Russian Coalition Fights Sex Slavery

“Work abroad. High pay. No experience needed.”

Such ads appear daily on the Internet and in newspapers across Russia and other nations of the former Soviet Union. In many cases, according to a coalition of women’s and human rights groups here, they are the hook that lures girls and women into sexual slavery.

After being coaxed abroad with promises of cheap visas and employment as nannies, cooks or hotel workers, victims typically are stripped of their passports, isolated, threatened, drugged, beaten and in some cases raped until they succumb to demands to become prostitutes.

On Wednesday, an alliance of about 40 Russian nongovernmental organizations called the Angel Coalition announced a campaign to fight human trafficking, which the groups estimate is responsible for forcing 50,000 Russian women and girls each year into prostitution around the world.

The scale of the problem is huge, according to the coalition. Citing U.S. and European government statistics, it said more than 500,000 girls and women from Russia and other former Soviet states have been sent to 50 countries around the world, including the United States, and compelled to become prostitutes.

The victims go mainly to Western Europe, the Middle East and China, the coalition said. Victims may be bought and sold by the traffickers, making them, in effect, chattel. Once under the control of organized crime, the women and girls are told that if they go to the police they will be arrested for prostitution rather than helped.

Among its goals, the Angel Coalition seeks laws in Russia to ban human trafficking across international borders. The current statutes only apply to the transportation of children. And the group plans to mount education campaigns in small towns and villages to teach potential victims how to avoid the traffickers’ snares.

But organizers acknowledge that they face an uphill fight to defeat trafficking networks that have become as entrenched and profitable as the trade in illegal narcotics. And like drug runners, they say, traffickers in human beings have been aided by corrupt and lax officials and society’s willingness to look the other way.

“World involvement in the sex industry is even bigger than the drug industry--with profits of $7 billion to $12 billion a year,” said coalition director Valentina Gorchakova.

Faced with economic hardship and high unemployment rates, the women often are helped by family members to pay for the trips, fill out the forms and supply the documents needed for visas, she said. The victims are eager for adventure abroad and the chance to send money back to their families.

As its first step, the Angel Coalition plans to place ads on television and in newspapers and to widely distribute informational materials, badges and brochures warning of the danger, said Yuri Puchkov, director of the Moscow office of MiraMed Institute, an American group involved in the anti-trafficking campaign.

At a news conference, Gorchakova was joined by representatives of the Moscow mayor’s office, the International Organization for Migration and the American Bar Assn. Ludmila N. Zavadskaya, director of the Gender Law Program of the ABA’s Central and East European Law Initiative, said her organization is willing to help draft amendments to the criminal code.

Tatyana Shornikova, coordinator of the Center for the Support of Survivors of Sexual Violence, said fear prevents effective law enforcement against the criminals who recruit victims, who in some cases are as young as 12.

“The victims are mainly from small provincial towns, where everyone knows each other, so that the ‘employers’ know everything . . . and can easily find and kill those who go to the police,” she said in a telephone interview. “And if we try to get information on the companies . . . we too may simply cease to exist. They will kill us.”

Shornikova said the trafficking could not take place without the connivance of some corrupt Russian officials.

“Otherwise, how can you explain that a few years ago, 14-year-old girls could easily get passports to go abroad, even though the legal age for that was then 16?” she said.

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Yakov Ryzhak of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.