The author of “The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade” sounds off on the pleasure-seekers that make trafficking possible
Victor Malarek, 57, is an investigative journalist for Canadian CTV’s current affairs show “W-5.” In 1997 he was named Canada’s top broadcast journalist for his work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
His latest book, “The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade,” about the trafficking of Eastern European women, was published in 2003 and has since been released in 12 countries in seven languages.
Malarek was in Kyiv recently to promote the Ukrainian edition of his book, which has been distributed free to libraries, schools and orphanages.
The Post met with him on June 19.
KP: I experienced a bit of shock reading all the horrifying stories you included in “The Natashas.”
VM: It is meant to be shocking. At first, I was trying to be a dispassionate objective reporter, and when I went to Kosovo and saw what was going on, I got so pissed off. And so I decided you cannot be objective about rape, and I took the gloves off. I wrote a book that I wanted people to be shocked at, because what is happening there is shocking.
When I first started out, I never believed there were so many girls. I thought that maybe it was an exaggeration. But when I started to hit the streets in different cities throughout Italy, Austria, Germany, France, and Israel, I couldn’t believe it. You are talking about thousands of girls, and all of them are Eastern European – Ukrainian, Romanian, Moldovan, Russian, Lithuanian, and Estonian.
Even in Canada, we have these tabloids, and, say, ten years ago, there only used to be one sex page on the back. Now it’s five pages, with two of the pages advertising Ukrainian and Russian girls.
The first places I chose to go were Bosnia and Kosovo, and the numbers of brothels and the numbers of peacekeepers and UN aid workers using these girls shocked me.
The next place I went, bizarrely enough, was Israel, a country where the law simply states “no brothels.” And in Tel Aviv alone there are up to 280 brothels, and the chief prosecutor tells the police, “Leave them alone, they are not bothering anybody.” [It’s] a secure country filled with Ukrainian, Russian, or Romanian girls, up to 5,000 [of them], depending on the year.
So once I started looking into it, I knew that the story was bigger. I realized that these girls are showing up everywhere. I could have made a book double the size just on anecdotes from every different country.
KP: How do you explain that trafficking is still taking place, despite apparent general awareness? Why do people still believe the ads offering lucrative jobs abroad that require little or no experience?
VM: Now they’re switching to different ways of doing it. They are using friends, contacts, or even career days in schools or universities.
People keep arguing with me that there is so much information out there, you’d think that people would know. But the reality is that desperation and destitution lead people to want to believe.
Another thing that is being used a lot is marriage proposals, so that on your honeymoon you discover that you are a prostitute. There are a lot of strange things happening to young women who happen to fall for whatever the line is. And it hasn’t stopped. The number is still very large.
Most of these girls are recruited when they are 14, 15, 16. What do you know about life then, what do you know about anything? That is when you are most impressionable. Studies have also shown that many of the girls out on the streets are orphans. They are the ones who are most vulnerable of all.
KP: What was the single most shocking experience during your investigation?
VM: Probably doing the raid in Kosovo, when we pulled the girls – three Moldovans and two Romanians – out [of the brothel]. They looked like prostitutes – cheaply dressed, makeup and everything.
I had gone to another area of the police station to talk to some people, and when I walked in, the police officer, an Italian woman, had gotten them into regular clothes. First, I thought I came to the wrong room. I asked her, “Where are the girls we just got?” and she said, “It was them.”
That’s when I saw my daughter and her friends. I just couldn’t believe they were servicing 10, 15, 25 soldiers a day. I kept looking at their faces and their eyes, and thought “This is too much to believe.”
When I interviewed one of the young girls, who had cigarette butt burns all over the backs of her arms, she just sat there in a catatonic state, staring at a little teddy bear in her hands. Then I saw her passport. It had this nice fresh face of the “I am going to see the world” kind.
Six months later she looked like a completely destroyed person.
KP: What is your attitude towards men who use those girls’ services? Did it change after you wrote your book?
VM: It has changed dramatically. I do not think any man has the right, just because he has money in his pocket, to buy sexual services off of a woman and not ask her a question. Many times I’ve talked to rescued girls and they wanted out of it. They simply asked to use a cell phone to call home, someone to rescue them. But those men were like “Oh, I am not giving you anything.” And they simply stayed and stayed.
Men think they can give $100 and then walk out, and not ask a single question, even though a girl may be tied to a bed. Sex parlors with sadomasochism are all over Germany, the Netherlands and Australia, where prostitution is legal.
The kind of abuse that is happening there, these men do it there day and night, without asking questions. I think you have to look at these young women and ask why are they here – because they want to be here? Who’s controlling them? You see that big thug of a pimp at the brothel’s doors, and you think those girls really want to be there? And you look at them when you first see them and see the fear in their eyes.
KP: You mention in your book an 18-year-old girl from Odessa whose virginity was auctioned off through e-Bay. What happened to her?
VM: She was won by a guy called Dani from Paris. I guess he got his wish.
You look at a guy who is bidding for a virgin, and what does he think? That the girl thinks, “I want some jackass, some fat pig from who cares where to be the first to have sex with me.” That was shocking.
A lot of this has pissed me off because I am of Ukrainian background as well, and I am very proud of my roots. And to see that numbers of Ukrainian girls are trafficked, and there is no one standing up and fighting for them. And I hear people say, “They are nothing but a bunch of whores.” They are not.
KP: With the removal of visa requirements for EU citizens, do you see Ukraine becoming a major sex tourism destination?
VM: This is already a favored destination. You can see it on the Internet. “Beautiful girls, not like Western ones, they don’t question anything.” Well, Ukrainian women are gorgeous, beautiful, but are they sex objects? Is that all they are good for?
If you gave 90 percent of these beautiful, gorgeous women a job, they would never take their clothes off for these slobs. It must be absolutely disgusting to be penetrated by a big, fat, greasy, hairy slob on Viagra, who happens to be 60 years old.
I have seen, in so many cities, walking down the streets, these ugly fat American, Canadian, German, Austrian and Japanese men with girls that should be their granddaughters. And they freaking well know that this isn’t proper, but sometimes I think they did something bad when they invented Viagra.
This is when I say to the local government “You have got to do something.” You cannot have the reputation around the world that Ukrainian women are easy targets and they are nothing but prostitutes. Because the reputation is out there now.
We are very proud of the Orange Revolution, we are very proud that Ukraine has got on the map. But Ukraine is also on the map very largely within the Internet, on probably what is the most important thing for the entire Internet – porn.
My argument is we shouldn’t – as Western nations – be moving foreign girls for abuse, and the reason why they’re foreign girls is that local girls have jobs and won’t do this. So, this is a form of the racism. It is the racism. Period.
But internally, that is when the local government has to turn around and say “What is the problem here? The problem is economic and how we can solve it?” You don’t solve it by allowing girls to be raped and raped and raped, or trying to convince them that the only thing they are good for is sex.
You are talking here about a huge disaster health-wise, because the girls come back not only with HIV or sexually transmitted diseases, but also with huge psychological problems. So many of the girls commit suicide. They are not human beings anymore, and everybody in their village knows who they are and calls them a whore.
KP: How do you solve the problem of trafficking?
VM: I know one thing: maybe you will never be able to turns the minds of men around. But once women have real jobs, you will find that the majority will say no to this. They will work in McDonald’s before they will take off their clothes. If there is no McDonald’s and no job, what do you want them to do? Start – they are easy targets at that point.
But if you up go to the majority of women trafficked out of Ukraine, Moldova or Romania, who are on the streets of Venice, Rome or Athens, you will find that the vast majority of them want to escape. And it’s the governments’ responsibility to rescue them, but for them prostitutes are not a priority.
