Sex Slaves [eng]

[Gość: pak]

Europe's cash and carry sex slaves

Gaby Rado, who died last week after falling from the roof of his hotel in
northern Iraq, wrote this report for The Observer before he left for the
Gulf. He had been in Romania investigating the plight of young sex workers.
He won a reputation at Channel 4 News as a thoughtful and compassionate
journalist. He once said: 'I am not comfortable with the idea of the
reporter being the hero. My job is to tell a story so as to demonstrate the
facts.' Born in Budapest in 1955, Rado came to England at eight. He is
survived by his widow, Desa, and two children from his first marriage to
Carol Rado.

Sunday April 6, 2003
The Observer

Buying a sex slave in Romania need not take more than a few hours and around
£300.A word or two from the right type of people and the buyer can be in the
appropriate district of a major city such as Bucharest the same evening.
There will be men standing on the street who will call out a woman for
inspection.
The price is a subject for haggling, but if the slave buyer is a foreigner
it will be higher. The two amounts known to have been quoted in past weeks -
and in the first case paid over - were $400 (£256) and $500 (£343).

If the entrepreneur is Romanian, the deal is simpler. No language problems,
and the price will be lower - $100 is the figure quoted by someone who knows
the trade well.

After she is handed over, the slave is kept and fed by the owner. He can do
what he wants with her - use her for his own sexual gratification or sell
her on. Often it's both, though purchasers may also be women - purely
interested in business.

If the slave stays in Romania, there is a risk for the trafficker and buyer
that, if she escapes, she will report to the authorities. But that won't
automatically mean her slavery is over.

In the case of the woman bought for $400 in January, it was later reported
that she had appeared before a court the previous November and named her
captors. The case was, however, thrown out. The traffickers walked free, she
was offered no protection, and was soon recaptured. Her punishment was to be
kept naked in a dog kennel and beaten with a hot chain, which left burns on
her skin.

From the traffickers' point of view, there is an incentive to get the woman
abroad, where she will be deprived of her passport and unable to speak the
language. These days, international trafficking of sex slaves is one of the
biggest illicit trades in Europe, rivalling drugs and cigarette smuggling.

Of course, unlike drugs or cigarettes, a sex slave is a re-usable commodity.
After she spends six months or so in one bar or brothel, sold by the hour or
the night by her owner, the clientele will weary of her and want 'fresh
meat'. She is then sold on, to another city or another country. Until she
escapes, gets arrested or dies, she is a constant source of income.

Those are the hard facts of an unspeakable trade in human lives in Europe -
whose people believe their nations abolished slavery in the mid-nineteenth
century. It may start in the poorest eastern fringes of the continent -
Romania, Moldova, Ukraine - but it works its way westwards. First through
the Balkans where large-scale, bored international peacekeeping forces are a
natural market for prostitution and then to the red-light districts of the
European Union.

DIANA lives in a refuge outside Bucharest, and is happy to see visitors. She
has a ready smile, that of a child, though her age is somewhere between 17
and 25. Her mental age is probably 10. As far as is known, she was once in a
Timisoara orphanage because of a violent or abusive family background. Her
favourite occupation is making collages of teddy bears and flowers.

When a Channel 4 News team set up a camera and asked her if she minded
answering some questions about her story, she had one request, whispered to
the team translator: 'Can we make a porno film? I want Iana to see me doing
it.'

Iana is the director of the refuge - a woman who took Diana in when she was
bought from a trafficker in January. Diana clearly wants to repay Iana the
kindness she's been shown in the refuge. The only gift she thinks she has to
give is her ability to perform sex. She says her last owners had picked her
up, aged 10, at Bucharest's main railway station and had hired her out for
sex ever since.

In January an undercover team secretly filmed Diana being sold on for sex.
The film shows a Bucharest trafficker, 'Shorty', standing beside her -
though he was the middle-man on this occasion - and Diana's actual owner, a
woman, standing in a doorway behind them. The woman is holding a baby.

The transaction is agreed and Diana, Shorty and the undercover team leave.

Out on the street, Diana asks Shorty if the new owner will beat her.

No, he tells her, the new owner will be her 'boyfriend' and buy her clothes.
Diana kisses the man who has the hidden camera and is put into a car.

The pay-off took place in a nearby park: Shorty was given about 13.5 million
Romanian lei, the equivalent of $400.

Soon after, in early February, the Channel 4 team filmed Shorty standing on
a Bucharest street corner, talking to a group of policemen.

Iana, the refuge director, says the $400 paid for Diana was an 'exception',
because one of the undercover team posed as a foreigner. There are other
young women in the refuge. One was shot while being held as a sex slave in
Macedonia a year ago. There had been a shoot-out in a bar between criminals
and police and a bullet went in through her leg and exited through her
genitals.

Iana estimates around 10,000 young women in Romania are sold as sex slaves
every year. Her refuge, the only one of its type in the country, has so far
taken in about 75 girls. The youngest was 13.

The Romanian Directorate for Combating Organised Crime takes part in
transnational schemes for combating human trafficking - one linked to
Britain was set up after the discovery of 58 bodies of Chinese illegal
immigrants in a container at Dover.

Since a law was passed in December 2001 to target human trafficking, more
than 2,000 people have been arrested. The day after a documentary featuring
Diana's purchase was shown on a Romanian TV channel in February, five people
involved in her sale, including Shorty, were arrested. The five were
basically the same group released after the November swoop.

Iana remains fearful. 'After these cases are publicised, my life becomes
more dangerous. These traffickers, they are terrible men - they can probably
find out where we are.' But she agrees something must be done.


To zdanie nabiera szczegolnego znaczenia w naszej jednoczacej sie Europie:
"Those are the hard facts of an unspeakable trade in human lives in Europe -
whose people believe their nations abolished slavery in the mid-nineteenth
century."

Sex Slaves to rowniez tytul ksiazki autorstwa Louise Brown:
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1860499031/ref=ase_451/026-2508464-9858004
Polecaw szystkim milosnikom kultury azjatyckiej a w szczegolnosci chinskiej.

Milego dnia