THE NATASHAS - THE NEW GLOBAL SEX TRADE
Victor Malarek interviewed by Claudette Vaughan

Award winning journalist, Victor Malarek speaks to the Abolitionist-Online about the global trafficking of women and girls from Eastern Europe and the newly independent states. In The Natashas, Victor Malarek details the tragic lives of individual women and girls ensnared in the most recent wave of this brutal trade. With up to two million people globally trafficked into the sex trade every year, the buying and selling of human flesh is organised crime’s fastest-growing business. Here is our interview with him.

Victor Malarek: I had heard about young women being trafficked but I didn’t know much about it. Much of my work as an investigative reporter over 30 years has been in the area of children’s rights, the rights of women and the rights of senior citizens particularly battered women and senior citizens who were being abused and children who live in the state system who happen to find themselves in situations way beyond their control and then turn and be abused by the system. So this has been a long history with me.

Abolitionist: What did you find when you were researching the book? What did you witness out there?

Victor Malarek: I was actually quite shocked, appalled and horrified by what I found. I had read a few little stories here and there about what was going on and I thought well, maybe it’s a little bit exaggerated. When I got out there to Kosavo and Bosnia and had seen what was happening with young women who were being trafficked to service Peacekeepers it just threw me for a loop. When I got into places like Israel, Germany, Italy and Greece and saw the numbers of young women from foreign countries servicing local and sex tourists, I couldn’t believe it. The numbers were huge and I know in my heart of hearts that young women, teenage girls they didn’t come up with this idea that, “Hey when I grow up or when I’m 14 or 15 or 16 or 18 geez, I’d love to be a prostitute and service all these men and turn all my money over to these pimps.”

Abolitionist: What kind of age ranges did you find working in the sex trade, Victor?

Victor Malarek: I encountered everything from 14 years old to about 26-28. I didn’t see very many women beyond 28 years old. But most of them are in their teens, straight out of high school. What was quite shocking about that was here they are, some of them get a passport and get their pictures taken and they are so happy. They are going to see the world and it’s just this beautiful face but 3, 4, 5, 6 months later when they are rescued or manage to run away, they look as if they escaped out of hell. It was quite devastating!

Abolitionist: What level of violence from what type of men are these women forced to deal with? Is it the ordinary type or the usual pimps and low-lifes or is it organised Mafia-style?

Victor Malarek: You have everything involved here. There’s the large time and the small-time criminal to just ordinary people who kidnap these women off the streets and who have managed to lure them into their web. We are dealing with quite violent men and they bring them to places like, out of sight, out of mind – what I call “breaking grounds” – where they supposingly season them. They beat them, they torture them, they threaten them constantly within an inch of their lives. They beat up girls in front of each other so young women know that if they ever try to escape or if they ever try to say, “I’m not going to do this”, then they pay heavily.

Abolitionist: How do these young women and girls cope if they fall pregnant?

Victor Malarek: When they fall pregnant, they are used right up until about their 8th or 9th month. There are men, sick, sick men out there, who actually pay extra money to have sex with pregnant women. I also came across some young women who had their babies and suddenly the babies were taken from them and sold to somebody who wanted a kid so they never got to see the baby. Half the time when they do get pregnant they are just basically sent back home to have their kid.

Abolitionist: You said in The Natashas…that orphanages are targeted in Russia and the Ukraine, Molodov and Romania and there’s a lot of complicity with the people running these orphanages. How do these young women get sucked into this syndicate? Can’t it be stopped at the recruitment level?

Victor Malarek: It could be stopped at the recruitment level but what it takes is a commitment by Governments in the countries where girls are taken – the source countries. They have to be very firm with their laws. In other words, if you get caught doing this you are going to spend a very long time in prison. Your money and all of your assets will be taken away from you. They have to show these criminals that they mean business. But you know what, you are never going to stop this thing until you start dealing with the demand side. Too often the women are blamed, or the women lead the men astray, they’re the ones that have been labeled whores and sluts and harlots so this whole thinking that women go out there to make money the easy way and people say that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, it is actually the world’s oldest oppression of women.

What needs to be done is you have to reverse this thing. You have to go after the johns and the users. Get them to understand in no uncertain terms that this is not right. Sweden does it by arresting johns and fining them and if they continue to do what they are doing, they get six months in jail and they get named and shamed. You are not going to stop this thing by simply going after the criminals. The demand is very high and the money that we are talking about is huge. It’s in the billions.

Abolitionist: Australian men are large purveyors of the child sex trade in Thailand. We know that Europe has a huge sex trade but it was a surprise to find, through your book, that Israel was right up there and trafficking hundreds of young women and girls for brothels as well.

Victor Malarek: That came as a surprise to me too. When I was in Tel Aviv there were about 280 brothels all over the place, just with red curtains and you would find 10, 15, 20 young women from Eastern Europe and Russia and Romanians. It was quite the thing.

Abolitionist: The way that you have written the book in the first person, giving a lot of these women space to speak, is very compelling. In doing this, you really get a sense of what these young women are going through and a sense of their desperation. One of the things The Natashas has achieved is in the exposing the hypocrisy of so-called “civilisation” and I’m presuming you wrote the book this way because of everything you yourself have been through in your own life.

Victor Malarek: Yes, it’s one thing to try and find the victims and the other thing that’s really difficult is to get them to talk to you. When I was a kid I went through some real serious abuse through the child welfare system in Quebec. I lived in Boy’s Homes and Institutions. I know what it is like [for these young women]. These young women when I met them I would just sit quietly, introduce myself, talk to them slowly and they felt comfortable enough to tell me about this. There were many that took one look at me and the fact that I was a man was enough for them to think about taking a gun and shooting me. There were some who knew I meant well and wanted to see something done.

Abolitionist: What is it about the child welfare system that no matter whether it’s Canada, America, England, Australia or New Zealand, they have not only failed the child, they continuously fail the child?

Victor Malarek: The child welfare system treats the child as what-can-we-do-to-get-this-kid-out-of-our-hair? Where can we place this kid? It’s not about the child, it’s about how the system can operate efficiently. It’s about the system. It’s about the childcare workers and the social workers. These are a bunch of people that think they are doing good but not really examining what they are doing. The reality is that they will fail the child 100 times out of 100 if you don’t get to the soul and the spirit of the child. In the days I was in the child welfare system it was all about corporal punishment. Now they are in your head. They are psycho-analysizing you. They are putting labels on you and they are drugging the kids to death. The kid doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. There’s a real disconnect between the reality of the child and when they say the child-care system, take the word “care” out – it’s just a system until they really understand what the word “care” means then they should just “We are going to ware-house you” and leave him alone!

Abolitionist: A lot of people say that these young women end up in the sex slave trade because of chronic poverty in their homeland. Poverty is the symptom of making slaves. Do you think there is a move in the world today to make only two classes exist – the elite and the slaves and by targeting these young, vulnerable women first it’s just that it always starts with the most vulnerable first before it works it’s way up to include in others. Is this feasible to you Victor?

Victor Malarek: What is happening here is that they are targeting these very impovished women and they know that if you come from poverty and you have nothing to turn to, then these people are perfect targets and they are desperate. Western society has to understand you can’t just allow your society and the men in your society, these fools that are chanting this, “Decriminalization” claptrap by saying “Hey, we’ll offer you a job but the only job we’re going to offer you is a blow job”. “You have to give us a blow job”. This is really disgusting and it shows the level we’ve reduced ourselves to. We should be looking at these countries and saying, “How best can we help the most vulnerable?” so they don’t get entrapped in this kind of enslavement and this kind of sexual environment that is going on worldwide and it’s increasing.

You know Australia has made a big mistake making prostitution legal in the ACT, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory because every country that has legalized prostitution such as Germany, the Netherlands and Australia, the vast majority of women who have been sucked into that trade are women from third world countries and women from destitute countries. It’s got to say something to you when you know that the local girls are certainly not going to do this because they have real jobs that don’t require them to take off their clothes. We have to really look at ourselves as a society and say, “Are you telling me that we can bring in Thai or Philippino girls and Russian girls and Romanian girls so poor and so desperate and the only thing we can do as a western society is say, “Service us sexually or starve to death”. And it really just rankles me no end that these politicians and leaders in our government can’t really look at this and say “It’s insanity”.

Abolitionist: George W. Bush told the National Training Conference on Human Trafficking that America will not tolerate slave traders and the “United States is confronting nations that profit from or tolerate human trafficking”. Yet, and get this, he excludes Saudi Arabia from out of all sanctions imposed as they do big business together and America is only one of two countries left in the world that refuses to sign the UN Convention on Child Rights. Doesn’t that speak volumes to you?

Victor Malarek: It’s a whole diplomacy game. Diplomatic relations trump rape. That’s the bottom line. It trumps rape. The Americas go out and identify North Korea, Cuba and Libya and they look at these terrible countries – look at Germany! It’s got 400, 000 women plying this trade. They have been trafficked in. In the Netherlands, 85,000. They are not really looking at this question seriously. You are not going to stop trafficking. 85-95% of young women in Germany and the Netherlands who are prostitutes are from foreign lands. What is wrong with these countries that they can’t say, “Stop this business”. “We’re not going to allow them to come in here and we’re not going to allow brothels to open up on every corner which these third world and impovished women”.

That whole thing with the Americans and the State department and rating countries [who traffick] is nothing but a bunch of hogwash.

Abolitionist: A whole book in itself is based on the question how to stop western men’s seemingly insatiable appetite for sex and what will it take to stop men from lusting after young women? There appears to be nothing stopping them – the worst but predictable form of consumerism!

Victor Malarek: The worst invention that triggered all of this is the internet. These guys are just surfing the Net and getting themselves all worked up. If you look at the World’s Sex Guide it tells you where to go on virtually anywhere on the planet. You’ve gotta wonder you know, you’ve really gotta wonder what’s happening with men. What’s wrong with their heads?

I remember one time I was doing an interview in Europe and the interviewer said, “You’re good looking enough. You don’t have to buy it” and I just looked at him and said “Are you crazy?” “What kind of logic is that?”

Abolitionist: It’s the same when you mention in your book that so-called ugly girls get such a hard time on the streets…I mean, nobody is ugly. What kind of talk is that?

Victor Malarek: Yeah I know. It’s unreal. Some of the stuff I saw chilled me to my bones. When I started this book my daughter was a teenager. When we pulled out these girls from that PlayBoy Club in Phasisi and I saw this girl that had cigarette burns up and down her arms and her legs and they were all dressed up in the cheap clothing and the make-up all that sort of stuff, when this police officer who was with the Peacekeepers got them regular clothes, they looked like my daughter and her friends. That’s when I got really pissed off, you know. Somebody has got to do something here because these girls are not lining up to do this.

I don’t know what the disconnect is but for people to actually think that somehow these young women and teenagers want to service 10, 15, 20 men a day for I don’t know for what, then they’re crazy!

Abolitionist: Well it’s the same thing as how women are treated in the court system when they have been raped. Where did all this hatred of women come from and how did they get away with it for so long now?

Victor Malarek: Yeah misogamy at it’s worst. Here’s one other thing that really did floor me. This should be the Number One item on the agenda for Women’s Rights groups. It’s just got to be. I don’t hear them yelling. I don’t hear them screaming from the rafters saying, “This has got to stop” and [where are the] Women’s Rights groups around the world going to their Governments and saying, “What the hell are you going to do about this?” Don’t push those legalisation questions because legalizing prostitution just makes it worse. It says to men, “Hey, it’s open field day. Go and have your fun” because you’re only going to fill the brothels, the massage parlors and the strip clubs with destitute women from countries that have no employment.