The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter January/February & March/April 2002, Volume 9, Nos. 1 & 2 WOMEN'S FREEDOM NETWORK NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON STOPPING COMMERCIAL SEXUAL EXPLOITATION Organized Crime and Trafficking in Eastern Europe and Russia by Dr. Louise Shelly

My particular focus, and that of the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, is human trafficking from the former Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, unlike Asia and other parts of the world, there was an effort to stamp out prostitution. Prostitution was not even recognized in the criminal code or the administrative code. But, in fact because it was thought that it had been done away with, prostitution was heavily suppressed, it was not eliminated.

So the question is, how do you go from a society that invested a lot of money and effort into getting women into the legitimate workforce, to an enormous number of women engaging in prostitution? After the demise of the Soviet Union, and during the transitional period, women not only lost their employment, but were denied wealth. There was a feminization of poverty.

What do I mean by feminization of poverty? If you have privatization in a society in which you have massive organized crime, your criminals are male, they are violent, and they use this force to achieve property rights for themselves, then you will have the feminization of poverty. This larger impoverishment of women has contributed to the trafficking of women.

Privatization deprived women of employment in many sectors and deprived them of any access to capital in the society that developed. This is key to understanding how you have such a highly educated group of women being trafficked into prostitution. One of the things revealed to us in our research was that the demographics of the women who are being trafficked into prostitution from Russia are no different from the general female population. This means that having a university education does not spare you from being trafficked into prostitution.

For example, we learned that two female university students from the Ukraine signed up as agricultural workers for a summer job in Greece only to find out that they were forced to work in a brothel. They tried to escape by jumping out of a window. They were picked up on the highway and placed in a jail for 3 weeks before being deported back to the Ukraine. This is not a problem that is confined only to the homeless, the less educated and those with dysfunctional families. It is a problem that cuts across all regions of the former Soviet Union and different social groups and soci al classes.

"If you have privitization in a society which you have massive organized crime, your criminals are male, they are violent, and they use this force to achieve property rights for themselves, then you will have the feminization of poverty."

Where are these Russian women trafficked? They are trafficked to all parts of the world. You can find them in Argentina, Asia, Thailand, Australia, the Middle East and the largest number are probably in Western Europe. These countries have visa controls on who can enter. It is not as if you can easily traffic a white woman into an Asian society and have her disappear. But, there are special visa statuses in which these women are granted 6-month visas as "entertainers." So you have women going into host countries under the auspices of being entertainers, only to be forced into prostitution.

To what extent are the women aware of what they are getting into? The fact that there are women from the former Soviet Union who are now working as maids, as child care workers, on cruise ships, or working in agricultural settings makes it credible that there is legitimate employment for women overseas. Women get tricked because the legitimate work is out there. As high as 50% of the women honestly believe they are going abroad to find legitimate work, only to be physically forced into prostitution. It is a risk many women are willing to take.

So, how would you explain this Russian "business" of human trafficking? In the Soviet case, or the post-Soviet case, Russians have never been traders. They have been sellers of natural resources. The way they operate their trafficking business is very similar to the way they sell gold, minerals, or other natural resources. They take their commodity, whether it's a natural metal or a human being, and sell it off to the first available person. This is why you can go to Belgium and see a Russian woman working in a Moroccan-controlled brothel. You can go to Hamburg and see a Ukrainian woman being managed by Albanian organized crime. This selling of Russian women multiple times happens because the Russians have not maximized profits or integrated operations. Their focus is not on the longevity of this business but on getting immediate cash.

I am not saying that any of this is good. But there are degrees of awful. If you do not want an integrated operation in which you are thinking about the future of your business, you may treat the women even worse. The women's fate, their life expectancy, may be even shorter than women in an operation where the owners are thinking about the business' long-term viability.

What can be done? I think the problem is much more basic than a law enforcement or prevention problem. Law enforcement can only deal with trying to break the crime ring. Prevention can only go so far because some women are risk-takers. Some women see no alternative for their impoverished lives and are ready to take the risk that this job may actually be legitimate.

One of the fundamental things that needs to be understood is that the eradication of human trafficking needs to be rooted in an economic transition that does not place women at an enormous disadvantage. You need to have capital that enables women to have legitimate employment opportunities. You need to decriminalize the society. This decriminalization needs to be done through civil society, education, consciousness, and an understanding of what is going on.

The consequences of not doing so are catastrophic. The Russian people need to be told that Russia's future is in jeopardy if so many women are trafficked into prostitution because they're already at a population below the replacement level in all the countries of the former Soviet Union. This problem is not only a human tragedy on the individual level, but it's a demographic tragedy for all of these countries of the former Soviet Union.