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Posted on 09/10/2001 6:40:23 PM PDT by sickandtired

Indian Express Expressindia Financial Express Screen Web NEWS Top Stories National Network Business International Sports Editorials & Analysis Op-Ed Letters to the Editor Columnists GROUP SITES Expressindia The Financial Express Screen Latest News Kashmir Live Loksatta Express Computer COMMUNITY Instant Messenger SUBSCRIPTIONS Express North American Edition INTERNATIONAL Tuesday, September 11, 2001 Sex slavery alive and kicking in the Holy Land MEGAN GOLDIN NEVE TIRZA PRISON, ISRAEL, SEPTEMBER 10: CHRISTINA, an 18-year-old student from Moldova, has been bought and sold so many times she has lost count. Christina, who declined to give her real name, studied classics and anthropology and played basketball before she was lured from a rural town in one of Europe’s poorest countries to sex slavery in Israel. She is not alone. Hundreds of thousands of ‘‘Christinas’’ have been bought like merchandise, beaten, raped and chained in Western brothels. Christina received top marks in her anthropology studies but couldn’t scrape together enough money to pay for photocopies, let alone buy textbooks. Her dire situation made her fair game for women hired by criminal gangs to lure young, naive girls from Moldova and other financially-strapped Eastern European countries into prostitution with promises of large sums of money. ‘‘I never thought I would actually have to do it,’’ Christina said in bewilderment. ‘‘I thought once I arrived I would find a way to escape and find other work,’’ Christina was flown to Egypt where along with 20 other Moldovan and Russian women aged between about 18 to 24, she was escorted across the Sinai desert into southern Israel by a bedouin smuggler. They walked over dunes, eventually crawling under a barbed-wire border fence at night. Rolls of money changed hands between the bedouin and the Russian-speaking men who bought the women. Christina doesn’t know how much they paid, but the market price for a woman like her in Israel is around $8,000. Frightened, an illegal alien, unfamiliar with Hebrew or Israeli geography, she had no hope of escaping. Instead she was taken to a brothel in north Israel where she was forced to have sex with 15 men every day, raped, beaten and threatened with death if she ran away. Eventually she did and is now a witness in a court case against the pimp who bought and mistreated her under a new Israeli law that makes human trafficking punishable by up to 16 years in prison. ‘‘It’s very easy. You just put them on a planes, walk them through the desert and you have slaves,’’ said lawyer Nomi Levenkron, who represents women like Christina who are locked in a special wing of the Neve Tirza prison near Tel Aviv while they wait to testify or to be deported for entering Israel illegally. Sex slavery, or white slavery as it was called in the 19th century, is almost as old as prostitution itself. But it has had a sudden resurgence since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 devastated many eastern European economies. Women who earn around $20 a month in Moldova are promised $1,000 a month abroad to work as prostitutes. It is a tempting offer for young women with bleak futures in their home countries. Sometimes the women don’t know they are being sent to work as prostitutes and are told they will be waitresses or secretaries. Others are simply kidnapped. ‘‘They come from a place with no money, a very poor family in a poor village, looking for a better future,’’ said Levenkron, a legal adviser to the Hotline for Migrant Workers, the only organisation in Israel that helps former sex-slaves. Israel is a popular destination for the human trade. It is not difficult to smuggle and hide Russian-speaking women in a country where almost a million people originate from the former Soviet Union. A recent US State Department report on human trafficking put Israel on a list of countries where the phenomenon is rampant. It has until 2003 to implement ‘‘minimum standards for elimination of trafficking’’ or face stiff sanctions. According to Zahava Gal-On, who heads an Israeli parliamentary committee on trafficking, that means deterring traffickers with hefty prison sentence instead of a few months in jail, the usual punishment handed down by Israeli courts. It also means putting women like Christina in safe houses instead of jail, thereby encouraging them to testify. In the past the victim has been locked up, while the pimp is let off with a small fine or a brief stay in jail although it is the brothel owner who has committed a crime. Like most former sex-slaves, Christina is penniless. Those lucky enough to be paid a paltry sum, usually a few dollars, by their pimps save the money to buy themselves freedom. Often they are sold before they can do so. (Reuters) Write to the Editor Mail this story Print this story Top About Us | Advertise With Us | Feedback © 2001: Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world.

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