<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,444751,00.html> Willing sex slaves
Human traffickers are always demonised, but most help desperate people
Rory Carroll Thursday March 1, 2001 The Guardian
I was looking for a victim and I found Tanya. Perched on a traffic barrier on Via Salaria, a busy motorway north of Rome, she was reading a crime thriller by the light of a lamppost. I pulled into the hard shoulder and she closed the book. Tottering over on black stilettos, she leaned into the window and in an eastern European accent said it would be £15 for oral sex. We drove to a deserted layby she knew well.
Two carloads of Albanian pimps cruised Via Salaria that night, as they do every night, keeping tabs on their property. To be gone more than 15 minutes would invite trouble. I turned off the engine and explained that I had lied, that I was a journalist researching an article about human trafficking and wanted only a story. About a slave trade that lures unsuspecting young women into a world of industrialised brutality and rape. The pimps would never know of our interview. "Tell them whatever you like," shrugged Tanya. "I don't work for them. Go ahead, what do you want to know?"
What she told me I believed - reluctantly, for it was not the story I wanted. She was 28, from Kursk, divorced, had an engineering degree and a two-year-old son. She had assessed her options and decided prostitution, for now, offered the only viable income. During the past two years she had come to Italy four times, each visit lasting around three months. She rented a studio apartment and allowed herself one night off a week. Even a bad week netted more than £500, enough to pay costs and save.
The work was unpleasant and sometimes dangerous. At home a catastrophic economy offered few reasonable alternatives. But nobody owned her and nobody forced her. On this point Tanya was adamant. It was her choice. She pays a gang of human traffickers about £1,100 to get from Moscow to Rome and the same amount to return. Travelling in the back of trucks is unpleasant, sometimes dangerous, but she has weighed the risks and potential gains.
Tanya is the side of human trafficking which newspapers and governments tend to ignore. The satisfied client. There are hundreds of thousands like her, though you would never guess it from the rhetoric about asylum seekers and illegal immigrants. They are labelled victims of evil schemers whose odiousness ranks not far behind paedophiles. Listen to Tony Blair and Giuliano Amato, Italy's prime minister, in a recent joint statement: "Every day we hear of the horrors illegal immigrants endure at the hands of the people traffickers [they] have thrown women and children, many of whom cannot swim, into the Adriatic to avoid detection by police patrol boats."
Thomas Bodstroem, Sweden's justice minister, painted a lurid picture at a European Union summit on trafficking: "As we speak, poor girls in European brothels are hoping for a break before the next customer comes in. The term 'slave trade' is not a provocative one, it is reality."
On it goes. The traffickers dupe, kidnap, exploit, rape, enslave. Herding their victims into brothels, throwing them overboard, suffocating them in containers. Industrialised evil. With the rhetoric comes a battery of initiatives: stiffer penalties, standardised laws across the EU, closer cooperation between police forces, joint undercover operations.
Blair, Bodstroem and Amato are right. Traffickers truly are criminal gangs who torture, murder and betray when it suits. They plough enormous profits back into corrupting officials and open ing new routes. Some clients, especially young women, start out as customers and end up as chattels, to be routinely brutalised. But before cheering the crackdown, consider Tanya. For her, traffickers offer the only route out of poverty. They have provided a reliable, albeit expensive, service. She hired them, and they did a good job.
About 400,000 asylum seekers and 500,000 migrants illegally entered the EU last year. Although the EU needs labour to replace greying workforces, it keeps the door to legal migration mostly shut. The only way in is to hire a trafficker. How many illegals are enslaved? A few, a lot, all? Such statistics do not exist, but it is likely Tanya's experience is far more common than Bodstroem's slaves. Most of Britain's asylum seekers last year, for example, came from Iraq, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iran. Doubtless each has his or her own horror story about the journey - uncertainty, exhaustion, fear, danger - but these nationalities rarely end up in brothels or sweatshops.
The truth about human trafficking is that for desperate people it is usually a good bet. They are at the mercy of ruthless smugglers, but atrocities are rare because they are bad for business. Official claims to be combating the trade on behalf of clients are a self-serving fiction. Restrictive immigration policies put officials squarely on the side of traffickers. For politicians to pose as defenders of the clients is breathtaking hypocrisy.
The crackdown is likely to have some effect in disrupting the trade. Persuading Bosnia to put controls at Sarajevo airport, for instance, may force more people to travel overland from Istanbul rather than fly - a lengthier, arduous route for which the trafficker will charge more. Demand might be choked.
Blair and Amato again: "In all that we do, we will honour our obligation to provide protection to those fleeing persecution." That made them giggle in the immigration service. Asylum seekers and migrants rely equally on traffickers and a crackdown impedes those fleeing persecution just as much as those fleeing poverty. Blair and co conceal this behind the fig leaf of combating slavery.
It tends to go unquestioned because those who report and comment on the issue cannot resist slavery. What a story! A bygone wickedness reborn in 21st- century Europe. Odysseys of hope and drama ending in tragedy. Demonic traffickers and helpless victims, sex and violence. No wonder we cannot get enough.
The stories are (usually) real and need to be told, but not in such a way that they distort a complex phenomenon. After Tanya, I interviewed another four prostitutes that night. Three told similar tales: late 20s or older, Russian or Ukrainian, in Italy out of their own volition, they worked only for themselves. Victims of collapsed economies, not traffickers.
The fourth was different. Angela was 19, Albanian and clearly terrified. She stammered in staccato and slowly it emerged: a devious boyfriend, sold with other girls at an auction for pimps in Tirana, raped, bundled into Italy and left to stand on Via Salaria from 6pm every night while her pimp trafficker cruised up and down.
Angela was too intimidated to seek help or flag passing patrol cars and hoped merely that within two years she could pay off her "debt". She trembled because that night's takings were well under £100. Tanya and Angela. Guess which story I was most interested in.