaders intent on removing the worldwide scourge, and the embarrassing Jewish contribution in particular, were sometimes accused of responsibility for all white slavery. This accusation would surface despite extensive documentation that the trade was dominated by French, German, and Italian operators and that Jews dealt primarily with Jewish women. Consequently, those Jews working to suppress this sorry trade in Jewish poverty often found themselves stymied both by gentile accusations and by Jewish reluctance even to acknowledge that a problem existed.
It is precisely at this juncture that the best-known analysand of all time -- Bertha Pappenheim, more famously known as Freud's "Anna O" -- becomes a significant player. Anna O was the name given by Joseph Breuer and Freud to the young woman whose hysterical symptoms laid the foundation of psychoanalysis.(9) The pseudonym was used to guarantee anonymity to the young daughter of a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, who suffered from a bizarre set of hysterical symptoms after the death of her father, with whom she had been very close, having attended him as a nurse during his death throes. Breuer documented his "talking cure" treatment, in which he hypnotized her and traced each symptom back to a specific traumatic event, almost effecting a cure thereby.(10)
It was this remarkable case, about which Breuer consulted Freud long after the event, which ultimately moved Freud to write The Interpretation of Dreams (read for the first time at a Tuesday night meeting of his B'nai B'rith lodge in 1899, and sent to Theodore Herzl in hopes of a favorable review) and thence to develop his full-blown theories of psychoanalysis. It was not until 1953, however, when Freud's disciple Ernest Jones wrote a definitive biography of the master, that Anna O was revealed as Bertha Pappenheim, whose treatment was broken off by Breuer in 1882, after she fantasized that she was having Breuer's baby.(11) Frightened by this development, Breuer broke off the treatment and went on a second honeymoon with his wife.
Despite the treatment, young Pappenheim again broke down and spent several years in a sanitarium, never totally recovering her sexuality. She emerged as an early feminist in the 1880s, but her subsequent career has been all but overshadowed by the pseudonymous Anna O.(12)
In fact, Bertha Pappenheim, using her Warburg-related family wealth, played perhaps the most prominent role of any individual in the fight against white slavery involving Jews. From 1882, when Breuer gave up her treatment, to 1888, Pappenheim remained in a sanitarium. In 1888 she and her mother moved to Frankfurt, where she began her far-flung campaign on behalf of fallen Jewish women. From 1890 on she mounted one mighty endeavor after another. In Frankfurt she founded a girl's orphanage and, at the same time, established the Judischer Frauenbund, a feminist organization, which ultimately enrolled some 20 percent of all German Jewish women. In 1906 she also established a home for wayward girls and illegitimate babies there before traveling to Eurasia (where she visited with the Czar's family) and the Americas to pursue her cause.(13)
Pappenheim also launched a remarkable literary career, which included the private publication of The Rummage Store (using a male nom de plume) and a three-act play entitled "Women's Rights" (1899; this time with a female pseudonym). In an essay on Jewish women, she argued for emancipation.(14) She had an extended correspondence and friendship with philosopher Martin Buber, whose theories she candidly admitted were opaque to her. When she died in 1936, Buber wrote a warm obituary, presumably never knowing Pappenheim was Anna O.(15) All this from a woman whom Joseph Breuer said would be better off dead.(16)
Even after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Papenheim continued to expand her network of more than 60 stations, staffed by volunteers wearing armbands which read "for women, by women." Her work, in the end, was a major factor in dismantling the Zwi Migdal in Buenos Aires and ridding the entire trade of the "unclean ones."(17)
Thus it is that a proper Viennese Jewess appears in history at the end of the 19th century as a patient in the foundational case of psychoanalysis and then reappears in the 20th century as a heroine in the struggle against white slavery. Given the success of her second role, as compared to her first (she vigorously opposed the suggestion of psychotherapy for her charges),(18) it may well be that Freud's Anna O deserves far less recognition than Bertha Pappenheim.
(1) Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice (New York: Schocken, 1982).
(2) Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 120.
(3) Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 169.
(4) "Avi," from My Father, collected poems of Chaim Nachman Bialik (Tel Aviv, 1935).
(5) Polly Adler, A House Is Not a Home (New York: Cader, 1953).
(6) Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 103-104.
(7) Rudyard Kipling, Vase Definitive E Dictim (New York: Doubleday, 1940), pp.40-43.
(8) Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 144.
(9) Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 73 et. seq.
(10) Breuer, The Life Work of Sigmund Freud (London: Penguin, 1961), pp. 202-204.
(11) Lucy Freeman, The Story of Anna O (New York: Paragon House, 1990) p.61.
(12) Freeman, Story of Anna O, pp.73-79.
(13) Freeman, Story of Anna O, pp. 61-75, 91-96.
(14) Freeman, Story of Anna O, p.121.
(15) His exact words were: "I not only admired her but loved her and will love her until the day I die." (Freeman, p. 173).
(16) Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice, p. 305; Freeman, Story of Anna O, p. 143.
(17) Freeman, Story of Anna O, p.150.
(18) There are a number of little-known connections among Bertha Pappenheim; Breuer, and Freud. Breur's family differed sharply with Jones' characterization of their relative (Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O, [New York: Routledge, 1996], pp. 108-109). The Bernay family (Freud's wife, Martha, was a Bernay) were close to the Pappenheims and may have been related. The two girls knew each other well (Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O, p. 34; Freeman, Story of Anna O, p. 211). Freud, who never knew his wife's friend, was reliably reported to have explained Pappenheim's subsequent career as a vindication of his theories because it was "all a preoccupation with sexuality" (Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O, p. 98). This is quite consistent with Freud's criticism of Breuer to the effect that Breuer held the keys in his hand but failed to open the door.
(*) As early as 1908, Adolph Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: "In no other city in Western Europe could the relationship between Jewry and prostitution and even now the white slave traffic be studied better than in Vienna...an icy shudder ran down my spine when seeing for the first time the jew as an evil, shameless and calculating manager of this shocking vice, the outcome of the scum of the big city."
Photo (The red-light district of Buenos Aires)
By Paula Amann
Washington Jewish Week/Jewsweek - 2001
http://www.jewsweek.com/society/059.htm
They come to Israel from the Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova looking for freedom. Instead they are sold as sex slaves. And you thought Israel was holy.
Jewsweek.com | Their names are Natalya, Oxana or Svetlana. They come to Israel, as immigrants do, for a better life. But their dreams of working as a waitress, nurse, or au pair turn nightmarish upon their arrival.
Their fellow countryman who met them at the airport, speaking the language of home, takes them to a locked apartment with barred windows and a phone that only takes incoming calls, where they are forced to provide sexual services to strangers.
Those who rebel risk being raped, beaten, or starved. Even those who knew they were going into prostitution are shocked by the stark conditions, the pay of roughly 20 shekalim ($5) a day or less for their labor.
This disturbing story unfolds all too often at the hotline for Migrant Workers, a Tel Aviv agency founded in 1998 to protect the human rights of foreign workers, victims of sex trafficking among them. The hotline takes as its motto the familiar line from Exodus 22:20: "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."
Agency director and co-founder Sigal Rozen, along with the group's counsel, Nomi Levenkron, were in Washington, D.C., last week to give a lecture at the Johns Hopkins Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, to network and to speak with supporters. Among them are the New Israel Fund, which has given the hotline a total of $19,000 during the past year and a half.
In an interview, Rozen called sex trafficking an "unorganized crime," based largely on personal networks of immigrants from the Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova.
"... "It's easier being a trafficker than being a plumber ..." --Nomi Levenkron
Those three countries alone accounted for 91 percent of the 474 women arrested in brothels and deported from Israel in 2000, according to figures compiled by hotline volunteers during visits to the Neveh Tirzah women's prison.
These statistics represent only a fraction of the problem. Police spokespersons have set the number of women brought into the country to work in the sex industry at 2,000-3,000 annually, the number of brothels at 250, Rozen said.
"It's Misha that knows Sasha that knows Vladimir," added Levenkron, noting the economic incentive to be a pimp or work with one. "It's easier being a trafficker than being a plumber."
One day she got a phone call from a rape crisis center where a woman pleaded to be arrested and deported.
This young Moldovian had twice tried to escape her pimp and at 18, was burned out on prostitution and just wanted to go home.
"She's so young and sweet," reflected Levenkron. "She came to Israel to be a waitress."
A year ago this month, Israel passed the Law Against Trafficking Women. Before that time, other laws existed against soliciting, pimping, and running brothels.
Yet hotline staff point out that few pimps involved in trafficking ever face a judge, with the majority of prostitutes deported without ever facing a trial that might involve their testimony against their pimps. Out of 459 women deported in 1998, only 35 cases went to trial; out of 253 in 1999, a scant five ended up in the courtroom.
Judicial indifference is compounded by police complicity, Levenkron argued.
The 18-year-old Moldovian, it turned out, had at one point in her misadventures, found herself in a Tel Aviv police station where some of the officers, who were her clients, recognized her and moved to call her pimp.
Overhearing their plans, the woman fled and moved in with a client-turned-boyfriend.
But somehow the pimp found her again, threatened the boyfriend. The young woman, with no place to go, went back to the brothel. Now the case hangs in the courts, where Levenkron has faint hopes for a positive outcome.
The police role in such trafficking ranges from casual to highly serious, she alleged.
"There are police who just come as clients, those who get special discounts because of their good relationships with the owner of the place and those that inform the owner about police operations," explained Levenkron.
One young Beersheva prostitute told the attorney she was forced to work seven days a week unless a police raid was expected.
Widespread fear of violence from pimps has muted the public outcry, say hotline staff. When Levenkron filed a suit on behalf of a Beersheva-based woman, a 20-year-old Moldovian who had survived six pimps and multiple rapes, several of the lawyer's friends came to her home to bid her a final farewell, in anticipation of her imminent death, she said.
INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM
Worldwide, trafficking in persons for domestic service, forced labor, and prostitution ranks third after drugs and guns among the activities of international crime, according to a congressional service report released May 10, 2000. For comparison, about 50,000 people are brought to the United States annually, the report stated.
The rise in trafficking seen over the 1990s was fueled by feeble economies in source countries, such as the former Soviet Union and Southeast Asia, along with weak penalties for traffickers, said a government official familiar with these issues.
Last October, the United States passed its own law addressing this problem, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which calls on the State Department to report annually on the scope of trafficking in various countries and measures taken to combat it. The report was due for release on June 1, but its publication has been delayed.
In Israel today, official policy on trafficking is to arrest and deport foreign sex workers. The women are held for an average of 30 days under crowded and sometimes harsh conditions, longer if they testify in court against their pimps, according to hotline data.
Rozen and Levenkron take issue with this approach. "Deporting women doesn't make things better," said Levenkron. "I'm tired of shouting this all over Israel so I've come here [to the United States] to shout about it."
Rozen contends that a one-year work permit in specified fields such as home health care or child care, before their return home, would put the former prostitutes in a stronger position to take care of themselves.
Gruesome albeit unsubstantiated stories abound, she says, about revenge attacks on returning women and their families by the original trafficker in the home country.
A nest egg from a year's legitimate work, Rozen suggests, would allow victims to re-establish themselves in a new community and stay out of the clutches of traffickers in the future.
Meanwhile, Levenkron is seeking professional back-up in her job representing the victims of trafficking.
"I am the [hotline] legal department," laments Levenkron. "We need lawyers and we need public awareness."
A-G calls for crackdown on trafficking in
women
By Marion Marrache
The Jerusalem Post - August, 01 2001
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/08/01/News/News.31632.html
NEVEH ILAN (August 1) - Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein yesterday called for a crackdown on trafficking in women, charging that law enforcement officials are not doing their job.
"We have to fight this phenomenon morally, socially, and legally... to aspire to uproot this phenomenon," Rubinstein said.
Rubinstein spoke at a conference held yesterday at Neveh Ilan on trafficking in women for prostitution. Also speaking at the conference, chaired by Internal Security Ministry adviser Hagai Herzl, were Internal Security Minister Uzi Landau, Deputy Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra, Insp.-Gen. Shlomo Aharonishky, and Labor MK Yael Dayan.
Police investigations head Cmdr. Moshe Mizrahi said 3,000 trafficked prostitutes are currently in Israel and that numbers are on the rise. Insp.-Gen. Shlomo Aharonishky said that seven women were caught last night trying to enter Israel from Egypt.
Mizrahi expressed concern about how to protect women who decide to testify against their pimps. If they are repatriated, those who imported them will be able to find them; additionally, many are supporting children in their home countries whom they fear may be harmed. So far 31 women have agreed to testify and are receiving a monthly stipend of NIS 6,000.
Mizrahi called for a "serious operation" that would extend to the women's countries of origin.
Some two-thirds of the women brought here end up virtual captives and are physically and mentally mistreated. One-third eventually manage to get work in more established brothels where they only work 12 hours a day but still must foot the bill for their medical expenses.
Mizrahi said that 146 files involving brothels have been opened, and 23 women have appeared in court.
Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On called for the issue to be dealt with as soon as possible. Interior Ministry Director-General Mordechai Mordechai said he is appalled that this is happening in Israel, and that it is connected to the absence of proper regulations concerning foreign workers, who are often treated as slaves.
Seventy-five percent of the women who come from Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia understand that they will be working as prostitutes. The rest think they will be working as masseuses or in hotels. None, however, expect such mistreatment. They enter the country with false documents provided by the traffickers, which are then taken from them, and are kept virtual captives, and work 16 to 18 hours a day servicing between four and 25 clients. In addition, they are often sold to other pimps.
Tel Aviv District Attorney Miriam Rosenthal decried the lack of infrastructure that let the women back onto the street after coming to the police for help. Some of them manage to come to the police for help. "It's as if we didn't want to touch it."
Organization for Foreign Workers' Rights legal adviser Naomi Levenkron said that although police do spot checks for documents at apartments where the women are held, they often overlook false papers and never ask the women whether they want to be there.
Dep.-Cmdr. Avi Davidovitch, head of an inter-ministerial team established at Rubinstein's recommendation, mentioned the women's social-psychological plight. He said that few complaints were filed against pimps, whereas the number of trafficked women was high, and that many women either refuse to complain or retract their statements to police later in court. He called the situation "a war against Amalek without guns." Davidovitch added that thanks largely to Levenkron's work, every woman who does come forward is provided with a lawyer at the state's expense.
Prof. Julie Cwikel of Ben-Gurion University's Center for Women's Health Studies and Promotion supported "bringing some focus on occupational hazards and funding." She said that the women should be given more help than just AIDS testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. The women interviewed for Cwikel's study (as reported in yesterday's paper, "BGU publishes first study of local prostitutes") were those who "work in organized places. We cannot interview women held against their will. If the situation according to our study doesn't sound 'all that bad,' it's because we have looked at a small group in much better conditions."
(Itim contributed to this report.)
Israeli, int'l police crack down on child
pornography
By The Associated Press - November, 28 2001
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/11/28/LatestNews/LatestNews.38957.html
LONDON - Israeli police joined forces from 18 other nations today in an international crackdown on child pornography.
Police arrested seven people in a series of raids across Britain this morning as part of the international operation.
Police in 19 countries carried out 130 arrest and search warrants as part of the operation, code-named Landmark, the National Crime Service said. The operation targeted people who downloaded and distributed child pornography from the Internet.
British police made the raids after a 10-month operation in which they sifted through data from Internet newsgroups specializing in explicit images of children.
Nine forces in England and Scotland carried out 10 raids, arresting seven and seizing computers and software.
Police in 18 other countries - Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and the United States - also executed search and arrest warrants, acting on information supplied by Interpol.
By Marion Marrache
Jerusalem Post - December, 02 2001
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/12/02/Features/Features.39142.html
(December 5) - Although new laws are in the works to stem the white-slavery trade into Israel, Marion Marrache explains why the authorities must do more to treat the prostitutes as victims rather than criminals
"Woman's flesh for sale, woman's flesh for sale," yells a man in front of the Hamashbir department store in downtown Jerusalem, offering up to passers-by the young woman standing next to him.
Although trafficking in women is very much a reality in Israel, this scene was a protest staged two weeks ago by the Jerusalem Women's Center as part of the International Day of Protest Against Violence Against Women.
"Instead of just protesting rape and domestic violence as we do every other year, we could not ignore the terrible issue of thousands of women being trafficked annually into this country to be used as prostitutes," says Adi Kunstman, coordinator of activities at the center, adding "Trafficking is modern slavery."
Local organizations dealing with the issue, such as the Hotline for Migrant Workers and the Awareness Center, believe that some 3,000 women are smuggled into the country every year for the purpose of prostitution. The majority of these women are from Moldavia, Russia and the Ukraine. They are approached in their countries of origin - where they earn $20 to $30 a month - with the promise of employment which will bring in a magical monthly $1,000.
According to a report issued by the International Abolitionist Federation, an estimated one-fourth of these women are unaware that they will be working in the sex trade, believing instead they will be employed as waitresses, cooks, au pairs, models or masseuses. None are prepared for what they eventually encounter. Most suffer beatings and repeated rape. The women are viewed and bought at pimping auctions - during which they are forced to undress - at prices ranging from $4,000 to $10,000.
According to attorney Nomi Levenkron of the Migrant Hotline, those who fetch the lower prices end up working in the slum area around Tel Aviv's old central bus station. Their passports are taken from them, and they are often kept locked up in apartments with barred windows. This was the case with the four prostitutes who were trapped and burnt to death when a religious fanatic torched a Tel Aviv brothel in August, 2000.
That incident briefly raised public awareness of the issue, and sparked calls for the authorities to start treating the problem seriously. But it is only in the past month that two bills that might alleviate the situation began to make headway in the Knesset.
Last week, a private member's bill entitling women who were sold into prostitution to public legal aid, passed its preliminary reading in the Knesset. Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On, sponsor of the bill and head of the parliamentary commission of inquiry into trafficking in women, notes that these women, when arrested, usually find themselves represented by their pimps' attorneys, an obvious clash of interests that goes against the principle of fair representation.
Two weeks ago the Knesset passed, in its preliminary reading, a bill that mandates a four-year minimum sentence for traders in women. Currently, there is a 16-year maximum sentence, but no minimum jail time, and many white slavers end up getting off with relatively light sentences.
"Israel has become a convenient center for pimps who trade in women," says Gal-On, who also proposed this bill. "It is modern-day slave trading, and the sentences for the pimps are not harsh enough, as judges still do not take this matter seriously enough. The courts give the criminals ridiculous sentences, rendering the current law meaningless. At the worst, the pimps spend a couple of years in jail, but they make a fortune. But from now on, criminals will know that you cannot trade in women and get off lightly."
AN ILLUMINATED sign reading "Palace Club" flashes outside a seedy brothel in south Tel Aviv. A group of journalists joining Gal-On's committee on a recent fact-finding mission, head down a few flights of dark stone stairs to the reception area where three young women sit huddled in a corner waiting for clients. Beside them stands their portly pimp dabbing the sweat from his forehead with a large silk handkerchief.
There are approximately 250 such brothels in Tel Aviv, an increase of 100 since last year. This is by far the largest number of brothels in the country; in other parts of the country trafficking exists, but it is less common and there is far less awareness of the problem. Some of the women live in brothels, others have a room elsewhere.
If business is good, a shift can last from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. They are paid at the end of the month after expenses and "fines" have been deducted - prostitutes can be fined by their pimps for almost anything. And this is only once the girls have paid back their purchase price, during which time they are extraordinarily lucky if those who are pimping for them give them a daily allowance of NIS 20 for cigarettes.
Often, by the time they have finished buying themselves out of their slavery, they have been resold and must begin again. These women are told so often that they are the property of their pimps that they do not even stop to think whether or not they have to have sex with them as well. Although clients generally have to use protection, the pimps usually don't. Gal-On says one pimp told her his women make NIS 120 for a half-hour, "NIS 100 for me, NIS 20 for them." Many brothels also have a kitty into which the girls have to put NIS 30 to 50 per client in order to cover the brothel's tax bill (declared income is credited to "massages").
These women are often lured into prostitution in their native countries by misleading job advertisements in the papers. They often have very young children who they have left behind with their families.
"Some have artistic careers, others are academics who want to make some money to pay for their studies," explains Levenkron. "Those who have children generally have not been part of the work force yet because they have married young."
Many of the women travel from Moscow to Sharm e-Sheikh, and then are taken to the Israeli border. They are met by there by Beduin guides, who smuggle them across the border and deliver them to an agent acting on behalf of procurers.
They are also provided with false documentation, needed for those times when the police raid brothels, check the womens' identification papers and ask to see if they have valid visas. But according to the prostitutes, they rarely enquire whether they are being held against their will. In any case, the women admit, they are usually too frightened to answer truthfully.
Although prostitution itself is not a crime in Israel, such groups as the Migrant Hotline and the Awareness Center accuse the authorities of treating the trafficked women as criminals, instead of victims, interested simply in deporting them - as has been the case with more than 1,000 such women in the past three years. These organizations also accuse law enforcement of generally ignoring the crimes of pimps and traffickers, even though they "buy, sell, rape and torture women," because they sometimes cooperate with the police by providing information about other criminal activities.
There have also been at least a half-dozen cases of sex trafficking involving policemen as suspects, and one policeman was charged with managing a brothel. In four cases, policemen informed the pimps of expected raids on their premises, and in one instance a policeman was accused of selling a woman to another pimp following her arrest.
One prostitute, Sonya (not her real name), says she went to a police station and asked to be arrested because she had just ran away from the brothel where she was held against her will. The policemen turned her away, and as she left she heard them saying (in Hebrew) they were going to call her pimp.
ONE OFFICER who does care is Tel Aviv Police Superintendent Pini Aviram, who heads a special investigative team dealing with the trafficking issue. But Aviram complains that he does not have anywhere near the manpower need for the job.
"My team consists of only five Russian speakers," he says, "We need people who can speak to the women in their own language, and interview them adequately."
This adequate interviewing is actually taking place, but unfortunately not until the women have already found their way into jail. They are held, usually at the Neveh Tirza prison but alternatively at Abu Kabir, Kishon, Negev or others, for weeks and sometimes for months, awaiting deportation. Levenkron or other volunteers from Migrant Hotline visit Neveh Tirza every Sunday taking a translator and additional student volunteers with them. Hotline is the only non-governmental organization which has been allowed access to the prisons, and they bring the women phone cards and clothing.
"One women sticks in my mind," says Levenkron; "She wore one green satin pyjama for three weeks straight, until we were able to bring her clothes."
Now, thanks to Neveh Tirza warden Debi Sagi, Hotline has better and easier access to the women. "Debi doesn't think they should be in prison," says Levenkron, "but as long as they are she wants to make life as easy as she can for them."
In general, the prostitutes are housed separately from the hardened criminals, but that is not always possible due to space restrictions. Levenkron worries about this because of the danger of the women being influenced to take drugs by their cellmates. Eastern European prostitutes, unlike their Israeli counterparts do not generally take drugs. In fact, Levenkron has only come across one such case among all the women she has met and whose interviews she has looked over.
Another difference between foreign and Israeli prostitutes is that the latter get to keep a larger percentage of the takings. Sadly, says Levenkron, one girl's ambition was to "become an Israeli prostitute."
When asked whether they had tried to run away - and if not why not - many of the women explain that they are afraid for the safety of their families back home. Some have tried to escape, and were later caught and beaten. One women presently housed at a hostel waiting to testify against her pimp, told the Hotline that a man who had befriended her was supposed to meet to help her escape but when she arrived at the prearranged meeting point, her pimp turned up instead. She began to scream and the police came and took her into custody.
In many cases when a woman is arrested, her pimp will pay an NIS 30,000 bail pending her deportation, so that she can go back to work. Thus, says Levenkron, "these women, who were raped, trafficked and exploited before their arrests, were in fact sold once more, this time by the state itself."
Police Deputy-Commander Avi Davidovitch, head of an inter-ministerial team dealing with the trafficking issue established at Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein's recommendation, says that although the number of trafficked women is growing alarmingly high, few complaints are filed against pimps, and many women either refuse to complain or later retract earlier statements they have made to the police out of fear of reprisals.
Police investigations head Cmdr. Moshe Mizrahi also expresses concern about how to protect women who decide to testify against their pimps. If they are simply repatriated, those who imported them will be able to find them; additionally, many are supporting children in their home countries whom they fear may be harmed. Mizrahi calls for a "serious international operation" that would extend to the women's countries of origin.
For example, in some countries of the Former Soviet Union, a poster campaign has sprung up and women are able to read on buses and other public places about the dangers of falling for the offer of a well-paying job abroad. But, Mizrahi insists, much more still needs to be done.
At least now, thanks to the Hotline's intervention, every woman who does come forward is provided with some assistance at the state's expense. This came about after four women filed a petition through the Hotline requesting the court instruct the police to seriously investigate their complaints against their procurers. The women stated they would be ready to testify against the pimps in court, provided they did not have to spend the intervening months in jail until called upon to give evidence at the trial. As a result of the petition, the police questioned the girls, and those who agreed to testify were provided with a safe place to stay and living expenses until the time of their testimony.
But Hotline insists that even this aid (said by police to cost NIS 6,000 a month per woman, a sum with which Hotline disagrees) is inadequate, especially when it comes to medical expenses. Many of the women come out of the brothels with serious health problems; one 21-year-old former prostitute is now unable to have children because of untreated gynecological problems. According to Shuki Baleli, Vice Squad Chief for the Tel Aviv District, they rarely even go to a doctor unless they are in pain. "If they die, no one will even know who they are," he adds.
Even when under police protection, almost every medical incident needs to be appealed separately by Hotline on behalf of the women. The humanitarian group Doctors for Human Rights treats these women for free or for nominal sums in the NIS 30 to 50 range, but serious health problems sometimes require the women to seek other sources of treatment.
So far, despite the provision providing them with a place to stay outside of prison, only a few dozen of the trafficked women have agreed to testify against their pimps. What they need, says Levenkron, "is a reason to come forward and to give evidence against these criminals."
She recommends that instead of threatening these women with deportation, they be given work or student visas for a specified amount of time in order to make the ordeal worth their while.
"Legalization of their status is the only real option," she says, an issue that applies to all foreign workers in this country. "If there will be further laws written," adds Levenkron, "they should insure that these victims get effective legal representation, medical treatment and a proper place from them to stay."
by Shula Kopf
The Jerusalem Post - June 21, 2002
HIGHLIGHT:
Rape, beatings and humiliation are daily reality for the thousands of women being sold into prostitution here. Three boxes at end of text.
The girls are young, beautiful and desperate. Their stories are heartbreaking.Listen to Marina, 19, from Moldavia."The day after I arrived in Israel, men began arriving in the apartment. They wore a lot of gold jewelry, they all had cellular phones and they smoked a lot. They were fat and scary. They looked like criminals to me. We had to get undressed and turn around for their inspection. They looked us over to see if we had scars or stretch marks. I felt like the African people who were sold as slaves 200 years ago. I felt like an animal."
There are self-inflicted slash marks on Marina's forearms. The 19-year-old cut herself with a knife in agitated moments of self-loathing during her seven-month stint as a Tel Aviv call girl.
Tanya, 20, from Russia:
"The first day they explained the rules to me. I must smile all the time and I must sit upright on the sofa in the reception room. I must not laugh or talk with the other girls. In the lobby the owner could see everything that was going on through cameras. But he was a good owner. He never beat me."
In the last 10 years, nearly 10,000 women have been smuggled into Israel and sold to brothels, grist for the mill of the lucrative sex trade estimated to make $ 450 million profit a year. Trafficking in people is the fastest growing area of international organized crime, preying on women and children made vulnerable by poverty and despair. According to a CIA report, one to two million people are trafficked each year worldwide, 50,000 into the US. The average age of entry into prostitution is 14. Most are recruited or forced.
The profits are staggering and trafficking is now considered the third largest source of profits for organized crime, behind drugs and guns, generating billions of dollars annually. Generally the flow is from Third World countries to the industrialized nations.
"It comes down to the point that men with money can buy the bodies of weak, poverty-stricken, desperate women," says Nissan Ben-Ami of the Awareness Institute, a non- profit Israeli organization which fights trafficking. "Society enables men to purchase sex just like one buys a loaf of bread."
Until recently, Israel has been a comfortable place for traffickers to do business. According to police, a brothel owner can profit anywhere from $ 50,000-$ 100,000 a year per woman, and he may have from 10 to 30 working for him. The women generally get only NIS 20 per customer, after they pay off their "debt" to the pimp.
In the last two years, Israel took the brunt of a scathing Amnesty International report and was placed on a US State Department's black list, a double punch which inaugurated the fight against trafficking.
"The issue of trafficking became politically correct," says Nomi Levenkron, attorney for the Hotline for Migrant Workers.
Just this month, due to its increased efforts, Israel was taken off the US State Department's list of worst offenders.
"Very little has changed in reality," says Levenkron. "The government's response continues to be the deportation of the women. There is no safe house for victims who want to escape their pimps. The court sentences are too lenient and there are too many plea bargaining deals."
Nonchalant politicians and an apathetic public ignore the cries of alarm about modern-day slavery raised by activists such as Levenkron.
"Israel started a bit late with this battle but is taking big steps in the right direction," says activist Leah Gruenpeter Gold of the Awareness Institute, which, together with the migrant workers' hotline, publishes an annual report it submits to the UN. "When the phenomenon began about a decade ago, with the last wave of Russian immigration, Israel wasn't ready. It all came as a surprise."
In fact, until two years ago there was no reference to trafficking in the penal code. Labor MK Yael Dayan sponsored an amendment in July 2000 which set a maximum 16- year sentence for the selling or buying of people.
At about the same time, the Amnesty report provided the impetus for the creation of a parliamentary inquiry committee headed by Zehava Gal-On of Meretz.
Gal-On's committee gained a shot in the arm eight months later when the US State Department released its report listing Israel among 23 nations which do not take the minimum measures to halt the trafficking of people across their borders. Israel's peers on this blacklist were Gabon, Sudan, Qatar and Bahrein, not exactly the company Israel aspires to keep. In addition, the report threatened to cut off US aid to countries that do not take steps to improve.
'It amazed us that the state was punishing the women by arresting and deporting them for illegal stay in Israel and letting the pimps go," says Gal-On.
In 2000, nearly 400 Eastern European prostitutes were arrested in police raids on brothels, jailed in Neve Tirzah women's prison, and then deported.
"The government likes to fold them, pack them and ship them," says Levenkron.
To date, Gal-On's committee has held 21 meetings, heard testimonies from numerous expert witnesses and proposed 10 changes to the law, of which six have received wide support from all parties.
"The trafficking of women is modern slavery and I am not willing to have it take place in Israel," says Gal-On. "Some people say that these women knew they were going to work in prostitution before they came here. That is irrelevant. They are victims whose basic human rights have been violated. They certainly didn't imagine the conditions they would meet here: the rapes, the violence, the humiliation and their sale from pimp to pimp."
Olga, 19, from Russia:
"We were never allowed out. The door was thick and there were bars on the windows. We were always guarded. Sasha would accompany us to the client's hotel and returned us immediately to the brothel. I knew I was coming here to work in prostitution, but I didn't know that prostitution means being closed up in a jail where 30 clients a day visit me without me being asked if I am willing or not. I didn't know I would have to work hours that never end and that I would always have to be ready, because maybe a client wants me at 10 in the morning when I went to sleep only at seven."
Gal-On, who heard testimony from young girls like Olga, has declared an all-out war against trafficking with several weapons in her arsenal:
An amendment to the penal code to require a four- year mandatory sentence for trafficking.
A proposal to allow the government to confiscate the traffickers' profits and property.
A witness protection bill to encourage victims to testify.
The establishment of a special government task force to lead the charge.
"Until now Israel has been an easy and comfortable place for the pimps," says Gal-On. "We have to get the pimps where it hurts - in their pocketbooks - to confiscate all their ill-gotten profits, as is done in drug cases. We're talking about an industry that according to some estimates, makes $ 450 million to $ 1 billion profit a year. They must be made to understand that they can't sell women's bodies and get away with it."
But get away with it they have."Of all the cases we have investigated, made arrests and handed over to the prosecution, never once have we been called upon to testify," says Pini Aviram, superintendent in the Tel Aviv police and co-head of a special investigating team of Russian-speaking officers. The cases rarely come to trial, and end in plea bargains.
"The deals are ludicrous," says the burly police officer, his voice edged with anger. "If we get them on three counts of trafficking, that is only the tip of the iceberg. And for that they get 18 months when the maximum sentence is 16 years on each charge. It infuriates me. I think that anything less than 10 years is a light sentence for these people. This is a plague that must be rooted out."
Aviram says, with no small measure of cynicism, that he has arrested second-time offenders who were back in business after completing their short jail term. However, he feels encouraged by a recent ruling by a Tel Aviv District Court judge who refused to approve a plea bargain and, instead, sentenced the pimp to three years in jail, two years probation and a NIS 10,000 fine.
According to Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit, over the last year 42 traffickers have been charged and 28 have been convicted with sentences ranging from two to 12 years.
"We must root out this contemptible and ugly phenomenon not just because of the Amnesty report, but because we are the State of Israel and something like this should not be allowed to exist here," Sheetrit said at a recent Knesset hearing.
His office has given prosecutors new instructions to hold traffickers in jail until their trial is over and to ask the court for financial compensation for the victims.
"If the pimp sits in jail for four years but his millions wait for him when he gets out, that is not enough of a deterrent," says Eli Kaplan, co-head of the special Tel Aviv police unit. "We need to get them where it hurts, in their pockets, and confiscate all their money and use it to benefit some of these girls, so that they don't go back to Moldavia to pick potatoes and freeze in the winter. If they can get some compensation, it will encourage them to testify."
About 60 percent of all arrests in the country come from the Tel Aviv unit, including the well-publicized recent arrest of Mark Gaiman who, according to police, ran a chain of brothels and a well-oiled network for recruiting and smuggling girls from Moldavia and the Ukraine. The unit has been cut back from 14 to seven officers as police have been assigned other positions due to the security situation.
Almost all the women come from the former Soviet Union where the high rate of unemployment and low pay make them vulnerable to the lure of procurers. In Moldavia, for example, 55% of the population live under the poverty line and the GNP per person is $ 400.
Christina, 21:
"In Moldavia, a woman simply must work somewhere so that her child and her husband, who is capable of wasting a month's salary on alcohol, will not starve to death. A salary of $ 35 a month is barely enough to survive. So the girl, out of stupidity or naivete, goes abroad with the hope of being a nanny, but arrives to a closed place where she must pleasure clients for 20 to 30 shekels."
Today, after Israel has tightened control at the airport, the women are smuggled through Egypt by Beduins, at a rate of about 30 to 40 a week, according to police.
Upon their arrival, the women are put up for sale, sometimes at a public auction where they are exhibited in front of a large crowd of pimps and sold to the highest bidder.
"The public auctions are just like the slave trade that you see in the movies," says Aviram. "They check their teeth and look to see if they have scars. The price is set by their looks. It's a slave market in the most disgusting way. The pimps look at them as merchandise. 'You belong to me. I bought you,' they tell the girls. I heard one of the girls say, 'When I lived in Moldavia I used to take my dog out twice a day to the yard to relieve himself. Here they held me locked up. I needed permission to go to the bathroom, to eat. My dog had it better.'"
According to a report by the Hotline for Migrant Workers submitted to the UN Commission on Human Rights, "The woman's intimate parts are often examined in order to appraise the value of the 'merchandise.' The price of a woman may vary from $ 4,000 to $ 10,000 depending on age and looks. The quality of a woman's false documents is also a factor in estimating her price."
In the court case of the State of Israel vs Reuven Rivai, the judge describes the sale of a woman named Eliona as follows: "A meeting was set for the following day at the McDonald's restaurant at the Gan Shmuel intersection... negotiations were held regarding the sale of Eliona for the purpose of prostitution. At the end of the negotiations, Eliona was taken to the men's room, stripped naked and examined by the buyer. It was agreed that she would be sold for $ 6,000... Eliona's examination can only be compared to the examination of cattle in the market."
After the sale to one of the country's 700 brothels, the women are told they will have to "pay their debt" to the pimps before they start earning any money - only about NIS 20 of the NIS 200 paid by the customers. They are fined for numerous "infractions": not smiling at clients, looking out the window or drinking a glass of wine without permission. The working hours are unbearable - 15 to 17 a day, and the women get few, if any, days off. Levenkron tells the story of one girl who was forced to spend her 21st birthday servicing 37 clients.
"I worked the morning shift in the brothel," one victim told the police. "The morning shift starts at 10 a.m. and ends at 3 a.m. ... the owner would sleep with any girl he wanted. We did not have the right to refuse."
According to police, often the pimp sells the woman to another brothel as soon as she has worked off her "debt" and the cycle of exploitation begins again.
"They keep rotating the girls among the brothels so the regular customers won't get bored," says Aviram.
"We have some girls who run away and come to us with nothing but a nylon bag with a couple of pairs of underwear," says Kaplan. "This is definitely modern slavery. In the end, after being abused, they end up with nothing."
Svetlana, 22, from the Ukraine.
"One day Natasha managed to escape. We don't know how, but we woke up in the morning and she wasn't there. We were so happy, not only because it infuriated the owner. He went wild. But also because we hoped, that if she succeeded, then one day we could succeed as well. That was the only day that I can remember since I got to Israel that I stopped feeling fear and despair and began to feel some hope."
A long-term solution to the problem, according to some Israeli activists, is nothing less than a restructuring of society. They point to Sweden where women have almost half the political power and, as a result, prostitution has been reduced by 60 percent in the last few decades.
"Prostitution is rooted in the structure of society and in the inequality between men and women," says Gold of the Awareness Institute. "To say that in 100 years the phenomenon will disappear, just as did African slavery, might be too optimistic. But in order to begin making the change we must not institutionalize or legitimize prostitution."
Gali (not her real name), an Israeli prostitute with a going rate of NIS 50, has her own opinions on this and other subjects. Gali has staked her spot behind the Mandarin Hotel in Tel Aviv, a dusty lot that serves as daytime parking for beach-goers but transforms at night into an outdoor brothel. Gali has fought off all challengers to her spot, especially younger and prettier prostitutes, resorting to violence when cursing and tough words don't scare them off.
"You have to be strong here or else you get trampled," she says in a husky voice.
It's a Thursday night and already the cars, headlights piercing the dark, circle Gali and her colleagues like a column of ants around breadcrumbs.
"This is pretty good traffic despite the bad economy," she observes and flicks the blonde hair of her wig with manicured fingers.
Gali is an intelligent, articulate woman who seems as if she could easily work as a store manager or run an office. She says that as bad as things are for her and the other Israeli prostitutes, there is nothing worse than the hell experienced by the young Eastern European girls smuggled into the country by traffickers.
"What the pimps do to them is like cutting into live meat," she says. "We've had a few of the girls who managed to run away from the pimps. They went through hell, rape, beatings and humiliation. They didn't know the language and didn't even know where they were. Their passports were taken away. They told us they were afraid to complain. There is nothing worse than for a woman to be forced into prostitution. At least I work for myself and not for some pimp," she says.
Gali has the social equation neatly summed up: "As long as there are men and as long as there are desperate, hungry women, there will be prostitution."
(Box 1) Physical abuse, psychological trauma
Prostitution is hazardous to mental health, even more so than being a combat soldier, according to a recent American study which found that prostitutes had a higher rate of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), than American Vietnam veterans.
"It's a devastating experience. They are beaten, robbed, raped and degraded and this has a cumulative effect on their self-esteem and mental health," says Eli Somer, psychology professor at the University of Haifa's School of Social Work.
Somer cites studies that indicate prostitutes are raped on average eight to 10 times a year and have a 75 percent rate of at least one suicide attempt. The vast majority, some studies indicate 90 percent, were sexually molested as children.
"How can anyone even think of legalizing something that is so damaging?" he asks.
Philosophically, Somer views prostitution as a shameful thread woven into the fabric of a male-dominated society.
"This is another illustration of how men exploit women's economic poverty," he says. "All the bad things assigned to us men are reflected in prostitution."
He pauses and adds: "I get embarrassed sometimes for being a man."
Nomi Levenkron, of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, knows of at least two women who have had mental breakdowns and had to be hospitalized.
Once the women are able to extricate themselves from the clutches of the traffickers and return home, their nightmare is not over.
Researchers for the International Organization for Migration published a report last year stating that 92 percent of victims had major problems returning to normal life. They experienced physical and mental health problems, a divorce rate three times higher than the average and numerous suicides or suicide attempts. They are threatened by traffickers to keep silent, and some are forced to join the trafficking networks to recruit new victims.
(Box 2) An old (Jewish) profession
Jews have been active in "white slavery" (as trafficking was known) beginning in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe. The poverty, discrimination, persecution and mass migrations proved to be fertile ground for brothel keeping and procuring, according to Nissan Ben-Ami of the Awareness Institute. A third of the women in the trade were Jewish and Jews organized an elaborate crime network to procure and transport women to Argentina, South Africa and England, he says.
According to Yale University historian Edward Bristow, in 1892, 22 Jewish traffickers in Lemberg (Lvov) in the Ukraine were convicted of procuring women for Turkish brothels. Jewish traffickers populated whole streets in Czernowitz. Refugees from Russian pogroms established the first brothels in Saloniki. In Warsaw, Jewish bundists were so outraged by the presence of Jewish brothel-keepers, that in 1905 they demolished 40 brothels. Eight people were killed and 100 injured in the riot.
In Buenos Aires, the powerful fraternity of Jewish pimps and procurers was known as the Zwi Migdal Society. They had their own synagogue and burial ground. Surveying the ground at the cemetery, the author Stefan Zweig remarked, "So much dirt, how much Jewish dirt. Where can I get the energy to describe this?"
In his book, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, Bristow chronicles the efforts of voluntary Jewish organizations to rescue Jewish victims from brothels and to fight the traffickers. It is largely due to Jewish efforts that legislation against procuring and juvenile prostitution was passed in Britain and South Africa.
Bristow cites a letter written in 1902 by American Rabbi Stephen Wise to a London rabbi, president of the gentleman's club of the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women.
"According to the statement of my informant, a large number of Jewish women in Manila are to be found in the ranks of prostitution. He thinks that at one time the number reached 200, but that now the number is less than 100, thanks to measures of the American government. These women are mainly of Galician, Russian or Rumanian birth. It is almost too shocking to put to paper, but according to Mr. Rubinstein, the statement of a man that he is a Jew is followed invariably by the question 'Have you any nice women to sell?' Saddest of all is the fact that these women have not chosen a life of shame of their own free will, but have for the most part been inveigled under promises or pretense of marriage These victims of deceit and treachery, though leading dissolute lives, are conscious of their shame, are not drunken and hilarious and frequently weep over their degradation."
(Box 3) Luckier ladies 'sold' to cops
Tel Aviv police ran a sting operation on May 12, with officers posing as pimps "purchasing" three Moldavian girls smuggled by Beduins over the Egyptian border.
"This is the first time we were able to get close to the smugglers working on both sides of the border," says Eli Kaplan, superintendent of the Tel Aviv Police Central Unit. The Beduin were armed and the police officers were not.
"So we gave them only part of the money, $ 10,000, and the rest we told them we would pay in Tel Aviv. When one of the Beduin arrived to get the money, we arrested him," says Kaplan. The police have not yet arrested the other two, nor recovered the $ 10,000 of taxpayers' money. According to police, the Beduin, Saliman Abu-Shalibi, 26, of the al-Azma tribe, has been charged with smuggling, selling and raping the women.
The girls "purchased" by the police told a harrowing tale. They were flown into Egypt and taken by Beduin into the desert.
"We spent three nights in the desert on the Egyptian side. The first group of Beduin treated us OK. They gave us food and cigarettes and laughed with us. They tried to rape us, but we threatened to tell the bosses in Israel on them," says Olla, 20.
A rival gang of Beduin kidnapped the girls at gunpoint.
"It was difficult and dangerous. They forced us to walk on foot and climb hills. It was difficult to breathe and my heart pounded. We had to climb big boulders. We hid when we saw headlights of cars. We moved at night. To cross the border, we started at around 7 at night and we were in Israel at 6 in the morning."
That is when their real ordeal began.
"We were put in a ruined house in the middle of the desert and were left there the entire day without food or water. There were signs left by women who had been there before us. We wanted to run away, but we didn't know where to go."
Christina, 20, picks up the story.
"At night the Beduin arrived with a car. We drove around in the desert. He was high on drugs. Suddenly he stopped the car, opened the door where I was sitting. He shouted at me to get out. I didn't want to. He was shouting at me. He was drugged out, so I was afraid. I got out and he told me to get undressed. I told him I was in the middle of my period, but he didn't understand."
At this point, Olla, who had worked previously as a call girl, got out of the car to protect Christina, who was innocent about such things. Christina, a petite girl with piercing blue eyes and a quiet demeanor, had been told in Moldavia that she would work in Israel as a waitress in a casino.
"He told me to get undressed. I refused," says Olla. "He said, 'all the time that you are with me, I am your owner and you will do what I tell you.' He threw me on the ground on my belly, stripped me, held my hands behind my back, and opened up my legs with his and that's it. He finished inside me. I told him I don't have contraception. He told me I will have a baby and he laughed.
"At 6 in the morning he returned us to the house and left us there all day with no food or water. Another night he brought two friends with him."
The girls consider themselves lucky to have been "sold" to the Tel Aviv police.
"We are helping the police by testifying so that this phenomenon will be wiped out," says Olla. "We are not animals and we are not slaves. We are people and not objects to be used."
Due to new regulations, the girls, who are in the country illegally, are not jailed but stay in a hostel paid for by the police until the time of the trial. Meanwhile they have found legitimate work.
"I am able to work in a respectable way," says Olla, who is tall, skinny, and dressed provocatively in tight- fitting black pants and high-heeled black shoes. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Her face is clean of make-up. Her brown eyes are deep set and sad. She plays nervously with a key chain during the interview. She has an air of hurt melancholy about her.
"When I was a little girl my dream was to be a mother and to give my children everything," she says.
This is Olla's second time in Israel. Previously, she worked in an escort service for about seven months before she was caught by police and deported. Upon her return to Moldavia she met the same poverty and hunger that drove her to prostitution in the first place.
Olla says she can't remember much about her first encounter with a client. She drank three glasses of whiskey to dull her senses.
"I felt hurt. Back in Moldavia I agreed to do this kind of work, but when I was confronted with the truth and understood what I needed to do, I felt disgusted." Olla says she had to work without pay until she returned her $ 5,000 purchase price to the owner of the escort service.
"Some of the clients were masochists, drug addicts and perverts. It was disgusting. I tried to ignore my thoughts because I had no choice."
The women say they would like nothing better than to be allowed to stay in Israel on temporary papers and to work cleaning houses.
"At first the pimp used us. And now the police will use us as witnesses and then kick us out. All we want is a chance to work in a normal job," says Olla.
GRAPHIC: 3 photos: Christina and Olla, two Moldavian prostitutes. Eli Kaplan, Tel Aviv police. Nissan Ben-Ami and Leah Gruenpeter Gold, the Awareness Institute. (Credit: Shula Kopf)
by Shalva Ben David
Aish Ha Torah - April 28, 2003
http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/Young_Girls_at_Risk.asp
15,000 Jewish teenage girls, from impoverished or broken families, have run away from home and are currently living with Arab men. One woman is trying to do something about it.
Miriam Schwartz is worried about the future of the Jewish people. It's not the terrorist attacks. It's not the failed Oslo accords. Miriam Schwartz is afraid that many Jewish souls in the State of Israel are being swallowed up by the Arab population.
Her concerns are fueled by the astonishing statistic from a source in the Ministry of Labor and Welfare that 15,000 Jewish teenage girls, from impoverished or broken families, have run away from home and are currently living with Arab men. Mrs. Schwartz, a Jewish educator of over 20 years, is determined to fight this phenomenon by offering these teens the chance to build new lives.
In an interview, Mrs. Schwartz said that she came across this trend purely by accident. En route to deliver a lecture in Be'er Sheva, she picked up a 12-year-old girl hitchhiking at the exit from Jerusalem. During the course of their conversation, the young girl revealed that she was living with an Arab and had persuaded a friend of hers to move in with a friend of his. Mrs. Schwartz gave the young girl her phone number and was not surprised when the girl contacted her for help a few months later.
After some investigation, Mrs. Schwartz learned that Arab men frequently target girls from broken homes or impoverished families. "In many cases the first contact takes place at a local grocery store, where an Arab stock boy is working. At first he just offers the girl some candy or a small toy. The next day the girl, who has no such luxuries at home, comes back for another treat. Until now, the girl does not know that the man is actually an Arab -- he poses as a Jew. After several months, and many gifts, the Arab entices the girl to come and live with him. Initially, she lives in the house as a daughter of the household, but when she becomes an older teenager, she enters into a relationship with the man, and tragically bears Jewish children who are raised as Arabs."
According to Mrs. Schwartz, this situation is nothing less than a national emergency that calls for immediate action. "With 750,000 Israeli children living under the poverty line, many children are at risk."
She reported that while these girls are treated reasonably when they are still young, their status changes once they are older and have borne children. Then they are treated more like slaves, but by that time, the girls are too deeply entrenched in the household to leave.
Additionally, there is great potential for damage to Jewish demographics in Israel. While a child born of a Jewish mother and an Arab father is a Jew according to Torah law, s/he is an Arab according to Arab tradition. Unless these young women are persuaded to take their children and leave these Arab homes, this phenomenon will compound the increasing gap that exists between the Jewish and Arab population.
After learning more about this worrisome trend, Mrs. Schwartz formed the organization Yad B'Yad in order to bring these girls back into the Jewish fold. This is, in fact, a two-part battle: persuading the girls to leave their Arab household, and finding a totally new home for them, since their biological parents are absent, uninvolved or unable to raise them. As founder and director of Am Echad United, a grassroots organization that promotes Jewish unity, she was familiar with the route a non-profit cause must take, and lost no time in contacting potential donors in North America as well as Welfare Minister Rabbi Shlomo Benizri in order to raise funds.
Mrs. Schwartz's dream is to build an educational complex with dormitory facilities in order to house these girls and enable them to build new lives. However, dreams are accomplished in stages and her first step was to rent out two houses in the center of Israel and settle the first group of girls in gradually. Yad B'Yad assumes responsibility for the girls' basic, immediate needs - food, clothing, shelter - as well as secondary needs such as schooling and medical care. The local municipality provides psychologists and social workers who are in constant contact with each girl. A housemother will be living on the premises and Sherut Leumi (National Service) volunteers will soon join the staff as youth advisors. Additionally, Mrs. Schwartz teaches the girls about their Jewish heritage so that they will be motivated from within to raise a Jewish family.
However, Mrs. Schwartz distinguishes between Jewish heritage and Jewish law. "I'm against religious coercion. Girls who live in our shelter do not have to observe the mitzvot. On the other hand, basic ground rules must be observed. Drugs are absolutely forbidden at Yad B'Yad and the girls must attend some type of educational institution."
Yad B'Yad does not accept a girl if there is a warrant for her arrest, nor does it accept girls that are being forced there by an outside authority. "The girls at Yad B'Yad come willingly," Mrs. Schwartz notes. "They are motivated to start a new life."
Yad B'Yad also operates on the preventative level, as Mrs. Schwartz explains, "I visit hang-outs in Tel Aviv, Holon and Jerusalem at night and talk to girls at risk. I give them my phone number and tell them that they can call me at any time. We give lectures to mothers to raise awareness about the problem. We urge them to be mindful of their daughters' whereabouts at all times and caution against sending a young girl to the grocery store alone."
It's clear that there are many obstacles to overcome in a project such as this. The financial costs of building an entire complex alone are staggering. However, Mrs. Schwartz is undaunted and is proceeding in stages. "This is a war we cannot afford to lose," she says. "It is a fight for the Jewish future."
To learn more about Yad b'Yad, please visit http://www.yadbyad.net.
Victoria's, and Israel's, Ugly
Secret
Ina Friedman
Jerusalem Report -January 31, 2004
http://www.jrep.com/Israel/Article-55.html
Of the thousands of women brought to Israel each year to work as prostitutes, many are enslaved, beaten and raped by their pimps. Now, one of them is fighting back...
If you were to pass her on the street, there's nothing particular about Victoria that would catch your eye. She could be your daughter, your sister, or your wife. In fact, before her ordeal began, she was a law student in the small Republic of Moldova, and she still has hopes of resuming her studies there. It is only when she begins to speak - barely above a whisper, in grammatically tortured Hebrew picked up "on the job" - that you sense, even become infected by, the fear in her voice, the sadness in her eyes, the exhaustion broadcast by her very posture. And only when you hear her story do you understand that this intelligent, un-assuming 21-year-old - one of the millions of people around the world who have been trafficked as prostitutes this year (see box) - is a heroine, not of some abstract international struggle for human rights but of a very private struggle to rise above the status of victim and take charge of her life again.
Ironically, it was a similar impetus that led Victoria (who asks that her last name not be published) into the nightmare she has been living for the past 16 months. In mid-1999, when she ran out of funds to continue her studies and found that her family would not help her, she was lured by the offer of a job in Israel as a masseuse. The promised monthly salary was $1,000 (astronomical compared to the $30 a month she was earning in Moldova), and she was assured that she could return there whenever she chose.
Victoria's suspicion that something was awry arose at the last moment, when the "job recruiter" equipped her with a false passport to travel via Romania. But it was only after she arrived in Israel, in August 1999, that she learned the truth about her new "job" from the man who met her at the airport, took the passport from her, and drove her to a town in the Negev. And the truth was harrowing: The "recruiter," she was told, had sold her into prostitution and debt bondage - meaning that she would have to work off her purchase price ($6,500) before she could be released or even start earning a wage. She would also be required to have sex with her "owner" and his friends for free. The best she could expect for herself was tips from satisfied clients, which she soon discovered averaged $4 to $8 per john.
"We were locked in an apartment or under guard every time we moved from place to place," Victoria explains when asked why she didn't flee. "And even if I could get away, I had no passport, I had no money for a ticket to go back." Because she had entered Israel illegally, Victoria feared the law. She also had reason to suspect that local policemen were in cahoots with her "owners," because they were among the clients being "serviced" in one of the places in which she worked. ("They showed up in uniform," she relates, "with a squad car parked outside waiting for them.") But most of all she feared reprisal by her pimps. "They threatened that if I ran away, their people would track me down in Moldova and make sure I was punished."
AND SO, OVER THE COURSE OF 11 months, Victoria worked in various brothels, apartments and hotels in Beersheba and Tel Aviv from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week, "servicing" between 10 and 20 clients a day. Five times she was sold by one pimp to another, each new "owner" requiring her to work off her purchase price. Along the way, she was raped and sodomized by three of her "owners" and one's son, as well. When a brothel in which she was working was raided and she was taken to the police station, she produced the forged Israeli identity card given to her by her "owner" and claimed - as she had been instructed - that she had been in the country for three years. Seeing the identity card, the police asked no further questions, and Victoria was released back into slavery.
It was only on July 27, 2000, the second time she was arrested in a raid, that the police bothered to interrogate Victoria. "I showed them the forged identity card again, but this time they asked me detailed questions about my family - the family I supposedly had, according to the forged card - and I couldn't answer them. So although I was frightened, I told them the truth," she recalls.
Thus ended one ordeal and began another. As an illegal alien, Victoria was held for about a month in a local lock-up and then another two in the Neveh Tirzah Women's Prison in Ramlah, awaiting deportation, before she was discovered by the Hotline for Foreign Workers, a Tel Aviv NGO that focuses on the plight of illegal foreign workers. At first all she wanted was the Hotline's help in obtaining a proper travel document so that she could leave the country. But at some point Victoria also remembered that wronged people have a right to be angry.
"After more than a year of absolute hell, I'm going to be going back without a penny to show for everything that's happened!" she grumbled to Sigal Rozen, the director of the Hotline. So Rozen promptly suggested an idea she had been promoting to women in a similar situation for two years - without any takers.
"Why not get your deportation postponed - with the Hotline's help - so that you can stay and fight for your due?" Rozen proposed to Victoria. "Not only justice for those who have victimized you but just compensation for your labors."
So were born the three court cases currently being waged in Victoria's name or with her help. The first is a criminal case against three of her six "owners" and the errant son. The charges against them, it turns out, do not include trafficking in women, as Victoria was last "sold" a month before the amendment to the Penal Code made trafficking in human beings a crime in Israel. They do, however, include crimes equally as evil: rape and sodomy, in aggravated circumstances, among others.
The second is a civil case filed in the Beersheba District Labor Court in which Victoria, represented by the Hotline's energetic legal adviser, Nomi Levenkron, is suing all six of her "owners" for a combined total of almost $200,000 in back wages, interest, and compensation for the pain, suffering, and anguish she endured while enslaved by them.
The third is a petition to the Supreme Court for an injunction ordering the minister of internal security, the interior minister, and the Israel Police to pay for Victoria's upkeep ($1,500 a month, though there are legal precedents for demanding twice that amount) until she can testify in the criminal case.
Since being released from the Neveh Tirzah Prison early last November, Victoria has been living, in hiding from her former enslavers and with no police protection, off the kindness of strangers. She is not getting the medical attention she wants. She is not receiving the psychological counseling she needs. "There are times when I'd just like to go window shopping in a mall to cheer up a bit," she says. "But that would only remind me how utterly destitute I am."
"The terms of her release from detention prohibit Victoria from working during the remainder of her stay in Israel," Levenkron explains. "So who's taking care of her? Well, if having our volunteers stand up at the end of a law class, tell Victoria's story, and pass around the hat is 'seeing to her needs,' then yes, I suppose you can say we're taking care of her."
VICTORIA'S CIVIL SUIT AND Supreme Court appeal for maintenance are unprecedented in Israel. But many aspects of her plight are so common to the thousands of trafficked women engaged in prostitution in Israel that one must wonder why the phenomenon has been allowed to continue for so long.
Indeed, Chief Superintendent Avi Davidovich, head of the Investigations Division in the national headquarters of the Israel Police and head of a new interministerial committee on trafficking in women, notes that the problem has been growing since the beginning of the 1990s.
"Four factors have fostered it," Davidovich explains: "The rapid growth of Israel's population and thus the number of men who seek sexual services; the growth in the number of foreign workers, mostly single men, who have become major consumers of such services; the opening of borders and freer movement worldwide, especially migration from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS); and an erosion of social norms in Israel."
"Israelis have simply grown used to the idea that women can be bought," concurs Leah Gruenpeter-Gold, co-director of the Awareness Center in Tel Aviv, which specializes in research on trafficking in women and prostitution. "I wouldn't say sex trafficking has burgeoned here largely because of the foreign workers - show me one who can afford $60 an hour for a prostitute. It's far more because of the changed norms of young Israelis - both married men and single men who don't want to enter into a relationship so they purchase sex."
The influx of 1 million immigrants from the CIS over the past decade has also made it easier for the crime syndicates operating there - whose tentacles reach deep into Israel - to traffic women with forged documents. "Some prostitutes come in under the forged identities of Jewish women in Russia and the Ukraine," explains Hagay Herzl, an advisor to the internal security minister on foreign-workers issues. "They even receive the rights and benefits accorded to immigrants by the Law of Return."
Yet even though the problem is a veteran and particularly ugly one, trafficking in women has only hiccupped its way through the discussion of Israel's struggle with a growing population of illegal foreign workers. "It crops up from time to time, the press gives it a blast of coverage - like when the four Russian prostitutes were burned to death in a locked brothel, with bars on the windows, in Tel Aviv last August - and then it goes back to sleep again," says Gruenpeter-Gold.
One reason for the lack of sustained attention by the government and media is that prostitution, per se, is not illegal in Israel (and neither was trafficking in human beings until last July). What is criminal is "procurement," which the law defines as taking some or all of the profits of a woman so engaged. In short, it is pimps who stand to spend up to five years in prison (seven under aggravated circumstances) for their actions. Yet in the case of trafficked women, it is the prostitutes who have been consistently punished by Israel's law-enforcement agencies - as illegal aliens - by being arrested, detained for weeks, and deported, while the owners of brothels have gotten off scot-free.
Another reason for the lack of vigor in attacking the problem is that Israeli officials, to this day, seem somewhat ambivalent about just how victimized the trafficked women are.
"From talks with hundreds of women awaiting deportation in Neveh Tirzah, I can tell you that only an isolated number claim they were deceived about what awaited them here - meaning they had answered an ad for a job as an au pair or a model or something similar," says Herzl. "The overwhelming majority came here knowing what they would be doing and how much they were likely to earn," which is an estimated $700-$1,000 a month. Many of these women, Herzl concedes, failed to anticipate the harsh physical conditions or how hard they would be required to work. "But the great majority of the women who have come here to work in prostitution do get paid for it," he stresses. "Before being deported, quite a few have even told me that they intend to come back, as this is the only way they can improve their economic situation."
Activists dispute this overview, saying that while they simply don't know what proportion of the women are here against their will, it's a far from isolated phenomenon. Still, testimonies like those cited by Herzl
probably made it easier to turn a blind eye to the egregious violations of human rights often entailed in the sex trafficking business. And typically, perhaps, it took an outside party to rub Israel's nose in this problem.
That service was provided last May by Amnesty International, which issued a blistering 23-page report on trafficking in women in Israel that slammed the government for "[failing] to take adequate measures to prevent, investigate, prosecute and punish human rights abuses against trafficked women" from the former Soviet Union. The report included a list of specific recommendations, among them: making slavery and trafficking unlawful; establishing a special unit to deal with the investigation and prosecution of abuses; treating women as victims rather than criminals; opening a hostel for trafficked women (detaining them in prison, pending deportation, only as a last resort); and providing them with legal aid, counseling, and medical services, as well as tools to request asylum when they face danger if returned to their native lands.
Clearly, official Israel was stung by the reproof. On June 13, 2000, the Knesset established a special commission of inquiry into trafficking in women, headed by Meretz Knesset member Zahava Gal-On. At the end of July, the Penal Code was amended to making trafficking in human beings a crime whose perpetrators are liable to up to 16 years in prison (20 for trafficking in a minor). And most recently, an interministerial committee, composed of representatives of the Justice, Interior, Internal Security, and Labor and Social Affairs ministries, has begun to address many of the issues spotlighted by the Amnesty Report.
Perhaps most telling of all, officials like Davidovich and Herzl are now clearly speaking of trafficked women as "victims" and of the need to prosecute the traffickers and pimps, rather than the women they victimize.
Expectations of what this thrust of interest and activity can accomplish, given budgetary constraints, vary. "We're not talking about eradicating [sex trafficking], just containing its spread and reducing its scope," says Davidovich. "And it's clear that the police cannot take on the establishment of hostels or other aspects of a witness-protection program to encourage these women to testify in criminal cases."
But Herzl is far more upbeat, saying that he intends to raise the idea of a witness-protection program with the incoming minister. He also reports that the police have been directed to embark on "quality, in-depth investigations - not against the women but against the importers, the pimps, the people who run the whole business." And he promises that "in the near future, you'll see the results of these activities. We are determined to deal with the phenomenon head on," he says, "with the aim of reducing it to the point of elimi-nating it."
MEANWHILE, OUT IN THE field, the hue has yet to turn rosy. The Knesset's commission of inquiry held only two sessions before its six-month mandate expired, and now there are procedural obstacles to automatically renewing it. A judge in Beersheba has been known to assign trafficked women to be held in detention, until their deportation, in the very brothel where they worked - stipulating, of course, that they must not engage in prostitution! And the Awareness Center has learned that the City of Rishon Lezion, south of Tel Aviv, has been issuing business licenses to brothels; the city had not responded by press time to an inquiry on this from The Report.
Even more dismaying is the fact that the first trial based on the new anti-trafficking clause of the Penal Code ended in mid-February with a whimper: a plea bargain - proposed by the prosecution - in which the offender received a mere two-year sentence. The case would probably not have come to trial at all had it not been for the fact that one of the victim's johns - a kibbutznik - fell in love with her (and vice versa), tried to redeem her from bondage by paying off her "owner," shelled out an advance, and then got stung by the greedy pimp, who proceeded to "sell" her elsewhere. Only then - and after the love-struck kibbutznik had managed to "kidnap" his prospective bride from her captor - was the matter taken to the police.
"Evidently the State Attorney's Office also has to be educated about the new outlook on trafficking," says Gruenpeter-Gold bitterly, while the Hotline's Levenkron has registered an official protest with the Tel Aviv district attorney over the plea bargain.
Speaking of education, Gruenpeter-Gold suggests that the Education Ministry also be represented on the interministerial committee dealing with trafficking, and Levenkron would add the Foreign Ministry to its list of members, explaining that an Israeli information campaign in the CIS could go a long way toward attacking the problem at its source.
All in all, press clippings over the past six months seem to suggest a slightly heightened awareness of the problem, and talks with officials suggest that the state is finally beginning to address it. But the apparent change of attitude is still nowhere near the energetic campaign that the organ-izations grappling with the issue of trafficking would like to see adopted.
"Neglect, sheer neglect is why we've reached this point," says Levenkron, and Gruenpeter-Gold adds: "I wish I could say that something has seriously changed since the law was amended last July, but I can't."
"Just two months ago, we had a hard time getting the police interested in even hearing Victoria's testimony," reports the Hotline's Rozen. "They said it would be her word against that of her pimps, and they couldn't build a case on that. It was only after I had testified before the Knesset inquiry commission that the police called back to say they would like to see her. They were shamed into it. And we should all be ashamed that things like this exist in our 'enlightened,' democratic society and we still prefer to turn the other way."
Panel hears grim details on child prostitution in Israel
By Zvi Zrahiya, Haaretz Correspondent
HaAretz - January 19, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=392383
Over 1,000 minors around the country are involved in prostitution, with their parent's encouragement, the Knesset Labor and Welfare Committee heard Monday. Dorit Brightman of the ELEM Youth in Distress non-profit organization told the committee that many of the minors are forced into prostitution because of the dire economic situation, and some have even died as a result.
The ELEM representatives also told the MKs that two or three children are known to each local authority to be involved in prostitution. "In addition, there are numerous youths who offer sex services in exchange for money and thus there are over 1,000 youths involved in prostitution," the representatives said.
Committee chairman, MK Shaul Yahalom (National Religious Party) said that "we must find a solution immediately to this terrible problem." He said that Labor and Social Affairs Ministry must place a particular emphasis on the matter and must make sure that there is never a situation where "a girl is found at night and by morning, [the authorities] don't know what to do with her."
The head of the Be'er Sheva's welfare department, Esther Amar, said that the State of Israel does not have enough rehabilitation programs to help youths who have been forced to resort to prostitution. Director-general of the Labor Ministry, Prof. Dov Goldberger, told the panel that no budget cuts would be made to rehabilitation programs for young women at risk.
News in Brief
Police have list of 70 trafficking suspects, hearing told
By Gideon Alon
Ha Aretz - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 (Shvat 26, 5764)
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/395349.html
Testifying yesterday at a parliamentary committee hearing that addresses trafficking in women, the head of the police intelligence department, Major General Ilan Franco, said police have compiled a list of 70 trafficking suspects, and are tracing their financial activities in order to expose the economic base of organized crime. Calling 2003 "a peak year for organized crime in Israel," Franco said there are some 50 major crime organizations at large. Attorney Yehuda Shefer, who has been active in efforts to crack down on money laundering, said at the hearing that illegal black-market activity has a volume of some $3 billion a year in Israel. (Gideon Alon)
Parents send kids to work as prostitutes
By Zvi Zrahiya
Haaretz - Tue., February 10, 2004 Shvat 18, 5764
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/392412.html
More than 1,000 minors work as prostitutes around the country, many encouraged to do so by their parents because of economic distress. This was reported to the Knesset Labor and Social Welfare Committee yesterday by Elem, a non profit organization that aids runaway, homeless and neglected youth in distress.
In some cases minors have died as a direct result of working as prostitutes, said Elem's representative, Dorit Breitman. Committee chairman Shaul Yahalom, MK (National Religious Party), said a solution must be found immediately for this terrible problem, adding his ministry should pay special attention to this.
Esther Amar, director of Be'er Sheva's social affairs office said the state lacks sufficient homes to take in girls who became prostitutes. "There are very long waiting lists for every rehabilitation facility," she said.
Mothers pimping their daughters for
food
Gaon Boaz
Maariv - Feb. 29, 2004
Mothers pimping their daughters for food Needy women "hiring out" their teen age daughters to produce market workers in return for vegetables. Welfare authorities are familiar with this shocking practice.
Volunteers of the "Elem" Youth in Distress non-profit organization thought they'd seen it all. At the Beer Sheva market, however, they were shocked to encounter a previously unheard of practice, mothers selling their daughters' bodies to Arab workers in return for market produce.
Down-and-out women come to the Beer Sheva market late at night to scrounge for some pumpkin or marrow. Lacking shekels, they offer an alternative form of payment, their teenage daughters. After providing sexual services in some dark alley, daughters and mothers disappear into the night laden with parcels of produce.
What are you doing here?
Last Thursday the writer joined one of Elem's patrols. At 1:00 a.m. the Elem mobile stress unit arrives at Beer Sheva's municipal market. A group of Arab workers are huddled around two small bonfires trying to keep warm. Two Russian-speaking women are standing nearby while the teenage daughter of one of them is talking to the workers in Hebrew.
Ori-Osnat Azulai, in charge of Elem's night volunteer group, identified the girl immediately. She called the girl by name and shot out of the car even before volunteer driver Ofer Artzi had time to brake. "What are you doing here?" she asked angrily.
"I'm here with my mother", replied the girl. The mother looked from daughter to Azulai and said nothing. Azulai grabbed the girl and dragged her to the car, which had in the meantime emptied.
Meanwhile Artzi drove the vehicle around the market, seeking other girls skulking in the shadows, waiting to turn a quick trick with whatever Arab worker will give them some fresh produce in return.
Several seconds later, a second girl appeared and hurried to a waiting cab, paid for by one of the workers. Meanwhile, her mother loaded parcels laden with vegetables into the trunk.
"What are you doing here?" repeated Azulai. "I came to shop with my mother", replied the girl. "But the market's closed", insisted Azulai. Without responding, the girl climbed into the cab, which sped off into the night, family and vegetables intact.
Esther Amar, Head of Beer Sheva's Social Welfare Department, agreed that this was indeed a shocking phenomenon but was unfortunately not a new one. ""Lately we are witnessing a serious increase in the numbers of youth in distress roaming the streets due to dire economic circumstances at home. Unfortunately, the government is unprepared financially to deal with these serious cases.
Amar added that a cornerstone laying ceremony was held recently for an emergency shelter for youth in distress, but said that the shelter would open only "in two to three years" from now. In a hurried combined effort by Elem and the welfare services, some of the market girls have recently been placed in the Zofia treatment facility for girls, near Gedera. "Children are inherently wonderful", says volunteer Schwartz, adding, "The problem is that we ruin them along the way".
Welfare services in the south, which, as a traditionally low socio-economic area, has been hardest hit by the prolonged recession, are familiar with teenage prostitution.
Maariv recently ran a story about the phenomenon of teenage girls renting their bodies for money, often to by basics like food and clothing that their families cannot afford.
Ex-sex slaves get help to
testify
By Hilary Leila Krieger
Jerusalem Post - March 4, 2004
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1078397702671
Former sex slaves who are willing to testify against the men who enslaved them can now receive Israeli work permits and stay at a new shelter providing support services aimed at weaning them from prostitution.
The measure, approved by the Interior Ministry, was announced Wednesday at a meeting of the Knesset Committee of Inquiry into Trafficking in Women.
The women will be able to live and work legally in Israel for a year, after which they will return to their native countries or seek renewals, which would be granted primarily to those whose testimony has yet to be completed.
Currently, police place victims who agree to testify in hotels and private residences, where they often return to prostitution, in part because they have no legal work status. They have to leave the country immediately after they appear in court and don't receive the psychological, medical, or legal services that the shelter offers.
The state hopes the new program will give the women a reason to stay involved with the system rather than flee.
The shelter, which can house up to 50 women, opened two weeks ago and currently holds nine of the country's 84 former sex slaves who are waiting to testify.
"Since women want to send money home to their families in their country of origin, we need to allow them a legal alternative to work and earn money. In this way we will decrease their motivation to continue working in prostitution. Without this, it will mean the women will stay in the shelter 24 hours a day as in a pressure cooker," shelter director Ronit Davidovitch told the committee.
Rita Chakin, who coordinates the anti-trafficking project at Isha L'Isha, the Haifa Feminist Center, welcomed the inauguration of the shelter and the granting of work permits, but said they are no panacea.
For one thing, they help only those who agree to serve as witnesses. While Chakin has no specific statistics, she knows of many cases where women have declined to testify out of fear of their former captors or even out of loyalty to them.
"Israel has no solution for these women," she said.
She estimates that the country has 6,000-7,000 sex slaves, though the Knesset Center for Research and Information survey put the number at half that.
Women who are arrested by police in raids, escape from the brothels, or otherwise end up in custody are generally quickly deported to their home countries if they don't agree to testify against their former pimps.
Three Knesset commissions of inquiry to shut
down
By Gideon Alon, Haaretz Correspondent
March 17, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/405848.html
Please e-mail Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin and express your opposition: rrivlin@knesset.gov.il
Biography of Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin at: http://www.knesset.gov.il/mk/eng/mk_eng.asp?id=114
Three Knesset commissions of inquiry which have been operating for the past number of years will be shut down at the end of this year, according to an agreement between Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin and the committee chairs.
The commission of inquiry examining the sex trade in Israel headed by MK Zehava Gal-On (Meretz), the commission charged with preventing violence in sports headed by MK Avshalom Vilan (Meretz) and the commission charged with tracking and returning assets of Holocaust victims headed by MK Colette Avital (Labor) will all be shut down.
Rivlin and the commission chairs agreed they will submit reports and recommendations by the end of the year and will cease their operations.
The Knesset's permanent committees will continue to track and deal with these three issues.
Rivlin has been asking for a number of months to get rid of the Knesset's commissions of inquiry which, he believes, should operate within limited time frames and should not continue working for years.
It costs about NIS 500,000 annually to operate the three commissions of inquiry, which were established by the 15th Knesset.
Rivlin is also working to get rid of four Knesset statutory committees dealing with public complaints, foreign workers, drugs and the status of children.
The heads of these committees, MK Ran Cohen (Meretz), MY Ayoub Kara (Likud) and MK Michael Melchior (Labor), object to their elimination and announced they will fight the decision.
The decision to cancel these committees is subject to debate and approval by the Knesset's House Committee.
Rivlin has already asked the House Committee to discuss his decision to cancel the committees, but the debate on the matter has not yet begun.
Study: Brothels earn $450m. a
year
By Nina Gilbert
The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition - March 17, 2004
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1079498071967&p=1078027574097
One million "visits" are made by clients every month to brothels in the country who channel some $450 million annually into the local sex industry, according to a report presented Wednesday to the Knesset Committee of Inquiry into Women Trafficking.
The committee dedicated its session on Wednesday to customers, which committee chair Zehava Gal-On (Meretz) termed the "undercover partner" to women traffickers.
The report was drafted by a joint project against women trafficking conducted by Hebrew University and Foreign Workers Aid Center.
Hani Ben-Yisrael, a researcher from the Hebrew University, said that the customers are not viewed as persons who are carrying out an abnormal or controversial act. Instead, she said customers have a "high level" of legitimacy.
According to Ben-Yisrael, the customers cannot be characterized according to any specific socioeconomic profile. They come from all sectors of society, and are of all ages, religions, and cultures she said. In Israel, as in other countries, the customer base is comprised overwhelmingly of locals.
The report recommended that customers be prosecuted according to the anti-rape laws in the Penal Code.
However, a representative of the State Attorney's Office, Anat Hulta, said that the state opposes enforcing the law against sex customers. She said it would be very difficult to build cases, because it must be proven that the woman who served the customer is being held against her will and that the customer was aware of this.
MK Marina Soldokin (Likud) said she would consider drafting legislation directed specifically against prostitution customers that would serve to deter them from seeking such services.
But Gal-On said she opposes legislation against customers and efforts should be invested instead in public awareness against the phenomenon of women trafficking.
Police estimate that some 3,000 women are working as prostitutes as a part of women trafficking rackets, according to the report. The one million figure is derived from the assumption that the women work 30 days a month, and serve 10 clients a day.
JTA - March 8, 2004
http://www.jta.org/brknews.asp?id=99242
A foreign woman forced into prostitution in Israel is suing her pimps for $500,000. Documents released by Tel Aviv District Court on Monday said the plaintiff, identified only by her first initial, N., decided to file suit after the Israeli couple that imprisoned her in their home and pimped her to as many as 30 customers a day were jailed on slavery charges last year. Her attorney called the lawsuit unprecedented and said he hoped it would bring about a crackdown on trafficking in foreign women in Israel. N., 22, said the couple "bought" her for $10,000 from an illicit agency that brought her to Israel.
By Asaf Carmel
Haaretz - September 9, 2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/622814.html
Natasha and Shaul (not their real names) met at an escort service in South Tel Aviv three years ago. She had arrived from Moldova a few months earlier. "I was promised work in caring for old people," she recalls, "but in the end they put me into work that wasn't so nice." He was a client. "Shaul was divorced five years before we met. A man has needs, you know. But he treated me nicely, not like the others," Natasha continues.
"In the end my whole salary went, and he wanted to take me away from there and be done with it. But the owner didn't like the idea. He demanded $5,000 and also started to treat us badly. Shaul took him for a man-to-man and told him, 'Either I leave here peacefully or there is going to be trouble.' We each paid $1,000 and left. I had nightmares for months afterward."
She moved in with Shaul and found a job as a caregiver for the elderly the work that had brought her to Israel in the first place. "Shaul's family received me well, even though I am Russian, and on television they keep saying that all the Russian women are whores - and that hurts me very much. Shaul is a truck driver, so we told his parents and brothers that he unloaded goods exactly next to the house of the old woman I care for. We didn't let them ask too many questions. Only a cousin of his knows the truth, because he was the one who brought him to the place where we met." A few months later, the couple went to Moldova to be married. There Shaul met Natasha's small daughter - from a previous relationship - who is being raised by Natasha's sister in the meantime.
Many months went by until Natasha, who was smuggled across the border from Egypt the first time she entered Israel, was allowed back into the country by the Interior Ministry so she could be with her husband. Today, they live in a small apartment in a city in the center of the country.Natasha, who is 32, is a saleswoman in a store, and Shaul, a beefy guy who will soon be 30, continues to burn up the kilometers in his truck. Natasha is in her seventh month of pregnancy. She hopes her 10-year-old daughter will soon be able to join her.
"In Moldova I registered my daughter as Shaul's daughter," she relates. "After I got back to Israel, his whole family suddenly started to explain to him that I was just pulling a fast one on him and that in the end he would have to pay me child support. I don't know what happened to them - maybe someone told them a tale while I was there. I told them that we want to live as a family and that they should keep out of our life.
"I want to convert to Judaism," she says, "so that the child in my womb will not be different and also to wash everything away and start fresh. Shaul and I do not talk about the past, but it bothers me. I feel as though I have a stain on my hand that won't come off."
Over the past few years, dozens of Israelis have married women who worked as prostitutes when they arrived in the country. The Interior Ministry does not know the exact number, but Reuven Lipkin, a Tel Aviv attorney, has already handled more than 20 such cases. Like Natasha and Shaul, many of Lipkin's clients met for the first time as prostitute and client. Then they fell in love, the woman managed somehow to extricate herself from the clutches of her boss, and the couple started a new life.
Does it sound romantic - like Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in "Pretty Woman"? Not to the Interior Ministry. Its officials are convinced that in most cases the marriage is fictitious, that the woman only wants release from bondage and the man is tired of having to pay for sex. Those who are insistent on true love have to endure an ordeal on the road to happiness. First of all, they have to leave Israel in order to marry, and then produce more and more documents. During the paper chase, the newlywed wife is usually not allowed to enter Israel. It is only months later, and after the Interior Ministry ascertains that the husband is well aware of his wife's past as a prostitute, that the couple is allowed to reunite.
All the couples who were interviewed for this article requested that their names not be used; all of them are trying to sever themselves from the past. They told their families and friends half-truths about the circumstances in which they met, and they were not eager to describe the start of their life together to a journalist, either. On one side are women who were forced into becoming prostitutes; on the other are men who sought sexual release in sleazy places, but stood out for their humanity. The men may have overcome stigmas and inhibitions and redeemed their wives from the gutter, but it is still hard for them to admit that they once paid for their favors - and, of course, that others did, too.
Nothing to write home about
Larissa and Moshe met 14 months ago at an escort service in the vicinity of the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. Life has not been kind to either of them. She arrived in Israel from Ukraine five years ago, knowing she would have to work as a prostitute. He is a truck driver who three years ago sold one of his kidneys to help him stay afloat economically. A year and a half ago he went through an ugly divorce; today he and Larissa are raising his two small children. "The first time I saw Moshe," Larissa
recalls, "I told myself: How terrific for the girl who has him for a husband." She soon discovered that her client was available and they became closer. "I went there everyday to persuade her that the work she was doing was not for her," Moshe relates. A few months later they moved into a rented apartment in metropolitan Tel Aviv. However, Larissa had not yet severed her ties with the escort service. "I was afraid it wouldn't work out. I already had a boyfriend here before and I stopped working, Then he turned out to be violent and I had a serious problem."
At the end of January, the police arrested her next to her place of work on a charge of being in the country illegally. She was released only because she agreed to testify against the owners. "When the police called me, my heart dropped to my balls," Moshe says. "But they told me that if I signed a bond of NIS 5,000 she would be released. I told them I would sign even for NIS 50,000."
After the arrest Larissa, who is 30, forsook prostitution. "We made a Lag b'Omer out of the clothes from the old job [meaning they burned them] and opened a new leaf," says Moshe, who is 34. "No one needs to know about the past. I buried it deep in the ground. What's important is the present. Larissa is working in a food plant and earns a respectable living. I love her and my children have it good with her, too." Larissa says that Moshe's parents also love her. "Well, but they don't know where I worked," she adds. "The family and friends think I am a new immigrant who came here alone. My past is not something nice to tell about and I don't want people to know."
"Believe me," Moshe says, "Larissa is a good girl. There are some people that you say this work is suitable for, but she is not like that. I have no idea how she slid into that kind of work." Larissa hears this and becomes agitated: "You Have no idea what it is to live in Ukraine. I worked there in Social Security and the money I made was only enough to pay carfare to get to work. I had no choice but to work in prostitution. I didn't steal from anyone."
Didn't it bother you to hook up with someone you met as a client?
"Women I worked with told me he would remind me of it my whole life, but so far it hasn't happened even once. The truth is that it does bother me. Moshe also says it's a pity we didn't meet [somewhere else]."
They hope the Interior Ministry will recognize their relationship and legalize Larissa's status. She is seemingly immune from deportation as long as she hasn't testified against the pimps, but she is nevertheless careful. "I try to go out only with Moshe and the children," she says. If she becomes pregnant, the Interior Ministry will have a hard time deporting her, but that is not on the cards right now. "I can't support another child," Moshe says. "I don't have another kidney to sell."
The truth stings
Maurice, 45, and Kay, 27, from Vietnam, met in Tel Aviv three years ago. "I have two grown children," Maurice says, "and I divorced their mother a few years ago. After that downfall, I started to wander around Tel Aviv in all kinds of places, and in one of them I met Kay. The place was a spa, not an escort service. The owner emphasized to me that I had come to the only place in South Tel Aviv that really is a spa. Kay and I liked each other from the first minute. I took her for a walk on the beach and we spent as much time together as we could."
However, the idyll was short-lived. The police did not share the owner's vision of a spa and shut it down. Kay, who was in the country without a permit, was placed in custody prior to deportation. "I went to see her in jail," Maurice recalls, "and I decided to pay her airfare to Vietnam so she wouldn't have to wait around for no reason. I then joined her there, and not long afterward we were married."
Kay says the age gap does not bother her. "For me it's not important," she says softly, mixing English and Hebrew. "Love does not depend on age." Her family warmly adopted the balding groom from Israel. "In Vietnam, most women marry at a very early age," she relates. "I was married at 24, which is considered old, and the only thing my mother wanted was for me to get married already." Maurice has hardly any family in Israel, but his friends were supportive - "both because I found a wife and because she is so young."
They live in a tiny apartment that is crammed with the toys of their 2-and-a-half year-old daughter. A whirring fan in a corner of the living room does nothing to help make the August heat bearable. On the wall is a photograph of their wedding: she in a white dress, he in a turquoise suit, with the Vietnamese family gathered around. Maurice likes his new wife's approach.
"She has an oriental mentality," he explains. "If the man decides we are not going out, then we don't go out. It's a matter of education. Take note that we are talking, but she is not intervening in the conversation - not like the Israeli women, who always butt in."
So you are happy?
"You would be happy, to. If you make a mistake about something, the Israeli women let you have it right away. She will say at most, in a quiet voice, that you are wrong. When she is really angry, she doesn't talk to you."
How do you see your future?
"I am now living one centimeter above the poverty line. If I see that I can find work that will give me a bit of a better livelihood, I will advance my wife. If not, she will stay stuck where she is now. She is not bitter, because in any case it's better for her to live here than to work like a mule in Vietnam and earn at most $50 a month."
Yana and Sergei live on the top floor of an apartment building on a quiet street in a large city in the center of the country. A hyperactive blond boy of 9 months plays on the carpet in the living room. Sergei immigrated to Israel from Ukraine in 1990, at the age of 13. After completing high school in the city where he lives, he served as a technician in the air force. He now works for Israel Military Industries as an electrician. He met Yana five years ago, not long after she arrived in the country from Moldova and found herself working for an escort service owned by Sergei's brother.
"I had no choice but to help out there with all kinds of technical things," Sergei says, "and that is how I spoke to Yana and a relationship developed between us. Every once in a while my brother and his partners let me take her out for a day. They wanted to give me the feeling that I was one of them and they also trusted me to make sure she didn't run off."
When the relationship between Sergei and Yana became closer, his brother tried to break it up. "He no longer agreed to my taking her out of the place, so I decided to cut myself off from them and take Yana with me," Sergei recalls. "One day I went to some lady who was working in the entrance and told her that at 2 A.M. Yana and I were leaving. I gave her a little money and told her, 'You saw nothing and heard nothing.'
"The next day my brother called and demanded Yana back. I told him to forget it and to treat her as though she had escaped. Then his partners called and demanded $6,000. They told me that if I didn't pay, they would get to me. I told them, 'No problem, as long as you know that 10 policemen will be waiting for you at the entrance.' In the end they took the money from a joint account I had with my brother. Since then he does not speakto me. Later the police raided the place and he was jailed."
Two and a half years ago, Sergei and Yana went to Moldova to get married. "We told her parents that she met me while working as a cleaning lady," Sergei says. "There is no reason to tell everything if the truth stings so much, especially when she was not to blame." After the wedding, Yana spent almost a year in the land of her youth. "Every time we submitted a document, they came up with a request for another document. One day the Interior Ministry remembered that they also need a certificate of good character in Yana's maiden name. Just to get that fucking paper she had to travel again all the way from where she lives to Kishinev and back. They also asked for a notarized document stating exactly how I met her. I think that was not legitimate. It's my business if I know what she did, but what business is it of theirs? How can I be sure that no one in the Interior Ministry will make the information public?"
Yana, who is 31, is still not fluent in Hebrew. She wants to study something, possibly nursing. She wanted to convert to Judaism, but the rabbinate rejected her request as long as she has temporary citizenship status. "I was very offended by that," Sergei says. "But it's not so terrible. Of 613 commandments, she is already observing two - she doesn't steal and she doesn't murder. You know, at first the connection between us was a bit strange. But afterward I understood that life has all kinds of shades and you never know where the good thing are."
The abuse goes on
An Israeli and a foreign prostitute who marry and want to live in the Holy Land have to submit a family unification request to the Interior Ministry. Like all other applicants, they have to come up with reams of documents, such as a certificate of good character and a birth certificate of the foreigner who wants to acquire Israeli citizenship. In the case of the prostitutes, most of whom arrived in the country
illegally, she needs a declaration from her home country, describing how she entered the country, where she worked and what she did. The problem is that the home countries of most of the prostitutes Russia, Ukraine and Moldova do not provide an official document of this kind. "It takes three to four months to organize this," attorney Lipkin says.
The family unification requests are handled by the regional offices of the Population Administration. "According to which office it is, I can tell you how long the procedure will take," Lipkin says. "In Rishon Letzion and in Tel Aviv and Holon it will take a few months. But in Petah Tikva it will take at least eight months and it is very likely that
entry to Israel will not be permitted until after a petition to the High Court of Justice. In Ramat Gan, it is 100 percent sure that it will get to the High Court.
"On one occasion, one of the women I represented was asked to produce an original birth certificate, not a reconstructed one. In the High Court hearing I told Justice Mishael Cheshin: 'Your honor, I don't know about you, but I have no idea where my birth certificate is, and my parents don't know, either. It's doubtful that the state's representative knows where his certificate is.' That very day we got a decision in favor of the petition."
Even after the young couple successfully produces all the relevant documents and the High Court authorizes the unification, if necessary, the ordeal is not over. A few weeks after the woman arrives back in the country, she is summoned to a hearing in the Interior Ministry. "In her husband's presence, she has to tell about her past as a prostitute after already declaring it in detail," Lipkin says. "Why exactly is this humiliation necessary?"
Another few weeks ago go by, and the couple is summoned to the Liaison Bureau, the unit that used to deal with bringing Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel, in order to ascertain the authenticity of the documents. Some of the couples complain about humiliating treatment there, too. The Liaison Bureau refused to allow the director of the consular section, Hanan Ahituv, to be interviewed for this article.
Leah Greenfeter-Gold, director of the Awareness Center for the study of prostitution and white slavery (trafficking in women), is also outraged by the attitude of the authorities toward couples consisting of Israeli men and former prostitutes: "These are women who underwent great abuse in Israel but still found a place of tranquillity here and are trying to establish a home and a family. But the Population Administration continues to abuse them and acts contrary to the decisions of the government and the interior ministers."
Sasi Katzir, head of the Population Center, is not fazed by the complaints. "There are dozens of cases every year of people who were granted status by fraud," he asserts, "and in some cases through the marriage of Israelis and call girls. In every such case we examine the correctness of the marriage. Sometimes the age gap is so great that it is clear the marriage will not last." At least four and a half years must go by from the moment a woman's entry into Israel is approved until she receives full citizenship. "We examine the correctness of the marriage every year, and if we receive all kinds of information that the couple has separated, we check those, too."
Katzir is certain that an original birth certificate can be obtained in Ukraine without any problem. "I have already heard that it's impossible to get to documents of various kinds, but it turns out that it is possible. All the documents we request are very important for knowing who we are letting into the country. I want to remind you that even the Law of Return has qualifications."
He admits that there is a lack of uniformity among the branches of the Population Administration. "You reached me just as I was leaving a seminar on the subject of graduated naturalization, and I hope that the disparities you are talking about are going to be reduced.
"A new procedure is due to come into effect very shortly. People seeking family unification will be able to submit a few preliminary documents, pay a deposit and enter the country within 30 days. They will then see to getting the other documents from here."
Katzir does not see the problem in confronting a former prostitute and her husband with the painful past. "When data is checked and we know the woman engaged in prostitution, the facts have to be verified. She speaks, what she says is taken down and that is the end of the matter."
The age factor
The story of Aryeh and Svetlana is Katzir's bad dream. He is a bus driver aged 57, she a Ukrainian of 28. He met her seven months ago, through a friend. "She is a good deal younger than I am, that is true, but we fell in love very quickly and moved in together. She is actually the first woman I have lived with for more than two days in the past 20 years."
Svetlana studied literature at a Ukraine university, but didn't know what to do afterward. Eventually she ended up in Israel, knowing she would work as a prostitute here. "She knew exactly what she was coming to," Aryeh says. "Where she comes from there is no electricity after 11 P.M. and the water is rationed. All people want to do is survive. But God gave the women there a gift - beauty and femininity - and they use that gift to escape."
When he met Svetlana, she was already independent. "She chose her clients herself. But after we fell in love she immediately became a housewife. You should only get cooking like hers. Instead of the money she sent the family, I send them a certain amount every month."
One day Svetlana went out to buy something and was picked up by the Immigration Police. She was deported to Ukraine; Aryeh flew there as fast as he could. "Her family received me fantastically and a short time later we were married." He does not recoil at maintaining a spousal relationship with a woman who engaged in prostitution not long before. "I never saw those women negatively. I was divorced for 25 years and occasionally I went to women like that. It's true that every once in a while I would start imagining who she was with and what she did, and I also talked to her about it. She told me 'It was only body, I did not give more than that.'"
Returning to Israel, he launched a legal battle to be reunited with Svetlana. Sitting in his neglected apartment on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, he opens an album with photographs of his alluring wife. "How can you not fall in love with something like this?" he says yearningly. "I consulted with a certain association and they told me that the age factor is quite critical, but who plans such things? I just paid a phone bill of NIS 3,000. If I am not allowed to live here with my wife, I will live with her somewhere else. No, definitely not in Ukraine, but in another country in Europe, where I was born and where I am eligible for citizenship. At my age it's not easy to start a new life, but maybe that will prove to the Interior Ministry that we are truly in love."
The sin on their heads
In contrast to all the other men mentioned in the article, Shmuel, 44, met Marina, 25, after she had fled the clutches of the pimps. "I came to Israel from Russia in 2000," she relates dryly, "and during a year I was sold six times." Finally, she was arrested in a police raid on the apartment at which she was staying. But Marina refused to accept her fate. She testified against the pimps and was released from prison. A
good-hearted man opened his house to her, and his neighbors introduced her to Shmuel, who emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. "They asked me to translate documents she received from the police," he relates. "The first time I saw her, she looked like a wounded, scared animal. She hardly said a word."
Marina had good cause for concern. Two of the pimps who were convicted because of her testimony lived closed to her secret apartment. "One day they were on furlough and they suddenly spotted me. Somehow I got away, but I heard one of them say, 'There is the whore, I will kill her.'"
The threats drew Marina and Shmuel even closer. "I asked her whether she was sure she wanted to be with me or whether maybe the whole thing started only because I helped her," he says. "After all, 20 years separate us. She did not recoil, and I pressed the issue: I asked her what would happen if one day I had only enough money for bread and salt. She replied that on that day she would eat bread and salt with me. That won me over. Today we are not far from that situation, and we are truly together."
Marina barely ekes out a living from translation work; Shmuel is recovering from a serious operation and is not working. She did not make do with testifying against the pimps in a criminal procedure; she also filed suit against them in the Regional Labor Court in Be'er Sheva. She won the case. The pimps were ordered to pay her NIS 300,000. Now all that remains is to collect the money. "We got 300,000 on paper," Shmuel says, disappointed.
Instead of paying, the pimps send Marina increasingly threatening messages. "Two days ago someone called me and said he was an investigator for the National Insurance Institute," Shmuel says. "I was still drowsy from sleep and I gave him the address. Go know who it was." A few days later they had to leave the apartment because they could not pay the rent.
Marina has the status of a foreign worker, which she received because she was recognized as a victim of white slavery. A month and a half ago she gave birth to her first child, a daughter. Because of her mother's status, the baby is not eligible for health insurance. Only after Shmuel obtains the state's recognition of his paternity will the infant be issued a blue-and-white ID number. "Who ever heard of anything like it?" he says angrily. "I brought a baby into the world and now I have to prove I am her father."
Seven years ago, following the death of his brother, Shmuel became religiously observant. He wears a black skullcap and has a thick beard. Marina underwent conversion in the court of Rabbi Nissim Karlitz, in Bnei Brak. "I did not induce her," Shumel emphasizes. "I told her it was her affair and that anyone who does not do it for the sake of heaven is punished severely." After Marina's conversion the couple wanted to be married in a religious ceremony, but then it turned out that the special conversion court, headed by Rabbi Haim Druckman the state institution that is supposed to affirm Marina's affiliation with the Jewish people refuses to recognize the private conversion she underwent.
"The court asked me how long I have known her and whether I am aware of her past," Shmuel says, barely able to control his wrath. "I told them, 'Yes, I took her out of there.' It says in the Torah, 'Everyone who returns is welcomed.' Apparently the court forgot that before the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai they were not Jews, either."
According to the halakha (Jewish religious law), Marina and Shmuel are forbidden to live together, not to mention have children. "That is not quite accurate," Shmuel says. "There is an explicit halakha about getting married. You don't need a rabbinate or rabbis. All you need is a ring of sanctification and two witnesses, and we did everything that was needed." But he is not satisfied with the solution under duress. "We are not allowed to live together, but we have no choice. I cannot throw her into the street, you know. Instead of helping us to get married as quickly as possible, the rabbinate is only holding us up. That sin is on their heads, not ours."
Law seeks to get tough on cyber sex with
minors
By Ruth Sinai
Haaretz - January 9, 2007
http://haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtVty.jhtml?sw=sex&itemNo=811028
The Knesset yesterday approved a law in final reading that imposes a maximum sentence of two years in jail on any adult who makes sexual suggestions to a minor via the Internet or telephone.
For the purpose of this law, a minor is defined as someone below age 15.
The law, sponsored by MKs Zevulun Orlev (National Religious Party) and Nadia Hilou (Labor), states that making sexual suggestions to a minor will be considered a crime even if the minor makes no objection, since their tender age sometimes makes it difficult for youngsters to understand that a suggestion is objectionable or to challenge an adult.
"Every sexual deviant should know that even if he did not intend to commit a crime, and only wanted to talk in a chat room, the moment he suggests something sexual to a minor, he is breaking the law," said Dr. Yitzhak Kadman, director of the Council for the Welfare of the Child, who drafted the bill for Orlev and Hilou.
Kadman based the bill on Australia's legislation against "cyber sex." He said that Israel is one of the few countries in the world that has adopted this model.
The 1998 law against sexual harassment, which the new law amends, made sexual suggestions to minors a crime only if there was a relationship of authority or dependency between the adult and the minor. The new law makes such suggestions criminal even if no relationship of dependency exists.
"The law is meant to be stricter on those who hurt children," said Orlev. "It closes a loophole that previously prevented the indictment of adults who exploited minors' innocence."
The best little whorehouse in Haifa
By Yocheved Miriam Russo
THE JERUSALEM POST - Feb. 7, 2007
Fifteen people were indicted as a result of Sharon's undercover work as a 'Madam' in a whorehouse, but even so, her family was outraged.
Today, three years after her unpaid eight-month stint as a brothel proprietor, she still recalls not only the social stigma and neighborhood harassment but her family's horror as well. "You can take my picture, but please blur my personal details a little," she says. "I was a pariah in the neighborhood where I lived. Even though the whorehouse itself wasn't nearby, when the news got out, my neighbors were angry. They thought I'd be bringing men home, into my own apartment. That was completely ridiculous, but I don't want to live through all that again."
Her family was disgusted. "My sister is a social worker, so I told her what I was doing," she recounts. "I thought she'd be supportive of my desire to help these women, but when I told her, her face went white. She refused to listen to another word. Even after all the indictments came down, it remains a sore subject."
Sharon - not her real name - is 66 years old and looks more like someone's grandma than a Madam. A graduate of one of the US's most prestigious Ivy League law schools, she served in the US Department of Justice, US Attorney's office, under Robert M. Morgenthau. She also holds a Masters Degree in Tax Law. She made aliya in the late 1970s and is now studying for another degree, this one in an offshoot of veterinary medicine.
All jokes about lawyers and whores aside, Sharon apparently excelled in running a house of ill repute in Hadar, the old commercial center of Haifa. "I loved the job," she admits. "I loved taking care of the girls, and enjoyed the business. I'm happy to tell the story because so much misinformation about prostitution exists, especially about the women themselves. I'd like to see some serious reform, and maybe this will help."
So how does a nice, smart, honorable woman - once married, no children - get involved in running a whorehouse? "The roots go back to the US," she says. "I'd been reading about foreign immigrants - or maybe emigrants - to Israel, and became interested in some of the legal issues involved. I packed up and made aliya but once here in Israel, I floundered. First, I was swept off my feet by a handsome Israeli guy, but the marriage was a disaster. Then I was having trouble with Hebrew, so I finally took a job as an English secretary. To practice law, you need both verbal and the non-verbal language, and I was struggling."
She studied hard and finally qualified for legal practice in Israel. "I was practicing law and teaching at one of the universities. There was a prison nearby - it's now closed - where someone I knew was incarcerated. He'd gotten involved in a real mess and because I had a legal license, I was able to visit him more often than other friends. I'd go visit, and while I was there, I met a lot of other people who were in prison. It occurred to me that working with some of them might be a whole lot more interesting than what I was doing."
On one visit, Sharon saw something she'd assumed didn't exist anymore. "There were a number of people walking around rather freely. They didn't look like either prisoners or criminals, but they certainly weren't guards. Then I found out. Do you know Israel still has debtor's prisons? People who can't pay their debts are jailed. And because the courts tend to set the size of repayments according to the size of the debt - not the size of the income - they end up in jail repeatedly, and obviously lose any job they'd had. It also dragged in good-hearted people who'd co-signed loans for others. Needless to say, most of these prisoners were way beyond broke, and basically none of them had lawyers to protect their interests. I decided that even though I wasn't really proficient in Hebrew, whatever I could do was better than nothing, so I began volunteering to represent debtors. Then came other clients, all sorts of crimes, including prostitutes. That was the beginning."
Practicing criminal law carries a stigma all its own. "It makes me laugh," she says with a giggle. "In my law school, no one would have admitted to even thinking of practicing criminal law - that's worse than ambulance chasing. But there I was, enjoying it."
Then the opportunity to be a Madam arose. "One of the people I met was a police informant, a really bright guy," she says. "He was trusted by both the criminals and the police. So one day he came to me and said he needed to open and run a whorehouse in an attempt to catch some of the people involved in the infamous 'trafficking in women' trade. Would I consider being the Madam for the sting operation?
"I jumped at the chance. I'd represented a number of prostitutes, and liked the idea of being able to help the women. I agreed."
Sharon declined to comment on any of the legal issues that evolved from the sting operation, except that the suspects were indeed indicted with 'trafficking in women.' In any event, she added, she wasn't involved. Her 'partner' was the one involved with the legal issues, and her involvement was limited to running the brothel.
The whorehouse was located in a low-rent district, in a four-bedroom apartment that had previously served as a house of ill repute. "My partner set the whole thing up. He knew prostitutes, and put the word out. He had no trouble finding the women to work - they were all prostitutes already. We didn't corrupt anyone."
Most of the women were here illegally from Eastern Europe. "They came from Romania, Kazakhstan and Russia, smuggled in over the Egyptian border, although a few may have had tourist visas. The main point to understand is, these women knew very well why they were coming to Israel. If they didn't exactly relish the work, for them it was a chance to earn pretty good money. On the whole, they'd do a lot better as prostitutes in Israel than they'd do at any job they could get in their home countries. One woman called both her mother and sister in Romania frequently, every time encouraging them both to come to work in prostitution. Compared to life there, they did well in Israel."
There was no compulsion, she notes. "They could leave, get out of the business, anytime they wanted. That wasn't a problem. One woman I really liked had worked in Holland as a prostitute, was imprisoned in Turkey for prostitution, and now was here. Every week, either my partner or I would go with her to the bank where she bought money orders to send to her family in Romania. Both her parents were disabled, and she was their sole support. Another woman had been a literature professor at a university in Russia - she couldn't get a job. Another was very elegant, extremely well dressed. She came because she could make a better living as a prostitute here than there."
Most didn't resemble either Miss Kitty or Pretty Woman's Julia Roberts. "There's a legion of myths about prostitutes. Ours had Russian names - Tanya, Alisa, Nadya. Most were in their 20s and moderately attractive. Many were overweight, a few even obese. When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me that all prostitutes were lesbians and drug addicts, but that's not true. Many had boyfriends or husbands, and several had children. Only one was a drug addict - many used ecstasy, but only one was addicted and I tried to get her into treatment. A few had problems with alcohol. They were all heavy smokers. Most of the men smoked too, and sometimes the air was blue with smoke."
It wasn't Matt Dillon or Richard Gere who came calling, either. "We were in a low-rent district - no high-fliers. Our clients were people from the neighborhood - cab drivers, truck drivers, men who worked in the shuk. Lots of Arabs. In the mornings, we'd get men who worked at night."
Sharon ran the whorehouse like a sorority. "The girls could live there if they wanted. Or they could just come in when they wanted to work. There was a kitchen, and we supplied food, medical care and abortions if needed. I arranged for anonymous HIV testing for them, but only one woman went - I think many of them lived in denial - the 'I always use a condom except with my boyfriend' kind of thing. The girls were supposed to do the cleaning but they didn't, so we had a woman come in occasionally. I answered the phone. We advertised in the newspaper as an 'escort service,' but we'd never have let the girls go out because then we couldn't protect them."
A typical day began in late morning. "I'd come in at about 11:00 a.m. The girls would come in when they wished. Some men would call first and I'd kind of flirt on the phone - which was fun. If they wanted something special - a woman who didn't shave, or two women, or wanted some unusual act - then I'd ask the girls who were there if anyone was interested in accommodating the man. They didn't have to. They could work as much as they wanted, perform whatever acts they wanted, refuse anyone they wished. It's hard to say how many clients each would see in a day, but maybe 10 is average. We insisted they use condoms, but didn't check to see if they did. In terms of cost, Haifa is more expensive than Eilat or Tel Aviv - which might indicate that there are fewer prostitutes in Haifa. We charged NIS 100 for the first 10 minutes, then more for 15 minutes or 20. The price went down with more time -an hour wasn't NIS 200, for example."
"Basically it was very low key. The girls would hear the knock on the door, and the man would come into the living room. If a girl felt like it, she'd come out. Many of the men were regulars, so they knew the women. They sit and talk awhile, relax. It was a very friendly place. Then, at some point, the mood would arise, and they'd go off with one of the women. She'd take him into her bedroom, they'd agree on how much time, and what services. The man would pay the girl, and she'd bring the money out to me, and tell me how much time. It was safer for me to hold the money - all cash, no credit cards. Then she'd go back to the room. If they hadn't come out when time was up, I'd knock on the door. Then the man would come out, he could shower if he wished, and the woman could shower. Then she could decide if she wanted to appear for the next client. At the end of the day, we'd settle up with the girls, who got half - so if it was NIS 100, she'd get 50, and I'd pay the VAT and all other expenses out of my NIS 50. I doubt all whorehouses operate like that. We lost money during my term. But we paid taxes - if we hadn't, we might have been okay."
The women were free to negotiate side deals as well. "If a girl could get more than NIS 100 for her work, either for extra services or a tip, that was perfectly okay. If the agreement was for 10 minutes, then all I wanted was my NIS 50. If they could earn a good tip, good for them."
Attire was up to the women, too. "They didn't wear anything very much different than what you see on the streets, nowadays. Sometimes a dress or skirt that was too low or too short, or too-tight pants. They were advertising the merchandise, after all. Sometimes in the living room they'd sit on a guy's lap, encourage him a little."
Was there security? A guard at the door? "No - which probably contributed to the fact that we didn't need it. There's a lot of testosterone in this business. If we'd had a big guard standing at the door, we might have had more problems than we did. The truth is, most men are reluctant to beat up a woman - and besides, they tend to value what they're paying for. I was the only guard there, but it worked - I have a big mouth. I honestly think I could be tougher than a man could, and get away with it. We never had fights, never a stabbing. Before I came, there was a death in that whorehouse - a man who'd taken viagra had a heart attack."
Frightening moments did occur. "One time a really enormous guy came. He insisted that because he knew someone, he should be able to see one of the women for free. I said no, I wasn't willing to waive my share, and I wasn't going to ask a woman to waive hers. He started to threaten me, became really unpleasant, but I just stood up to him, defied him, dared him to do something, and he backed down. He didn't touch me."
A couple of times the police came. "One time the police were called in by someone - I'm not sure who - but they said illegal women were working as prostitutes, which was true, of course. So the police arrived and one man decided to stand guard at the door, to prevent the women from escaping. That was bad - the police took all the women downtown for questioning. My partner finally got it all worked out, and everyone was released. At the time, the women didn't know we were running an undercover operation - all they knew was that we had a really excellent relationship with the police. Later on, they knew because some of them testified in the court cases."
There were some awkward incidents, too. "A couple of times, I'd open the door and find a man I knew standing there - maybe a former client. That was awkward. One time, on a totally unrelated case, I went into a different division of the police department to copy a file, and the woman who worked there, with whom I'd had a very nice relationship before, was very hostile to me. I asked her what the problem was. She said, 'I didn't know you were running a whorehouse!' I couldn't tell her - we had to keep it absolutely undercover. Another time at my home, I needed to hire a handyman.
One guy came over, but when he saw me, he refused to do the work. 'I know you - you run a whorehouse! I'm not going to take blood money from you!'"
In the neighborhood itself, people were generally friendly. "Some of the local business owners knew what we were doing, and had no problem with it at all. One day we ran out of condoms. My partner usually bought supplies, but that day, I had to go. I went to the shuk and walked around asking, 'Do you sell condoms?' and finally found a guy who did. I told him I wanted a whole box - like 50 condoms. He gave them to me, then said,'Do you mind if I ask?' and made some remark about my age. So I said, "They're not for me. I'm running a whorehouse.' He was just staggered. Then he gave me a big smile and a thumbs-up. He wrote down our phone number and said he'd spread the word."
The operation ended when the apartment building, which had been in foreclosure, was vacated.
"Most likely the women went on to work elsewhere," Sharon says. "Some may have been sent home, others may have gone back voluntarily, if they'd earned what they set out to earn. Others, I don't know. It's not a business without risks."
In retrospect, how bad is the life of a prostitute? "On the whole, it's probably more pleasant than doing drudge work in a factory, standing on your feet all day. For many, it's better than working in one of the chemical plants. Look at some of the places where people work in Haifa - terrible conditions, fumes, caustic substances, hard work, long hours, low pay. Many women would rather be prostitutes. One thing is for sure: I won't sit in judgment on women who made this choice - their biggest mistake was not being smart enough to choose parents like mine, who saw to it that I had every advantage."
Would you do it again? "You bet," Sharon says with a grin. "In a heartbeat. It was fascinating."
Israel improves in addressing human trafficking
problem
US State Department report ranks Israel in higher category than last year, citing 'significant efforts' to comply with trafficking prevention standards and new gov't amendment to combat trafficking
By Yitzhak Benhorin
YNet News - June 13, 2007
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3411879,00.html
WASHINGTON - Israel has improved its record on human trafficking in the last year, according to a US State Department human rights report published Tuesday. The report ranks 151 nations based on their behavior in combating human trafficking, such as prostitution and slavery, highlighting government efforts involving prosecution, protection, and prevention.
Israel was among 23 nations ranked in the lowest category with regards to trafficking in human persons for 2005. This year, in an assessment of the issue in 2006, Israel was one of 10 nations to succeed in rising to a higher category.
According to the report, "The Government of Israel does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so.
Israeli efforts
"This year, the government passed crucial amendments to its anti-trafficking law that comprehensively prohibit all forms of trafficking in persons, including involuntary servitude and slavery. In addition, the government extended legal assistance to victims of trafficking for involuntary servitude, and passed a national action plan to combat trafficking for forced labor."
Despite these improvements, because the government still "does not provide forced labor victims with adequate protection services - such as shelter, medical, and psychological aid – and...has not yet reported any criminal prosecutions under its new law for labor trafficking," Israel still remains in one of the report's lower categories.
Serving as a hopeful sign for future progress, Israeli Rahel Gershuni was listed among 'heroes acting to end modern-day slavery' and was praised for leading the reform movement within the Israeli government "by serving as a catalyst for the development of policies that treat sex trafficking victims as true victims and not as criminals. "
Over the last three years, she has changed countless attitudes, shaped scores of policies, and, most importantly, saved many lives," said the report.
The reportThe report splits nations into four categories. Tier 1, the highest category, is awarded to nations who comply with minimum standards of Congress' Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000.
A country that fails to make significant efforts to bring itself into compliance with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking in persons, per US law, receives the lowest ranking - a "Tier 3"assessment. Such an assessment could trigger the withholding of non-humanitarian, non-trade-related assistance from the United States to that country.
In between there are Tier 2 and Tier 2 "Watch List" countries. Tier 2 countries are those whose governments do not fully comply with the Act's minimum standards but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.
Watch list nations, while making similar compliance efforts, differ from Tier 2 countries in that the absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is significant or increasing or there is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat human trafficking.
As stated, Israel is no longer ranked as Tier 3, but it has moved up only one tier and remains on the US watch list.
According to the report, Israel is a destination country for low-skilled workers from China, Romania, Jordan, Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and India who migrate voluntarily for contract labor various industries. Some are subsequently subjected to conditions of involuntary servitude, such as withholding of passports and other restrictions on movement, threats, and physical intimidation.
Israel is also a destination country for women trafficked from Eastern Europe — primarily Ukraine, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Belarus and Russia — for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation.
This is the sixth annual Trafficking in Persons Report, which the State Department is required to submit each year to the US Congress. It is intended to raise global awareness, to highlight the growing efforts of the international community to combat human trafficking and to encourage foreign governments to take effective actions to counter all forms of trafficking in persons.
Police raid seven brothels in city, 19 prostitutes arrested
By Sharon Roffe-Ofir
YNet News - August 1, 2007
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3432331,00.html
Police raided and shut down seven brothels in Haifa and the vicinity in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Nineteen prostitutes were arrested, and four other people suspected of operating the brothels inside apartment buildings were also detained.
Police decided on the raid following numerous complaints by residents.
"The suspects would rent apartments in the residential complexes and then convert them into brothels, which became a major nuisance for the other tenants," a senior police officer told Ynet.
Police officials said they hoped the raid would prevent the opening of additional brothels in residential areas.
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Articles
U.S. Selects Covenant House To Operate National Hotline for Trafficking Victims
Covenant House - February 26, 2004
http://www.covenanthouse.org/about_pr_20040226-trafficking_hotline.html
Through a competitive contracting process, The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has selected Covenant House to operate a national hotline for Human Trafficking Victims. "We are thrilled to provide this much needed service," Sister Patricia Cruise, President of Covenant House, responded to the news. "It is outrageous that so many women and children are brought, sold or trafficked into this country for purposes of sexual exploitation and domestic slavery. We will do everything in our power to provide them with the resources necessary to gain them their freedom."
"Each year as many as 700,000 people around the world, primarily women and children, are bought, sold, transported and held for the purpose of forced commercial sex or labor."
In granting this award, the Department of Health and Human Services is relying on Covenant House's NINELINE, which has 16 years of experience in the field of telephone crisis intervention and information/referral. The NINELINE began in 1988 as a hotline for homeless, runaway and throwaway youth in an effort to provide emergency services, especially shelter and on-going residential services, to that population. Over the years, the NINELINE has evolved into a crisis line providing a range of counseling services to young people in general. The NINELINE has assisted youth regarding suicide, domestic violence, child abuse, substance abuse and mental health issues to name a few.
Trafficking in persons is a modern form of slavery. Traffickers use threats, intimidation and violence to force victims to engage in commercial sex or to labor under slave-like conditions for the traffickers' financial gain. Each year as many as 700,000 people around the world, primarily women and children, are bought, sold, transported and held for the purpose of forced commercial sex or labor. This illicit practice has not eluded the United States, where thousands of non-citizens struggle behind closed doors against their will as prostitutes, factory workers, domestic servants, and migrant agricultural laborers. Traffickers may threaten physical harm to the victim or to a loved one left behind in their country of origin. Many victims are raped, beaten or otherwise brutalized into terrified submission to their traffickers. In addition to sexual, physical and/or emotional abuse and exploitation, victims may be vulnerable to other health concerns, such as alcoholism, drug abuse, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
Covenant House's sites in Central America, Mexico, the United States, and Canada have been dealing with transient youth for many years. Before coming to Covenant House, many youth have been involved in the commercial sex industry. Covenant House and Casa Alianza, our Latin American program, have worked with this population both in rescuing the victims and stopping those who victimize and exploit innocent and vulnerable youth.
The NINELINE has also been involved in an international network of child help lines. This group is dedicated to assisting children worldwide who are being exploited in various countries. Many children are being trafficked in and out of countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America for purposes of commercial sex and forced labor. In some countries, child soldiers are a significant problem. These are youngsters, some as young as 13 years old, that are conscripted to fight in an army.
The Department of Health and Human Services believes that NINELINE possesses the experience and professionalism to deal with the complex problem of Human Trafficking, and to fulfill the goals of the project among which are:
* Explaining to a potential victim of trafficking or to persons calling on behalf of a potential victim of trafficking how to recognize that an individual has been subjected to an act of trafficking;
* Describing to potential victims of trafficking or to persons calling on behalf of a potential victim of trafficking the programs available to assist trafficking victims and providing practical advice on how to access these benefits;
* Contributing to the safety and rescue of trafficking victims by providing potential victims of trafficking or persons calling on behalf of a potential victim of trafficking real-time referrals to local organizations willing to provide emergency, case management and other services to victims of trafficking within their community
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Federal agency managing the contract with Covenant House, recently initiated a public awareness campaign to broaden the current scope of outreach to access and educate the public with priorities on victims of trafficking and the populations most likely to encounter victims. As a result of this campaign, it is expected that many more victims of this modern form of slavery will be able to be rescued. Covenant House looks forward to this challenge and the opportunity to help these victims attain their freedom.
By Joseph Parker, Clinical Director
The Lola Greene Baldwin Foundation
http://prostitutionrecovery.org/how_prostitution_works.html
INTRODUCTION
Prostitution, pornography, and other forms of commercial sex are a multibillion dollar industry. They enrich a small minority of predators, while the larger community is left to pay for the damage.
People used in the sex industry often need medical care as a result of the ever-present violence. They may need treatment for infectious diseases, including AIDS. Survivors frequently need mental health care for post-traumatic stress disorder, psychotic episodes and suicide attempts. About a third end up chronically disabled and on Social Security.
The sex trade plays an active role in promoting alcohol and drug problems. Pimps also use prostituted women in forgery and credit card fraud. The community must pay for chemical dependency treatment, insurance costs and incarceration.
In addition to these costs, the community loses the contributions which might have been made to legitimate community productivity by those used up in the sex industry.
The operators of sex businesses not only do not pay for these expenses, many manage to avoid paying taxes at all.
THE JOHNS
No business can afford to create a product for which there are no buyers. The first step in understanding the sex industry is to understand the customers, the johns.
Real sexual relationships are not hard to find. There are plenty of adults of both sexes who are willing to have sex if someone treats them well, and asks. But there lies the problem. Some people do not want an equal, sharing relationship. They do not want to be nice. They do not want to ask. They like the power involved in buying a human being who can be made to do almost anything.
The business of prostitution and pornography is the use of real human beings to support the fantasies of others. Anyone working in prostitution who tells a john too much about who they really are, interferes with the fantasy. They risk losing a customer, and may get a beating as well. In real relationships with real people, you are stuck with the limitations of who you are, who your partner is, and what you can do together without hurting each other.
Some people do not want real relationships, or feel entitled to something beyond the real relationships they have. They want to play "super stud and sex slave" or whatever, inside their own heads. If they need to support their fantasies with pictures, videotapes, or real people to abuse, the sex trade is ready to supply them. For a price, they can be "a legend in their own minds."
The most common type of prostitution customer is the user. He is quite self-centered, and simply wants what he considers to be his needs met.
The user would deny any intent to harm anyone, and might even claim some empathy for the sex workers he uses. However, his empathy does not extend to discontinuing his using behavior, nor to helping anyone escape from the sex industry. He does not care whether the person he is using is unwilling or unusually vulnerable. He simply feels entitled to whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. If someone is hurt, that is not his problem. He feels that the fee he pays covers any damages.
He sees himself as a respectable person, and works to protect that appearance. Users provide a large, safe, and steady income for the pimps and other "businessmen," of the sex industry.
Sadists are people who have the ability to take pleasure in another person's fear, pain, or humiliation. They constitute about ten percent of the population. Sadists vary in severity, ranging from those who just make you feel bad, on up to those who do torture murders. There is a definite practice effect. If allowed to hurt people often, their sadism gets worse.
Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse by sadists drives their child victims from their homes into the street, trying to escape. The pimps and "chickenhawks" take it from there.
Sadists are attracted to prostituted women and children because they are willing to get into a car or come to a place where the sadist can be in control. Sadism is about control. Hurting people who cannot stop them is their most intense and pleasurable form of control.
Sadists play close attention to matters of power. They are most brutal with small women and children, and are more careful with larger women and men. They avoid people who may have someone to protect them, or someone who may take revenge on the victim's behalf.
There are pimps who specialize in supplying victims to sadists, and who base their fees on the amount of damage done to the victim.
Sadists are found at all levels of society, including the respected and powerful. They often use this, saying, "You are just a whore, nobody is going to believe you." If they do kill someone, they are very aware that, to some extent, the effort society puts into finding the killer will reflect the value placed on the victim. People working in prostitution are safe victims.
Necrophiles are people who can take pleasure in filth, degradation, and destruction. They are the users of the sick, the old, the psychotic, the brain damaged, the "tracked" and tattooed casualties of the sex industry, in the end stages of their lives. For necrophiles, broken bodies and broken minds are a turn on. They glory in their superiority over ruined human beings, and feel entitled to express their contempt in every way.
Necrophiles must keep their perversion secret from their friends and families, both to protect their social standing, and to protect their fantasies of superiority. Normal people just would not understand.
Child molesters participate in the sex industry in several ways. Some have been aware of a sexual attraction to children, often of a particular age and sex, from some time in late childhood. They then make the choice to act on it.
Some have sadistic characteristics. Children are easier than adults to control. The molester's own children, in his own home, are the easiest of all to control.
Necrophilic child molesters enjoy the knowledge that, when the molesters are finished with them, the children's lives will never be the same. They enjoy the fact that the children may later self-destruct in addiction, prostitution or suicide. It proves that they were right.
Sex offenders against children operate with varying degrees of sophistication. Some do careful "grooming." They use pornography to break down resistance, and supply drugs, alcohol, and money. Others just start out with forcible rape. Many claim unusual "love" for children. They claim that sex between adults and children is not harmful, and should be legalized. Pedophiles actually teach children that they are helpless, hopeless, worthless, and only good for sex and hurting.
A large portion of workers in the sex trade started out as sexually abused children. Some were even "broken in" by being shared with or rented out to others by their own families.
There are specialist pimps who provide children to johns. The fees vary depending on the age, sex and appearance of the child, as well as the amount of damage the child has already incurred.
When caught, the pimps and johns claim not to have known the child's real age. There is a market for small adults made up to look like children, both for direct sex and for pornography. But the truth is in the fees: real children sell for more than fake ones.
Prostitution buffs are like police and fire buffs, that is, people with an intense interest in those occupations even though they do not belong to them.
Prostitution buffs are people with a morbid fascination for or obsession with prostituted persons and their activities. Some characterize themselves as "researchers", and amass hundreds of pages of notes and photographs, that somehow are seldom published.
Others claim to be intent on religious redemption of "sinners", and spend huge amounts of time in vice areas, but never quite manage to offer anyone practical help.
A third group consists of "community livability" activists, who blame the people being prostituted for the behavior of the johns, pimps, and drug dealers.
As with any obsession, with some people it may get out of control. Police buffs may take unlawful police action, and some fire buffs eventually set fires.
Each type of prostitution buff strongly believes his or her rationalizations for their activities, and would vehemently deny any personal sexual interest. The trouble is, it is obviously there. They show a lot of subtle signs, which, to someone working in prostitution, indicate that they may be potential customers.
When a prostituted person approaches the buff to offer their services, the response may be unpredictable and dangerous. Sometimes the buffs will accept their services, and the worker may never realize that they are anything but a normal trick. At other times, they will be met with rage, as if they are making a hetero- or homosexual attack on the buff. They may be beaten, knifed, or thrown out of a moving vehicle.
Most of the "research" and "religious" buffs are men, and spend enough time studying their subject that their identifications of who is and is not prostituting are fairly accurate.
Many of the "community livability" activists are women. Some may pepper spray or draw weapons on young people who are in no way involved, but who fit whatever stereotype the activist has for what a prostitute should look like.
CUSTOMER STREAMS
Three forces generate streams of customers for prostitution: Isolation, sexual abandonment, and unusual interests. Prostituted people are used to service populations which are physically isolated from the life of their communities. These customers come from military bases, logging or mining camps, and from farm labor camps. Operators of these facilities are often involved in arranging for services through local pimps.
Other customers are isolated by travel, such as seamen, truckers, and traveling businessmen. Hotels and motels, bars and other businesses providing support services for travelers also participate in arrangements for sexual services.
In some religious cultures, and some individual family cultures, sex is regarded as an unpleasant duty of marriage, and once the childbearing years are over, one partner may cut the other off from sexual activity. The sex industry does not reach out to middle-aged women, so their only choice is to have affairs. This may be morally unacceptable to them, or eligible partners may not be available. For them, there may be no solution.
For men, prostitution is quite available, and many men may see it as less wrong than having affairs, or as requiring less effort. These men provide a large and steady income for the sex industry.
Most of these johns would be classified as "users", and an unclear proportion of them might not be prostitution customers if they were not isolated.
Customers who remain in or near their home communities are more likely to use prostituted people due to unusual interests, such as sadism, pedophilia, or sexual addiction. They are isolated by the nature of their desires, rather than their location. For example, men who prefer sex with boys, but who do not view themselves as homosexual, support a whole segment of the industry involving prostituted males. It is unclear whether local law enforcement efforts, or the openness and aggressiveness with which with the sex industry is allowed to operate in a community, affects the stream of "special interest" customers.
A large portion of prostituted people are also used in and around the communities where they grew up. The fact that survivors often meet previous tricks in local grocery stores and other random places can be a considerable problem for their recovery.
For those whose special interests place them at serious legal risk in their own community, there is sex tourism. Some cities in the US are well known to run more 'wide open' than others, that is, there are fewer and weaker laws on the books, and police and other officials are discouraged from enforcing them. These conditions are often the result of cooperation between business and elected officials, who are repaid by the sex industry in various ways.
THE PIMPS
No one really wants to have sex with five, ten, or twenty strangers a day, every day. Besides the sheer numbers involved, some of those strangers are going to use a person in ways that are bizarre, painful, disgusting, and occasionally fatal.
When people who have worked in prostitution call it repeated rape, they are not exaggerating or being "hysterical." They are being legally precise. Rape is sexual intercourse, against the will of the victim, carried out by threat or force.
In prostitution, the john performs the sex act with the unwilling victim, but subcontracts the intimidation and violence to another man, the pimp.
The john would like to believe he is paying for sex, but the person he has sex with gets little or none of the money. The money goes to the pimp to pay for the force needed to keep prostituted women and children working. It goes to the drug dealer who provides whatever it takes to keep the workers from becoming psychotic or committing suicide. It goes to pay the businessmen who provide the real estate, support services, and legal protection for the trade.
Pimps come in three general types. Media pimping, like other kinds, involves selling fantasies that ultimately hurt people. Two of their central lies are that women are only good for sex, and men are only good for violence.
They claim that they produce sex and violence because that is all that sells. In fact, many other things sell as well or better. (For example, Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg productions often are very successful.) Media pimps often have a tremendous sense of superiority over "common" people, yet lack the intelligence and creativity to do high quality work. They very much enjoy selling a degraded view of the human race.
Advertisers often implicitly promise that buying their products will bring happiness, power, and sexual success. After spending their money, the victims of this "bait and switch" scam find that they get only a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of shampoo, or a magazine full of dirty pictures. They are just as lonely and unhappy as before, but their money is gone.
Media pimps perform another "bait and switch" function, in cooperation with business level pimps. They attract young people hoping for fame and fortune in the legitimate entertainment business, and manipulate them into the lower levels of the sex industry.
They degrade ordinary people living ordinary lives, by showing only idealized characters with perfect bodies, high powered jobs, and plenty of money. The characters' problems are always solved in an hour or two, with a liberal application of sex and violence.
Real people, whose lives cannot hope to measure up to these "ideals", are made to feel inferior and worthless. The media pimps work to divert people from the ups and downs of real life, into dependence on the fantasy worlds that they sell. The sex industry, above all, sells fantasy regardless of who gets hurt.
The media pimps have a lot of money. They own magazines and newspapers, and produce movies and television programs. They can afford to hire law firms and advertising agencies to further their interests. Their money can buy access to political officials, and special treatment for their businesses. In return they offer favorable media exposure, and large campaign contributions.
Their money often goes to support various front organizations, which work to direct public discussion toward "free speech rights," and away from the damaging effects of the sex industry on the women and children used in it.
Business level pimps extract profits from the sex industry in ways that minimize the risk of public exposure or criminal prosecution.
They own the bars and strip clubs, which attract concentrations of potential johns. They offer jobs as dancers and hostesses to vulnerable young people who are potential candidates for more direct use in the sex trade. They own the adult bookstores, massage parlors, motels, and legal brothels.
They posture as legitimate businessmen, conceal their ownership behind corporations and front men, and deny knowing that their property is being used in the sex industry. They charge sex businesses far higher rents and fees than they could get from legitimate tenants, which indicate they know what the businesses are doing.
Through contacts in the business community, they arrange for sexual services for visiting businessmen, politicians, celebrities, and sports teams. By keeping these arrangements secret, business pimps insure a degree of protection for their other activities from their customers in high places.
Business level pimps separate themselves from the "dirty workers" of the sex trade by treating them as independent contractors rather than employees. This enables them to avoid having to pay taxes, overtime pay, health insurance, and workmen's comp. If one of the workers is arrested, the businessman is protected from any legal involvement. They subcontract any violence needed to the street level pimps.
With support from elements of the "legitimate" entertainment industry, as well as street level pimps, they produce and distribute commercial pornography.
They support and have the support of "civil liberties" advocates, who oppose censorship regardless of the harm done to the people used in making the pornography. They disclaim any responsibility for the actions of potentially violent sex offenders who use pornography to "fuel" their fantasies until they are ready to commit actual violence.
Business pimps often join civic organizations, make highly public contributions to charity, and play a role in local politics. They continually assert their identity as legitimate businessmen. When threatened, they call on the support of the real, legitimate, non-sex business community, often successfully.
Unlike street level pimps, the businessmen usually manage to hold onto their profits. They have investment skills, can afford lawyers, seldom are addicted, and rarely take the risks involved in garden variety crime. Often the greatest danger they face is from the Internal Revenue Service, not from the police.
Street level pimps are the foot soldiers of the sex industry. Typically, they are small time criminals, who have a high need for sadistic gratification.
The johns and business level pimps subcontract to these men the brainwashing, terror, beatings, and the occasional murder needed to keep prostituted women and children working.
Pimps are part of the business even where prostitution is legal. Brothels do not run employment ads. The brothel owners require that any new "employee" be "referred" by someone ready to supply whatever force is necessary to control the woman.
Street pimps learn the business from friends and relatives already in the business, from other criminals in jails and prisons, and from other pimps they meet hanging out in the bars and clubs. Occasionally, someone especially talented in greed and cruelty learns the trade solely by practicing on available victims.
Pimps tend to avoid identifying themselves as such, except to other pimps. They like to present themselves as husbands, boyfriends, or protectors. When caught in acts of violence, they try to prevent outside interference by claiming that it is "only a domestic matter." In fact, the pimps themselves are the greatest danger to those they exploit. The johns and the police are lesser hazards.
Street pimps pride themselves on their finesse, on controlling their victims by psychological manipulation. They claim that prostituted women and children give their money to the pimps because they "love" them. (In criminal language, "She loves me" means "I can control her.") Street pimps try to play down their use of threats and violence, despite the fact that it is their biggest contribution to the sex industry.
Throughout human history there has been the kind of greed that takes the form of wanting to own other human beings. Slavery died out in most areas because it was unprofitable compared to more modern methods of production. The one trade where the would-be slaver can still find success is in the sex industry. For many pimps, the gratification of owning slaves is as important as the drugs and the money.
Contrary to the images in the media, most pimps exploit members of their own race. Many are nearly the same age as their victims.
Most pimps are male. Women are becoming more and more involved as active operators in the sex industry. Some are involved in helping a male pimp to control his "stable," or act as madams in brothels owned by someone else. Some run "escort" or out-call services themselves, but maintain relationships through which they can call on male enforcers when needed.
Occasionally women are involved in supplying their own children to pedophiles, pornographers, or others in the sex industry. The mother's own addiction is the usual cause. Plain greed for money, and the mother's own sexual perversities are less common motivations.
Street level pimps usually spend their money on clothes, jewelry, cars, and especially on their own addictions. They often are involved in other types of crime, especially drug dealing, and may go to prison for those. Successful prosecution for pimping itself is quite unusual.
It is rare for a street pimp to hold onto his money and make the transition to a business level operator, but there always are a few at the business level who got their start as street pimps.
WHERE THE WORKERS COME FROM
The sex industry ultimately is about power. This is best demonstrated by the care with which the industry takes to ensure that those it uses are powerless. The predators are neither irrational nor stupid. They watch carefully for a kind of "victim profile," and avoid anyone who may be uncontrollable or dangerous.
They focus on young people coming out of families that are abusive, disorganized, or non-existent. One fundamental function of the family is protection of its members, especially its children. The family also is a team, and all players must do their jobs. If a member is lost or disabled, others in the extended family or community must step in to carry on. When one or more adults in a family are absent, addicted, mentally ill, or severely demoralized, the children are in danger.
When the family is poor, or part of a devalued minority group, and opportunities for education and good jobs are limited, some members of those families may be willing to take risks. If the young people are being terrorized, beaten, or sexually abused by the very people who should be protecting them, many are going to take their chances on the street. For some, nude dancing or even prostitution may look better than no job at all.
If they are under age, have no address, or cannot afford to have their parents involved, most social service agencies will not help them. Children are still treated as some adults' property.
The juvenile system has little interest in noncriminal runaways or "throwaways." There are age requirements for normal jobs, usually between 14 and 18 years of age. The very young are practically forced into the sex industry, even before the pimps and johns get involved. They may have to do prostitution from age 12 or 14, until they turn 18, and can get a "better job" such as nude dancing.
There are three general patterns for "breaking" someone into prostitution.
In slave taking, a young male predator "befriends" a victim long enough to be sure she is not dangerous herself, nor protected by anyone who is. He manipulates her into a situation where she can be kidnapped and held in isolation in a place the slaver and his friends control. Over a prolonged period, she is terrorized, tortured, and gang raped. She is threatened with her own death, and that of anyone she loves.
Once she is convinced that her only chance of survival is to do exactly as she is told, she is "turned out." Her first "trick" may in fact be a member of the prostitution organization, set up to make sure she performs as directed. After she has been properly "seasoned," she is put to work for her captors, or sold to another pimp.
The domestic violence transition targets young people coming out of abusive homes who are emotionally needy, and have no real idea of what a normal love relationship looks like. They become involved with a "boyfriend" who initially treats them better than they have ever experienced before. The boyfriend gradually becomes extremely controlling, and eventually violent. He introduces commercial sex in terms of his pressing need for money, and "If you love me, you will do this." He quickly transitions from "just this once" into "You are just a whore, my whore!" and requiring daily prostitution. He continues controlling the victim with alternating emotional manipulation and explosive violence, while living on her earnings, for as long as she lasts.
The "grooming" process is used by older and more sophisticated predators, and is especially used on younger children. These perpetrators become adept at identifying abused, neglected, and depressed children, and "befriending" them. They develop a "special" relationship, one that isolates the child from others, and makes the child feel indebted to the groomer.
Slowly, resistance is broken down, using gifts, money, alcohol, drugs, and pornography. In the sex industry, pornography is not only a profitable product, it also is a working tool.
They engage the child in progressively more direct sex, and begin to merge the abuse into the child's identity: "You want this", "You like this", "You make it happen", "Now you are dirty, perverted, queer". These predators often are only interested in children of a specific age or appearance. When they develop beyond that, the kids may be passed off to pedophiles interested in older children. Being suddenly "dumped" for no understandable reason often is very painful for the child.
Over a lifetime these predators may victimize an incredibly large number of children. The emotional damage they do leaves a child even more isolated and vulnerable to further involvement in the sex industry.
GENDER DIFFERENCES
The experience of prostitution is remarkably similar for males and females, but there are some differences.
Most young men used in prostitution are heterosexual. They are drawn into the sex industry by many of the same forces as women. Many johns consider themselves straight, and claim that only the prostituted young male is gay. Those used in male-on-male prostitution often are left with tremendous confusion about their actual sexual orientation. When trying to escape "the life", they may encounter all the prejudices encountered by gays, in addition to the stigma of prostitution. They are at higher risk of HIV than prostituted women.
Rape and sexual slavery are common in jails and prisons. There is considerable public support for it as a normal part of the punishment. Some of those who run institutions do their best to maintain a safe and controlled environment. They may be hampered by outdated, hard to supervise buildings and lack of staff. Others may care very little about what inmates do to each other.
Inmates who go to staff for protection often end up in protective custody. Thismis practically the same as disciplinary isolation. The response of convicts toward "snitches" ranges from abusive to deadly.
Almost all of these traumatized men eventually are released. Many dissolve into alcohol and drug dependence, or are disabled by psychological symptoms. Others wander the streets, intoxicated, armed, and ready to react explosively to any threat of harm or humiliation.
Women used in prostitution usually have children sooner or later. Mothers who cannot protect themselves rarely can protect their children. In the endless whirl of sex, drugs and violence, the children may be neglected, traumatized, or even become merchandise in the sex industry themselves. One of the most painful events in the life of prostitution is losing custody of children, regardless of how good the reasons for that loss may be.
Most prostituted women want very much to be good mothers, often trying to give their children the love and care they never received themselves. The birth of a "trick baby", that is, one fathered by some unknown john, produces very complicated feelings. Some mothers can separate their feeling for the baby from the anger at the way the baby was conceived, but others cannot. Some "trick babies" are given up for adoption by mothers who fear that they otherwise might abuse them.
If the baby was fathered by a pimp, or is at least claimed to be in official records, the courts may fail to recognize, or ignore, the real nature of the relationship. The pimp may be given visitation rights or even custody. This gives the pimp a new person to threaten and a new means of controlling the mother. It makes escaping from the sex industry even harder than it already is.
Both male and female survivors of prostitution usually develop a tremendous hatred of men, especially those in authority. They hate both for the actual harm done, and for the help that was not given when it was terribly needed.
SOCIETY'S ROLE
The larger society provides the pimps with a very powerful weapon. It makes prostitution an identity, not an occupation. Once you have taken money for sex, you are a prostitute. Society does not allow an expiration date on that identity, nor a way to be publicly accepted as something else.
Society offers help to people in trouble largely based on the value set on that person. It is much easier to get help for a married, middle class, domestic violence victim, than for a refugee from the sex industry trying to escape from a pimp.
Many people prefer to view prostitution as a "lifestyle choice," or even an "addiction" to a lifestyle. They think most people in the sex industry are there to support their drug habits, when actually the drugs are used to cope with what is happening to their lives. Society assumes that nothing can be done to help them, so there is no need to try. The pimps count on it.
Being trapped, under the control of violent and merciless men, without hope of outside help, sets the stage for Stockholm Syndrome. When the victim cannot successfully fight or flee, she may try to form a protective relationship with her captor. She hopes that if she can prove her love and loyalty to the pimp, she can "love" him into being good. This can become such a desperate attachment that she actually believes she loves him, and passes up chances to escape. Stockholm Syndrome often is the real reason for what others see as the "choice" to stay in the sex industry.
Prostitution and the drug trade go hand in hand. Customers for sex often are buyers for drugs also. Many pimps are supporting their own habits, and dealing drugs as well.
The pimps consider drugs and alcohol a cost of doing business. Without the chemicals, their "livestock" may become psychotic or commit suicide. In addition to the brainwashing and violence, addiction provides a form of control. Drugs also produce isolation from people who otherwise might try to protect a victim or help her escape. The only creature less worthy of help than a prostitute, is an addicted prostitute.
The health effects of prostitution are devastating. Prostitution, especially in childhood, is at least as effective as war in producing post-traumatic stress disorder. Survivors usually have some combination of depression, anxiety, and dissociative disorders. Brain damage, psychosis, and suicide are common. Long term psychiatric disability, serious medical illness, and the effects of accumulating injuries shorten lives.
CONCLUSION
People who have had luckier lives, as well as those who profit from the sex industry in some way, frequently refer to prostitution and pornography as "victim-less crimes". They point to a tiny fraction of sex workers who actually might be involved by choice. They selectively read history to find some tiny minority, somewhere, at some time, who gained something in the sex business.
The very selectiveness of their attention indicates that, on some level, they know that for almost everyone, involvement in the sex industry is a terrible misfortune.
As many an old cop will say, "Anyone who thinks prostitution is a victimless crime, hasn't seen it up close."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Herman, Judith Lewis. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.
Jarranson, James M. and Michael K. Popkin. (Eds). (1998). Caring for Victims of Torture. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press.
Interpol - Trafficking in human
beings
http://www.interpol.int/Public/THB/default.asp
Interpol aims to end the abuse and exploitation of human beings for financial gain. Women from developing countries and young children all over the world are especially vulnerable to trafficking, smuggling or sexual exploitation.
Trafficking in women for sexual exploitation is a multi-billion-dollar business which involves citizens of most countries and helps sustain organized crime. A violation of human rights, it destroys the lives of its victims.
Human trafficking is distinct from people smuggling in that it involves the exploitation of the migrant, often for purposes of forced labour and prostitution.
People smuggling implies the procurement, for financial or material gain, of the illegal entry into a state of which that person is neither a citizen nor a permanent resident. Criminal networks which smuggle and traffic in human beings for financial gain increasingly control the flow of migrants across borders.
Child sexual exploitation on the Internet ranges from posed photos to visual recordings of brutal sexual crimes. One of Interpol's main tools for helping police fight this type of crime is the Interpol Child Abuse Image Database (ICAID). Created in 2001, it contains hundreds of thousands of images of child sexual abuse submitted by member countries, thereby facilitating the sharing of images and information to assist law enforcement agencies with the identification of new victims.
Helping girls flee brothels TheStar.com - News - Helping
girls flee brothels
Craig and Marc Kielburger
The Star - June 04, 2007
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/221184
For 40 years Father Shay Cullen decried the treatment of neglected and forgotten children in the Philippines, but it wasn't until he helped smuggle a television camera inside a jail that the world started paying attention.
The tape showed hundreds of children as young as 5 locked in cages stacked a half-dozen high. Most were child prostitutes, caught in that country's rampant sex tourism trade.
Broadcast on CNN, it highlighted an issue the world couldn't ignore, and hit hardest in North America, where many of the children's regular customers live.
Father Shay was in Toronto last week with the urgent message that those children, and thousands like them, still desperately need our help.
The 64-year-old Catholic missionary leads an organization in the Philippines called PREDA that has been rescuing children exploited by pimps and brothel owners, then sold to tourists who have come to prey on them.
It's not a job for the faint of heart. He spends his days with young girls who are sexually, physically and emotionally abused on a daily basis, as well as with johns who are convinced they are doing the girls a favour by paying them for sex.
"The worst kind of slavery today is child labour," he told us during his visit. "And the worst form of that is the sex trade."
More than 60,000 Filipino girls work as child prostitutes. They are recruited by pimps in rural areas of the country from unsuspecting, desperately poor families who send their daughters to the city to earn extra money.
"It's everyone from the sleazy to the elite," Father Shay says of the tourists who frequent child brothels. "All levels of society and every nationality."
Girls are sold in the brothels and on the streets for as little as $25 and can see as many as 10 customers a day. If they don't make enough money, they are beaten.
Father Shay works with local authorities to conduct stings, posing as a john and negotiating prices for girls. He tells us "cherry girls"– ones new to the business – are in highest demand.
We had the opportunity to visit some of the girls rescued by sting operations at PREDA's rehabilitation centre in the city of Olopango. There they undergo a primal therapy session with social workers to deal with the pain and fear they have endured.
It's a heart-wrenching scene – a dozen or so girls sprawled out on the floor, wailing at the top of their lungs and pounding the floor in agony. Tears stream down their faces and their bodies shake as they relive years of abuse. Father Shay and the others try to console them.
This industry is allowed to thrive under the radar. Unless we make combating child prostitution and sex tourism a global priority, thousands more children will have their lives torn apart.
Canada has legislation to prosecute citizens who abuse children overseas; since 2002, it's only been used twice.
That's because police here rely on authorities overseas to provide them with evidence – authorities easily bribed by rich brothel owners.
Despite local corruption and weak international laws, Father Shay is not discouraged. He is slowly but surely shining a light on a once dark industry.
Craig and Marc Kielburger are children's rights activists who co-founded Free The Children, which is active in the developing world.
CBS News - Sept. 12, 2007
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/12/eveningnews/main3254966.shtml
(CBS) Most people think slavery ended in America back in the 19th century. But thousands of people are sold in this country each year. Some are made to work for no pay. Others are forced into prostitution.
The government has funded 42 task forces across the country to root out human trafficking operations.
It's an industry that's worth some $32 billion worldwide. And as CBS News correspondent Tracy Smith reports in a series for The Early Show, it's making its way into America's suburbs.
At 17, Shauna Newell didn't see it coming.
"She was the new girl at school looking for friends," says Shauna.
A new girl in town invited Shauna for a sleepover in her Pensacola, Fla., neighborhood. A man posing as the girl's father slipped Shauna a drug. She woke up to a nightmare.
"My legs were being held," she says. "And my head ... my hands were tied like this, above my head. And I remember saying, 'No, please don't do this. Stop.'"
While her parents frantically searched for her, Shauna was drugged, raped and beaten. Investigator Brad Dennis suspected Shauna was a victim of human trafficking, a growing problem in the Florida Panhandle.
"They know how to target these young, vulnerable teenage girls," he said.
According to Dennis, the girls are moved around a circuit and sold for sex.
He says, "They're hitting all the major hotel industries and convention centers."
"The business of trafficking is an extremely lucrative business," according to Wan Kim of the U.S. Justice Department.
The U.S. government says human trafficking is one of the largest criminal industries in the world - second only to drugs - and the fastest growing.
"Human beings you sell and resell and resell and you're always making a profit," says Anna Rodriguez of the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking.
The State Department says nearly 20,000 people are trafficked into the U.S. each year. Countless women are promised jobs, but then are sold for anywhere from $10,000 to $300,000 and forced into labor or prostitution.
One Haitian woman came here to be someone's nanny - but ended up a sex slave. She tells Smith she was tortured.
"These people are under extreme control, even death threats. This is one of the most horrific crimes that I have seen," says Rodriguez.
The problem has moved beyond immigrant trafficking. The Justice Deptartment says increasingly young American boys and girls, like Shauna, are attractive targets.
"We find it in residential neighborhoods where usually young girls are being held - sometimes for periods of years upon years, in subjugation. They never leave the house. People don't even know they live there," says Kim.
In Shauna's case, investigators pursued a group of suspected traffickers in the Panhandle area. She was released after four days, but her captors remain at large.
To find out more about Shauna's story and human trafficking in America, turn to The Early Show for the special series "Against Their Will."
Beyond Borders addresses childhood prostitution and trafficking of children for sexual purposes
Life Support Collective is the child prostitution and pornography survivor writing collective.
Legal/Law Enforcement/Goverment
The relationship between adult sexual assault and prostitution: An exploratory analysis.
Campbell R, Ahrens CE, Sefl T, Clark ML
Violence Vict 2003 Jun; 18(3):299-317.
Previous research has established a link between childhood sexual abuse and engaging in prostitution as an adult. The purpose of this study was to extend this literature by exploring whether being raped as an adult is associated with exchanging sex for money. Interviews with 102 rape survivors in a major metropolitan area revealed that 23.5% had engaged in prostitution post-rape. Those who had exchanged sex for money were more likely to be women of color, to have a high school education or less, to be unemployed, and to have children to support, than those who had not engaged in prostitution post-assault. The prostitution subsample also had significantly higher levels of psychological distress, physical health symptomatology, and substance use. Survivors were asked whether and how the rape was associated with engaging in prostitution: most (75%) stated that they felt it was related to the assault. The most commonly cited reason for engaging in prostitution by these survivors was that they were trying to regain some control over their lives and their bodies; exchanging sex for money was seen as one way to control men's access to them. Implications for future research on victimization and prostitution are discussed.
From: Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1117, USA.
Date: December 22, 2003
For Release: Immediately
Contact: HHS Press Office
(202) 690-6343
STATEMENT BY TOMMY G. THOMPSON
Secretary Of Health And Human Services
On the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2003
President Bush on Friday signed important legislation that will authorize more than $200 million across the federal government to combat the practice of human trafficking -- including women and children forced into prostitution. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2003 (TVPRA) renews the U.S. government's commitment to identify and assist victims exploited for labor or sex in the United States and worldwide.
As President Bush declared before the United Nations General Assembly in September, "Nearly two centuries after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and more than a century after slavery was officially ended, the trade in human beings for any purpose must not be allowed to thrive in our time."
The TVPRA is a decisive step toward meeting the President's challenge. It provides fresh resources and initiatives to assist, in particular, the 18,000 - 20,000 victims of human trafficking who are trafficked into the United States every year. It augments the legal tools which can be used against traffickers by empowering victims to bring federal civil suits against traffickers for actual and punitive damages, and by including sex trafficking and forced labor as offenses under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization statute. It also encourages the nation's 21,000 state and local law enforcement agencies to participate in the detection and investigation of human trafficking cases.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has a significant role in implementing the law's victim-centered, compassionate approach to finding and aiding the victims of this modern-day slave trade. HHS is launching a major public awareness campaign, targeted at local officials and service providers most likely to encounter victims, to find, rescue and restore victims to a humane condition of life. HHS welcomes the additional authority this Act provides to assist victims from the moment of detection.
A bedrock principle of this legislation is that victims of trafficking in the U.S. (who likely are not legal aliens and may be involved in illegal practices such as prostitution) are not perpetrators of crime -- they are the victims of crime, and they ought be allowed to rebuild their lives by staying here in the United States.
By signing the reauthorization of the federal human trafficking program, the President is reaffirming his Administration's commitment to end the horror of human trafficking, and to ensure that the real criminals -- the traffickers of innocent people -- are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Note: All HHS press releases, fact sheets and other press materials are available at http://www.hhs.gov/news.
By Peter Landesman
New York Times - January 25, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25SEXTRAFFIC.html?pagewanted=print&position=
The house at 1212 1/2 West Front Street in Plainfield, N.J., is a conventional midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. The house is set back off the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop. On the door of Superior Supermarket was pasted a sign issued by the Plainfield police: ''Safe neighborhoods save lives.'' The store's manager, who refused to tell me his name, said he never noticed anything unusual about the house, and never heard anything. But David Miranda, the young man behind the counter of Westside Convenience, told me he saw girls from the house roughly once a week. ''They came in to buy candy and soda, then went back to the house,'' he said. The same girls rarely came twice, and they were all very young, Miranda said. They never asked for anything beyond what they were purchasing; they certainly never asked for help. Cars drove up to the house all day; nice cars, all kinds of cars. Dozens of men came and went. ''But no one here knew what was really going on,'' Miranda said. And no one ever asked.
On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren't prostitutes; they were sex slaves. The distinction is important: these girls weren't working for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move. ''I consider myself hardened,'' Mark J. Kelly, now a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security), told me recently. ''I spent time in the Marine Corps. But seeing some of the stuff I saw, then heard about, from those girls was a difficult, eye-opening experience.''
The police found a squalid, land-based equivalent of a 19th-century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, ''morning after'' pills and misoprostol, an antiulcer medication that can induce abortion. The girls were pale, exhausted and malnourished.
It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area -- mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago -- where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive. Most of them -- whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America -- are taken to the United States through Mexico. Some of them have been baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; many have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families.
Because of the porousness of the U.S.-Mexico border and the criminal networks that traverse it, the towns and cities along that border have become the main staging area in an illicit and barbaric industry, whose ''products'' are women and girls. On both sides of the border, they are rented out for sex for as little as 15 minutes at a time, dozens of times a day. Sometimes they are sold outright to other traffickers and sex rings, victims and experts say. These sex slaves earn no money, there is nothing voluntary about what they do and if they try to escape they are often beaten and sometimes killed.
Last September, in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, President Bush named sex trafficking as ''a special evil,'' a multibillion-dollar ''underground of brutality and lonely fear,'' a global scourge alongside the AIDS epidemic. Influenced by a coalition of religious organizations, the Bush administration has pushed international action on the global sex trade. The president declared at the U.N. that ''those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished'' and that ''those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.''
Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 -- the first U.S. law to recognize that people trafficked against their will are victims of a crime, not illegal aliens -- the U.S. government rates other countries' records on human trafficking and can apply economic sanctions on those that aren't making efforts to improve them. Another piece of legislation, the Protect Act, which Bush signed into law last year, makes it a crime for any person to enter the U.S., or for any citizen to travel abroad, for the purpose of sex tourism involving children. The sentences are severe: up to 30 years' imprisonment for each offense.
The thrust of the president's U.N. speech and the scope of the laws passed here to address the sex-trafficking epidemic might suggest that this is a global problem but not particularly an American one. In reality, little has been done to document sex trafficking in this country. In dozens of interviews I conducted with former sex slaves, madams, government and law-enforcement officials and anti-sex-trade activists for more than four months in Eastern Europe, Mexico and the United States, the details and breadth of this sordid trade in the U.S. came to light.
In fact, the United States has become a major importer of sex slaves. Last year, the C.I.A. estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 people are trafficked annually into the United States. The government has not studied how many of these are victims of sex traffickers, but Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, America's largest anti-slavery organization, says that the number is at least 10,000 a year. John Miller, the State Department's director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, conceded: ''That figure could be low. What we know is that the number is huge.'' Bales estimates that there are 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in captivity in the United States at any given time. Laura Lederer, a senior State Department adviser on trafficking, told me, ''We're not finding victims in the United States because we're not looking for them.''
ABDUCTION
In Eastern European capitals like Kiev and Moscow, dozens of sex-trafficking rings advertise nanny positions in the United States in local newspapers; others claim to be scouting for models and actresses. In Chisinau, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Moldova -- the poorest country in Europe and the one experts say is most heavily culled by traffickers for young women -- I saw a billboard with a fresh-faced, smiling young woman beckoning girls to waitress positions in Paris. But of course there are no waitress positions and no ''Paris.'' Some of these young women are actually tricked into paying their own travel expenses -- typically around $3,000 -- as a down payment on what they expect to be bright, prosperous futures, only to find themselves kept prisoner in Mexico before being moved to the United States and sold into sexual bondage there.
The Eastern European trafficking operations, from entrapment to transport, tend to be well-oiled monoethnic machines. One notorious Ukrainian ring, which has since been broken up, was run by Tetyana Komisaruk and Serge Mezheritsky. One of their last transactions, according to Daniel Saunders, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, took place in late June 2000 at the Hard Rock Cafe in Tijuana. Around dinnertime, a buyer named Gordey Vinitsky walked in. He was followed shortly after by Komisaruk's husband, Valery, who led Vinitsky out to the parking lot and to a waiting van. Inside the van were six Ukrainian women in their late teens and early 20's. They had been promised jobs as models and baby sitters in the glamorous United States, and they probably had no idea why they were sitting in a van in a backwater like Tijuana in the early evening. Vinitsky pointed into the van at two of the women and said he'd take them for $10,000 each. Valery drove the young women to a gated villa 20 minutes away in Rosarito, a Mexican honky-tonk tourist trap in Baja California. They were kept there until July 4, when they were delivered to San Diego by boat and distributed to their buyers, including Vinitsky, who claimed his two ''purchases.'' The Komisaruks, Mezheritsky and Vinitsky were caught in May 2001 and are serving long sentences in U.S. federal prison.
In October, I met Nicole, a young Russian woman who had been trafficked into Mexico by a different network. ''I wanted to get out of Moscow, and they told me the Mexican border was like a freeway,'' said Nicole, who is now 25. We were sitting at a cafe on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and she was telling me the story of her narrow escape from sex slavery -- she was taken by immigration officers when her traffickers were trying to smuggle her over the border from Tijuana. She still seemed fearful of being discovered by the trafficking ring and didn't want even her initials to appear in print. (Nicole is a name she adopted after coming to the U.S.)
Two years ago, afraid for her life after her boyfriend was gunned down in Moscow in an organized-crime-related shootout, she found herself across a cafe table in Moscow from a man named Alex, who explained how he could save her by smuggling her into the U.S. Once she agreed, Nicole said, Alex told her that if she didn't show up at the airport, '''I'll find you and cut your head off.' Russians do not play around. In Moscow you can get a bullet in your head just for fun.''
Donna M. Hughes, a professor of women's studies at the University of Rhode Island and an expert on sex trafficking, says that prostitution barely existed 12 years ago in the Soviet Union. ''It was suppressed by political structures. All the women had jobs.'' But in the first years after the collapse of Soviet Communism, poverty in the former Soviet states soared. Young women -- many of them college-educated and married -- became easy believers in Hollywood-generated images of swaying palm trees in L.A. ''A few of them have an idea that prostitution might be involved,'' Hughes says. ''But their idea of prostitution is 'Pretty Woman,' which is one of the most popular films in Ukraine and Russia. They're thinking, This may not be so bad.''
The girls' first contacts are usually with what appear to be legitimate travel agencies. According to prosecutors, the Komisaruk/Mezheritsky ring in Ukraine worked with two such agencies in Kiev, Art Life International and Svit Tours. The helpful agents at Svit and Art Life explained to the girls that the best way to get into the U.S. was through Mexico, which they portrayed as a short walk or boat ride from the American dream. Oblivious and full of hope, the girls get on planes to Europe and then on to Mexico.
Every day, flights from Paris, London and Amsterdam arrive at Mexico City's international airport carrying groups of these girls, sometimes as many as seven at a time, according to two Mexico City immigration officers I spoke with (and who asked to remain anonymous). One of them told me that officials at the airport -- who cooperate with Mexico's federal preventive police (P.F.P.) -- work with the traffickers and ''direct airlines to park at certain gates. Officials go to the aircraft. They know the seat numbers. While passengers come off, they take the girls to an office, where officials will 'process' them.''
Magdalena Carral, Mexico's commissioner of the National Institute of Migration, the government agency that controls migration issues at all airports, seaports and land entries into Mexico, told me: ''Everything happens at the airport. We are giving a big fight to have better control of the airport. Corruption does not leave tracks, and sometimes we cannot track it. Six months ago we changed the three main officials at the airport. But it's a daily fight. These networks are very powerful and dangerous.''
ut Mexico is not merely a way station en route to the U.S. for third-country traffickers, like the Eastern European rings. It is also a vast source of even younger and more cheaply acquired girls for sexual servitude in the United States. While European traffickers tend to dupe their victims into boarding one-way flights to Mexico to their own captivity, Mexican traffickers rely on the charm and brute force of ''Los Lenones,'' tightly organized associations of pimps, according to Roberto Caballero, an officer with the P.F.P. Although hundreds of ''popcorn traffickers'' -- individuals who take control of one or two girls -- work the margins, Caballero said, at least 15 major trafficking organizations and 120 associated factions tracked by the P.F.P. operate as wholesalers: collecting human merchandise and taking orders from safe houses and brothels in the major sex-trafficking hubs in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago.
Like the Sicilian Mafia, Los Lenones are based on family hierarchies, Caballero explained. The father controls the organization and the money, while the sons and their male cousins hunt, kidnap and entrap victims. The boys leave school at 12 and are given one or two girls their age to rape and pimp out to begin their training, which emphasizes the arts of kidnapping and seduction. Throughout the rural and suburban towns from southern Mexico to the U.S. border, along what traffickers call the Via Lactea, or Milky Way, the agents of Los Lenones troll the bus stations and factories and school dances where under-age girls gather, work and socialize. They first ply the girls like prospective lovers, buying them meals and desserts, promising affection and then marriage. Then the men describe rumors they've heard about America, about the promise of jobs and schools. Sometimes the girls are easy prey. Most of them already dream of El Norte. But the theater often ends as soon as the agent has the girl alone, when he beats her, drugs her or simply forces her into a waiting car.
The majority of Los Lenones -- 80 percent of them, Caballero says -- are based in Tenancingo, a charmless suburb an hour's drive south of Mexico City. Before I left Mexico City for Tenancingo in October, I was warned by Mexican and U.S. officials that the traffickers there are protected by the local police, and that the town is designed to discourage outsiders, with mazelike streets and only two closely watched entrances. The last time the federal police went there to investigate the disappearance of a local girl, their vehicle was surrounded, and the officers were intimidated into leaving. I traveled in a bulletproof Suburban with well-armed federales and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
On the way, we stopped at a gas station, where I met the parents of a girl from Tenancingo who was reportedly abducted in August 2000. The girl, Suri, is now 20. Her mother told me that there were witnesses who saw her being forced into a car on the way home from work at a local factory. No one called the police. Suri's mother recited the names of daughters of a number of her friends who have also been taken: ''Minerva, Sylvia, Carmen,'' she said in a monotone, as if the list went on and on.
Just two days earlier, her parents heard from Suri (they call her by her nickname) for the first time since she disappeared. ''She's in Queens, New York,'' the mother told me breathlessly. ''She said she was being kept in a house watched by Colombians. She said they take her by car every day to work in a brothel. I was crying on the phone, 'When are you coming back, when are you coming back?' '' The mother looked at me helplessly; the father stared blankly into the distance. Then the mother sobered. ''My daughter said: 'I'm too far away. I don't know when I'm coming back.''' Before she hung up, Suri told her mother: ''Don't cry. I'll escape soon. And don't talk to anyone.''
Sex-trafficking victims widely believe that if they talk, they or someone they love will be killed. And their fear is not unfounded, since the tentacles of the trafficking rings reach back into the girls' hometowns, and local law enforcement is often complicit in the sex trade.
One officer in the P.F.P.'s anti-trafficking division told me that 10 high-level officials in the state of Sonora share a $200,000 weekly payoff from traffickers, a gargantuan sum of money for Mexico. The officer told me with a frozen smile that he was powerless to do anything about it.
''Some officials are not only on the organization's payroll, they are key players in the organization,'' an official at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City told me. ''Corruption is the most important reason these networks are so successful.''
Nicolas Suarez, the P.F.P.'s coordinator of intelligence, sounded fatalistic about corruption when I spoke to him in Mexico City in September. ''We have that cancer, corruption,'' he told me with a shrug. ''But it exists in every country. In every house there is a devil.''
The U.S. Embassy official told me: ''Mexican officials see sex trafficking as a U.S. problem. If there wasn't such a large demand, then people -- trafficking victims and migrants alike -- wouldn't be going up there.''
When I asked Magdalena Carral, the Mexican commissioner of migration, about these accusations, she said that she didn't know anything about Los Lenones or sex trafficking in Tenancingo. But she conceded: ''There is an investigation against some officials accused of cooperating with these trafficking networks nationwide. Sonora is one of those places.'' She added, ''We are determined not to allow any kind of corruption in this administration, not the smallest kind.''
Gary Haugen, president of the International Justice Mission, an organization based in Arlington, Va., that fights sexual exploitation in South Asia and Southeast Asia, says: ''Sex trafficking isn't a poverty issue but a law-enforcement issue. You can only carry out this trade at significant levels with the cooperation of local law enforcement. In the developing world the police are not seen as a solution for anything. You don't run to the police; you run from the police.''
BREAKING THE GIRLS IN
Once the Mexican traffickers abduct or seduce the women and young girls, it's not other men who first indoctrinate them into sexual slavery but other women. The victims and officials I spoke to all emphasized this fact as crucial to the trafficking rings' success. ''Women are the principals,'' Caballero, the Mexican federal preventive police officer, told me. ''The victims are put under the influence of the mothers, who handle them and beat them. Then they give the girls to the men to beat and rape into submission.'' Traffickers understand that because women can more easily gain the trust of young girls, they can more easily crush them. ''Men are the customers and controllers, but within most trafficking organizations themselves, women are the operators,'' Haugen says. ''Women are the ones who exert violent force and psychological torture.''
This mirrors the tactics of the Eastern European rings. ''Mexican pimps have learned a lot from European traffickers,'' said Claudia, a former prostitute and madam in her late 40's, whom I met in Tepito, Mexico City's vast and lethal ghetto. ''The Europeans not only gather girls but put older women in the same houses,'' she told me. ''They get younger and older women emotionally attached. They're transported together, survive together.''
The traffickers' harvest is innocence. Before young women and girls are taken to the United States, their captors want to obliterate their sexual inexperience while preserving its appearance. For the Eastern European girls, this ''preparation'' generally happens in Ensenada, a seaside tourist town in Baja California, a region in Mexico settled by Russian immigrants, or Tijuana, where Nicole, the Russian woman I met in Los Angeles, was taken along with four other girls when she arrived in Mexico. The young women are typically kept in locked-down, gated villas in groups of 16 to 20. The girls are provided with all-American clothing -- Levi's and baseball caps. They learn to say, ''U.S. citizen.'' They are also sexually brutalized. Nicole told me that the day she arrived in Tijuana, three of her traveling companions were ''tried out'' locally. The education lasts for days and sometimes weeks.
For the Mexican girls abducted by Los Lenones, the process of breaking them in often begins on Calle Santo Tomas, a filthy narrow street in La Merced, a dangerous and raucous ghetto in Mexico City. Santo Tomas has been a place for low-end prostitution since before Spain's conquest of Mexico in the 16th century. But beginning in the early 90's, it became an important training ground for under-age girls and young women on their way into sexual bondage in the United States. When I first visited Santo Tomas, in late September, I found 150 young women walking a slow-motion parabola among 300 or 400 men. It was a balmy night, and the air was heavy with the smell of barbecue and gasoline. Two dead dogs were splayed over the curb just beyond where the girls struck casual poses in stilettos and spray-on-tight neon vinyl and satin or skimpy leopard-patterned outfits. Some of the girls looked as young as 12. Their faces betrayed no emotion. Many wore pendants of the grim reaper around their necks and made hissing sounds; this, I was told, was part of a ritual to ward off bad energy. The men, who were there to rent or just gaze, didn't speak. From the tables of a shabby cafe midblock, other men -- also Mexicans, but more neatly dressed -- sat scrutinizing the girls as at an auction. These were buyers and renters with an interest in the youngest and best looking. They nodded to the girls they wanted and then followed them past a guard in a Yankees baseball cap through a tin doorway.
Inside, the girls braced the men before a statue of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and patted them down for weapons. Then the girls genuflected to the stone-faced saint and led the men to the back, grabbing a condom and roll of toilet paper on the way. They pointed to a block of ice in a tub in lieu of a urinal. Beyond a blue hallway the air went sour, like old onions; there were 30 stalls curtained off by blue fabric, every one in use. Fifteen minutes of straightforward intercourse with the girl's clothes left on cost 50 pesos, or about $4.50. For $4.50 more, the dress was lifted. For another $4.50, the bra would be taken off. Oral sex was $4.50; ''acrobatic positions'' were $1.80 each. Despite the dozens of people and the various exertions in this room, there were only the sounds of zippers and shoes. There was no human noise at all.
Most of the girls on Santo Tomas would have sex with 20 to 30 men a day; they would do this seven days a week usually for weeks but sometimes for months before they were ''ready'' for the United States. If they refused, they would be beaten and sometimes killed. They would be told that if they tried to escape, one of their family members, who usually had no idea where they were, would be beaten or killed. Working at the brutalizing pace of 20 men per day, a girl could earn her captors as much as $2,000 a week. In the U.S., that same girl could bring in perhaps $30,000 per week.
In Europe, girls and women trafficked for the sex trade gain in value the closer they get to their destinations. According to Iana Matei, who operates Reaching Out, a Romanian rescue organization, a Romanian or Moldovan girl can be sold to her first transporter -- who she may or may not know has taken her captive -- for as little as $60, then for $500 to the next. Eventually she can be sold for $2,500 to the organization that will ultimately control and rent her for sex for tens of thousands of dollars a week. (Though the Moldovan and Romanian organizations typically smuggle girls to Western Europe and not the United States, they are, Matei says, closely allied with Russian and Ukrainian networks that do.)
Jonathan M. Winer, deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration, says, ''The girls are worth a penny or a ruble in their home village, and suddenly they're worth hundreds and thousands somewhere else.''
CROSSING THE BORDER
In November, I followed by helicopter the 12-foot-high sheet-metal fence that represents the U.S.-Mexico boundary from Imperial Beach, Calif., south of San Diego, 14 miles across the gritty warrens and havoc of Tijuana into the barren hills of Tecate. The fence drops off abruptly at Colonia Nido de las Aguilas, a dry riverbed that straddles the border. Four hundred square miles of bone-dry, barren hills stretch out on the U.S. side. I hovered over the end of the fence with Lester McDaniel, a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On the U.S. side, ''J-e-s-u-s'' was spelled out in rocks 10 feet high across a steep hillside. A 15-foot white wooden cross rose from the peak. It is here that thousands of girls and young women -- most of them Mexican and many of them straight from Calle Santo Tomas -- are taken every year, mostly between January and August, the dry season. Coyotes -- or smugglers -- subcontracted exclusively by sex traffickers sometimes trudge the girls up to the cross and let them pray, then herd them into the hills northward.
A few miles east, we picked up a deeply grooved trail at the fence and followed it for miles into the hills until it plunged into a deep isolated ravine called Cottonwood Canyon. A Ukrainian sex-trafficking ring force-marches young women through here, McDaniel told me. In high heels and seductive clothing, the young women trek 12 miles to Highway 94, where panel trucks sit waiting. McDaniel listed the perils: rattlesnakes, dehydration and hypothermia. He failed to mention the traffickers' bullets should the women try to escape.
''If a girl tries to run, she's killed and becomes just one more woman in the desert,'' says Marisa B. Ugarte, director of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition, a San Diego organization that coordinates rescue efforts for trafficking victims on both sides of the border. ''But if she keeps going north, she reaches the Gates of Hell.''
One girl who was trafficked back and forth across that border repeatedly was Andrea. ''Andrea'' is just one name she was given by her traffickers and clients; she doesn't know her real name. She was born in the United States and sold or abandoned here -- at about 4 years old, she says -- by a woman who may have been her mother. (She is now in her early to mid-20's; she doesn't know for sure.) She says that she spent approximately the next 12 years as the captive of a sex-trafficking ring that operated on both sides of the Mexican border. Because of the threat of retribution from her former captors, who are believed to be still at large, an organization that rescues and counsels trafficking victims and former prostitutes arranged for me to meet Andrea in October at a secret location in the United States.
In a series of excruciating conversations, Andrea explained to me how the trafficking ring that kept her worked, moving young girls (and boys too) back and forth over the border, selling nights and weekends with them mostly to American men. She said that the ring imported -- both through abduction and outright purchase -- toddlers, children and teenagers into the U.S. from many countries.
''The border is very busy, lots of stuff moving back and forth,'' she said. ''Say you needed to get some kids. This guy would offer a woman a lot of money, and she'd take birth certificates from the U.S. -- from Puerto Rican children or darker-skinned children -- and then she would go into Mexico through Tijuana. Then she'd drive to Juarez'' -- across the Mexican border from El Paso, Tex. -- ''and then they'd go shopping. I was taken with them once. We went to this house that had a goat in the front yard and came out with a 4-year-old boy.'' She remembers the boy costing around $500 (she said that many poor parents were told that their children would go to adoption agencies and on to better lives in America). ''When we crossed the border at Juarez, all the border guards wanted to see was a birth certificate for the dark-skinned kids.''
Andrea continued: ''There would be a truck waiting for us at the Mexico border, and those trucks you don't want to ride in. Those trucks are closed. They had spots where there would be transfers, the rest stops and truck stops on the freeways in the U.S. One person would walk you into the bathroom, and then another person would take you out of the bathroom and take you to a different vehicle.''
Andrea told me she was transported to Juarez dozens of times. During one visit, when she was about 7 years old, the trafficker took her to the Radisson Casa Grande Hotel, where there was a john waiting in a room. The john was an older American man, and he read Bible passages to her before and after having sex with her. Andrea described other rooms she remembered in other hotels in Mexico: the Howard Johnson in Leon, the Crowne Plaza in Guadalajara. She remembers most of all the ceiling patterns. ''When I was taken to Mexico, I knew things were going to be different,'' she said. The ''customers'' were American businessmen. ''The men who went there had higher positions, had more to lose if they were caught doing these things on the other side of the border. I was told my purpose was to keep these men from abusing their own kids.'' Later she told me: ''The white kids you could beat but you couldn't mark. But with Mexican kids you could do whatever you wanted. They're untraceable. You lose nothing by killing them.''
Then she and the other children and teenagers in this cell were walked back across the border to El Paso by the traffickers. ''The border guards talked to you like, 'Did you have fun in Mexico?' And you answered exactly what you were told, 'Yeah, I had fun.' 'Runners' moved the harder-to-place kids, the darker or not-quite-as-well-behaved kids, kids that hadn't been broken yet.''
Another trafficking victim I met, a young woman named Montserrat, was taken to the United States from Veracruz, Mexico, six years ago, at age 13. (Montserrat is her nickname.) ''I was going to work in America,'' she told me. ''I wanted to go to school there, have an apartment and a red Mercedes Benz.'' Montserrat's trafficker, who called himself Alejandro, took her to Sonora, across the Mexican border from Douglas, Ariz., where she joined a group of a dozen other teenage girls, all with the same dream of a better life. They were from Chiapas, Guatemala, Oaxaca -- everywhere, she said.
The group was marched 12 hours through the desert, just a few of the thousands of Mexicans who bolted for America that night along the 2,000 miles of border. Cars were waiting at a fixed spot on the other side. Alejandro directed her to a Nissan and drove her and a few others to a house she said she thought was in Phoenix, the home of a white American family. ''It looked like America,'' she told me. ''I ate chicken. The family ignored me, watched TV. I thought the worst part was behind me.''
IN THE UNITED STATES: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
A week after Montserrat was taken across the border, she said, she and half a dozen other girls were loaded into a windowless van. ''Alejandro dropped off girls at gas stations as we drove, wherever there were minimarkets,'' Montserrat told me. At each drop-off there was somebody waiting. Sometimes a girl would be escorted to the bathroom, never to return to the van. They drove 24 hours a day. ''As the girls were leaving, being let out the back, all of them 14 or 15 years old, I felt confident,'' Montserrat said. We were talking in Mexico City, where she has been since she escaped from her trafficker four years ago. She's now 19, and shy with her body but direct with her gaze, which is flat and unemotional. ''I didn't know the real reason they were disappearing,'' she said. ''They were going to a better life.''
Eventually, only Montserrat and one other girl remained. Outside, the air had turned frigid, and there was snow on the ground. It was night when the van stopped at a gas station. A man was waiting. Montserrat's friend hopped out the back, gleeful. ''She said goodbye, I'll see you tomorrow,'' Montserrat recalled. ''I never saw her again.''
After leaving the gas station, Alejandro drove Montserrat to an apartment. A couple of weeks later he took her to a Dollarstore. ''He bought me makeup,'' Montserrat told me. ''He chose a short dress and a halter top, both black. I asked him why the clothes. He said it was for a party the owner of the apartment was having. He bought me underwear. Then I started to worry.'' When they arrived at the apartment, Alejandro left, saying he was coming back. But another man appeared at the door. ''The man said he'd already paid and I had to do whatever he said,'' Montserrat said. ''When he said he already paid, I knew why I was there. I was crushed.''
Montserrat said that she didn't leave that apartment for the next three months, then for nine months after that, Alejandro regularly took her in and out of the apartment for appointments with various johns.
Sex trafficking is one of the few human rights violations that rely on exposure: victims have to be available, displayed, delivered and returned. Girls were shuttled in open cars between the Plainfield, N.J., stash house and other locations in northern New Jersey like Elizabeth and Union City. Suri told her mother that she was being driven in a black town car -- just one of hundreds of black town cars traversing New York City at any time -- from her stash house in Queens to places where she was forced to have sex. A Russian ring drove women between various Brooklyn apartments and strip clubs in New Jersey. Andrea named trading hubs at highway rest stops in Deming, N.M.; Kingman, Ariz.; Boulder City, Nev.; and Glendale, Calif. Glendale, Andrea said, was a fork in the road; from there, vehicles went either north to San Jose or south toward San Diego. The traffickers drugged them for travel, she said. ''When they fed you, you started falling asleep.''
In the past several months, I have visited a number of addresses where trafficked girls and young women have reportedly ended up: besides the house in Plainfield, N.J., there is a row house on 51st Avenue in the Corona section of Queens, which has been identified to Mexican federal preventive police by escaped trafficking victims. There is the apartment at Barrington Plaza in the tony Westwood section of Los Angeles, one place that some of the Komisaruk/Mezheritsky ring's trafficking victims ended up, according to Daniel Saunders, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the ring. And there's a house on Massachusetts Avenue in Vista, Calif., a San Diego suburb, which was pointed out to me by a San Diego sheriff. These places all have at least one thing in common: they are camouflaged by their normal, middle-class surroundings.
''This is not narco-traffic secrecy,'' says Sharon B. Cohn, director of anti-trafficking operations for the International Justice Mission. ''These are not people kidnapped and held for ransom, but women and children sold every single day. If they're hidden, their keepers don't make money.''
I.J.M.'s president, Gary Haugen, says: ''It's the easiest kind of crime in the world to spot. Men look for it all day, every day.''
But border agents and local policemen usually don't know trafficking when they see it. The operating assumption among American police departments is that women who sell their bodies do so by choice, and undocumented foreign women who sell their bodies are not only prostitutes (that is, voluntary sex workers) but also trespassers on U.S. soil. No Department of Justice attorney or police vice squad officer I spoke with in Los Angeles -- one of the country's busiest thoroughfares for forced sex traffic -- considers sex trafficking in the U.S. a serious problem, or a priority. A teenage girl arrested on Sunset Strip for solicitation, or a group of Russian sex workers arrested in a brothel raid in the San Fernando Valley, are automatically heaped onto a pile of workaday vice arrests.
The U.S. now offers 5,000 visas a year to trafficking victims to allow them to apply for residency. And there's faint hope among sex-trafficking experts that the Bush administration's recent proposal on Mexican immigration, if enacted, could have some positive effect on sex traffic into the U.S., by sheltering potential witnesses. ''If illegal immigrants who have information about victims have a chance at legal status in this country, they might feel secure enough to come forward,'' says John Miller of the State Department. But ambiguities still dominate on the front lines -- the borders and the streets of urban America -- where sex trafficking will always look a lot like prostitution.
''It's not a particularly complicated thing,'' says Sharon Cohn of International Justice Mission. ''Sex trafficking gets thrown into issues of intimacy and vice, but it's a major crime. It's purely profit and pleasure, and greed and lust, and it's right under homicide.''
IMPRISONMENT AND SUBMISSION
The basement, Andrea said, held as many as 16 children and teenagers of different ethnicities. She remembers that it was underneath a house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood on the West Coast. Throughout much of her captivity, this basement was where she was kept when she wasn't working. ''There was lots of scrawling on the walls,'' she said. ''The other kids drew stick figures, daisies, teddy bears. This Mexican boy would draw a house with sunshine. We each had a mat.''
Andrea paused. ''But nothing happens to you in the basement,'' she continued. ''You just had to worry about when the door opened.''
She explained: ''They would call you out of the basement, and you'd get a bath and you'd get a dress, and if your dress was yellow you were probably going to Disneyland.'' She said they used color coding to make transactions safer for the traffickers and the clients. ''At Disneyland there would be people doing drop-offs and pickups for kids. It's a big open area full of kids, and nobody pays attention to nobody. They would kind of quietly say, 'Go over to that person,' and you would just slip your hand into theirs and say, 'I was looking for you, Daddy.' Then that person would move off with one or two or three of us.''
Her account reminded me -- painfully -- of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. In the story, a piper shows up and asks for 1,000 guilders for ridding the town of a plague of rats. Playing his pipe, he lures all the rats into the River Weser, where they drown. But Hamelin's mayor refuses to pay him. The piper goes back into the streets and again starts to play his music. This time ''all the little boys and girls, with rosy cheeks and flaxen curls, and sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls'' follow him out of town and into the hills. The piper leads the children to a mountainside, where a portal opens. The children follow him in, the cave closes and Hamelin's children -- all but one, too lame to keep up -- are never seen again.
Montserrat said that she was moved around a lot and often didn't know where she was. She recalled that she was in Detroit for two months before she realized that she was in ''the city where cars are made,'' because the door to the apartment Alejandro kept her in was locked from the outside. She says she was forced to service at least two men a night, and sometimes more. She watched through the windows as neighborhood children played outside. Emotionally, she slowly dissolved. Later, Alejandro moved her to Portland, Ore., where once a week he worked her out of a strip club. In all that time she had exactly one night off; Alejandro took her to see ''Scary Movie 2.''
All the girls I spoke to said that their captors were both psychologically and physically abusive. Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist's patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners -- toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens -- as well as what she called a ''damage group.'' ''In the damage group they can hit you or do anything they wanted,'' she explained. ''Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it's always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.
''They'd get you hungry then to train you'' to have oral sex, she said. ''They'd put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older I'd teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn't hurt.''
Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves says: ''The physical path of a person being trafficked includes stages of degradation of a person's mental state. A victim gets deprived of food, gets hungry, a little dizzy and sleep-deprived. She begins to break down; she can't think for herself. Then take away her travel documents, and you've made her stateless. Then layer on physical violence, and she begins to follow orders. Then add a foreign culture and language, and she's trapped.''
Then add one more layer: a sex-trafficking victim's belief that her family is being tracked as collateral for her body. All sex-trafficking operations, whether Mexican, Ukrainian or Thai, are vast criminal underworlds with roots and branches that reach back to the countries, towns and neighborhoods of their victims.
''There's a vast misunderstanding of what coercion is, of how little it takes to make someone a slave,'' Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission said. ''The destruction of dignity and sense of self, these girls' sense of resignation. . . . '' He didn't finish the sentence.
In Tijuana in November, I met with Mamacita, a Mexican trafficking-victim-turned-madam, who used to oversee a stash house for sex slaves in San Diego. Mamacita (who goes by a nickname) was full of regret and worry. She left San Diego three years ago, but she says that the trafficking ring, run by three violent Mexican brothers, is still in operation. ''The girls can't leave,'' Mamacita said. ''They're always being watched. They lock them into apartments. The fear is unbelievable. They can't talk to anyone. They are always hungry, pale, always shaking and cold. But they never complain. If they do, they'll be beaten or killed.''
In Vista, Calif., I followed a pickup truck driven by a San Diego sheriff's deputy named Rick Castro. We wound past a tidy suburban downtown, a supermall and the usual hometown franchises. We stopped alongside the San Luis Rey River, across the street from a Baptist church, a strawberry farm and a municipal ballfield.
A neat subdivision and cycling path ran along the opposite bank. The San Luis Rey was mostly dry, filled now with an impenetrable jungle of 15-foot-high bamboolike reeds. As Castro and I started down a well-worn path into the thicket, he told me about the time he first heard about this place, in October 2001. A local health care worker had heard rumors about Mexican immigrants using the reeds for sex and came down to offer condoms and advice. She found more than 400 men and 50 young women between 12 and 15 dressed in tight clothing and high heels. There was a separate group of a dozen girls no more than 11 or 12 wearing white communion dresses. ''The girls huddled in a circle for protection,'' Castro told me, ''and had big eyes like terrified deer.''
I followed Castro into the riverbed, and only 50 yards from the road we found a confounding warren of more than 30 roomlike caves carved into the reeds. It was a sunny morning, but the light in there was refracted, dreary and basementlike. The ground in each was a squalid nest of mud, tamped leaves, condom wrappers, clumps of toilet paper and magazines. Soiled underwear was strewn here and there, plastic garbage bags jury-rigged through the reeds in lieu of walls. One of the caves' inhabitants had hung old CD's on the tips of branches, like Christmas ornaments. It looked vaguely like a recent massacre site. It was 8 in the morning, but the girls could begin arriving any minute. Castro told me how it works: the girls are dropped off at the ballfield, then herded through a drainage sluice under the road into the riverbed. Vans shuttle the men from a 7-Eleven a mile away. The girls are forced to turn 15 tricks in five hours in the mud. The johns pay $15 and get 10 minutes. It is in nearly every respect a perfect extension of Calle Santo Tomas in Mexico City. Except that this is what some of those girls are training for.
If anything, the women I talked to said that the sex in the U.S. is even rougher than what the girls face on Calle Santo Tomas. Rosario, a woman I met in Mexico City, who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years, said: ''In America we had 'special jobs.' Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.'' She said that she believed younger foreign girls were in demand in the U.S. because of an increased appetite for more aggressive, dangerous sex. Traffickers need younger and younger girls, she suggested, simply because they are more pliable. In Eastern Europe, too, the typical age of sex-trafficking victims is plummeting; according to Matei of Reaching Out, while most girls used to be in their late teens and 20's, 13-year-olds are now far from unusual.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., are finding that when it comes to sex, what was once considered abnormal is now the norm. They are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. ''We've become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit,'' says I.C.E. Special Agent Perry Woo. Cybernetworks like KaZaA and Morpheus / through which you can download and trade images and videos -- have become the Mexican border of virtual sexual exploitation. I had heard of one Web site that supposedly offered sex slaves for purchase to individuals. The I.C.E. agents hadn't heard of it. Special Agent Don Daufenbach, I.C.E.'s manager for undercover operations, brought it up on a screen. A hush came over the room as the agents leaned forward, clearly disturbed. ''That sure looks like the real thing,'' Daufenbach said. There were streams of Web pages of thumbnail images of young women of every ethnicity in obvious distress, bound, gagged, contorted. The agents in the room pointed out probable injuries from torture. Cyberauctions for some of the women were in progress; one had exceeded $300,000. ''With new Internet technology,'' Woo said, ''pornography is becoming more pervasive. With Web cams we're seeing more live molestation of children.'' One of I.C.E.'s recent successes, Operation Hamlet, broke up a ring of adults who traded images and videos of themselves forcing sex on their own young children.
But the supply of cheap girls and young women to feed the global appetite appears to be limitless. And it's possible that the crimes committed against them in the U.S. cut deeper than elsewhere, precisely because so many of them are snared by the glittery promise of an America that turns out to be not their salvation but their place of destruction.
ENDGAME
Typically, a young trafficking victim in the U.S. lasts in the system for two to four years. After that, Bales says: ''She may be killed in the brothel. She may be dumped and deported. Probably least likely is that she will take part in the prosecution of the people that enslaved her.''
Who can expect a young woman trafficked into the U.S., trapped in a foreign culture, perhaps unable to speak English, physically and emotionally abused and perhaps drug-addicted, to ask for help from a police officer, who more likely than not will look at her as a criminal and an illegal alien? Even Andrea, who was born in the United States and spoke English, says she never thought of escaping, ''because what's out there? What's out there was scarier. We had customers who were police, so you were not going to go talk to a cop. We had this customer from Nevada who was a child psychologist, so you're not going to go talk to a social worker. So who are you going to talk to?''
And if the girls are lucky enough to escape, there's often nowhere for them to go. ''The families don't want them back,'' Sister Veronica, a nun who helps run a rescue mission for trafficked prostitutes in an old church in Mexico City, told me. ''They're shunned.''
When I first met her, Andrea told me: ''We're way too damaged to give back. A lot of these children never wanted to see their parents again after a while, because what do you tell your parents? What are you going to say? You're no good.''
Peter Landesman is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about illegal weapons trafficking.
NIH director defends funds for criticized sex
research
By Robert Stacy McCain
The Washington Times - January 30, 2004
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20040129-112152-7324r.htm
The director of the National Institutes of Health said his agency will continue to fund sex research, including studies involving pornography and prostitution that have been criticized by House Republicans.
"I fully support NIH's continued investment in research on human sexuality," Dr. Elia A. Zerhouni wrote in a letter to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, that bypassed the Republican committee chairmen who oversee the agency.
The director's letter reported on NIH's "comprehensive review" covering several projects criticized by congressional Republicans and conservative activists.
Those projects included a $147,000 Northwestern University study that paid women to watch pornography, another that studied prostitutes at truck stops and one that examined "two-spirited" transvestites in American Indian cultures.
The letter to Mr. Kennedy echoed Dr. Zerhouni's remarks earlier this month to an agency advisory committee. "When we looked at the public health relevance, there was no question that these projects should have been funded and should continue to be funded," the director told the NIH panel, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Critics say the NIH sex studies divert federal tax dollars from potentially life-saving research. Rep. Mark Souder, Indiana Republican, called Dr. Zerhouni's defense of the projects "an unbelievable rationalization."
"Do I need a Ph.D. to understand why it is a sensible prioritization to spend hundreds of thousands of research dollars to pay women to watch porn, while countless Americans are suffering from dehabilitating diseases with no cures?" Mr. Souder said in a statement.
The NIH director said he is "initiating discussions ... to ensure that this research is better presented to the public so that they may understand the relevance of this research to public health and that it is prioritized appropriately."
The battle over taxpayer-funded sex research has escalated steadily in Congress over the past year. In July, the House rejected in a 212-210 vote a measure sponsored by Rep. Patrick J. Toomey, Pennsylvania Republican, that would have eliminated federal funding for five sex studies.
Democrats have defended the research. Rep. Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, accused Republicans of "scientific McCarthyism" for questioning the sex studies. "Imposing ideological shackles on this research would be a serious public health mistake," Mr. Waxman wrote in an October letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, whose department includes NIH.
Although Dr. Zerhouni's letter to Mr. Kennedy outlined various sexual research projects, it did not specifically address the project most often cited by critics of NIH sex research: Northwestern University psychology professor J. Michael Bailey's study that paid female subjects as much as $75 each to "watch a series of commercially available film clips, some of which will be sexually explicit" in order to monitor their body's sexual arousal.
Rep. Dave Weldon, Florida Republican, condemned as "disgusting" the NIH decision to fund the Bailey study.
In November, Northwestern announced an ethics investigation of Mr. Bailey, who has been accused of violating federal law by failing to obtain consent from subjects used in research for his recent book, "The Man Who Would Be Queen."
One of the complainants in the ethics probe -- described under the pseudonym "Juanita" in Mr. Bailey's book -- consulted the professor in 1996 to obtain psychological approval for sex-change surgery. "Juanita" filed an affidavit with the university saying that two years after undergoing the surgery, she had sex with the professor. His book subsequently cited her behavior as validating Mr. Bailey's theories of sexuality.
NIH is "clueless" for defending Mr. Bailey, said University of Michigan professor Lynn Conway.
"Taxpayer money is not just being wasted in sex research at Northwestern University -- it's being used to exploit and defame transsexual women in the name of science," said Ms. Conway, a pioneering computer scientist who was born male and underwent sex-change surgery in 1968.
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