<p>Poverty, chaos and porous borders have turned prostitution into
a global growth industry, debasing the women and children of
the world
</p>
<p>By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/PARIS--With reporting by Nomi Morris/Berlin, Anita Pratap/Bombay,
Susanna M. Schrobsdorf/Brussels and James Wilde/Istanbul, with
other bureaus
</p>
<p> On Saturday nights, as many as 300 young women line the margins
of E55, a Czech highway near the German border. Their costumes
vary: light frocks, skimpy red dresses, glow-in-the-dark Spandex
pants. They speak a babel of languages: Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian,
Hungarian, German. But they have only one thing to sell: sex.
</p>
<p> For the truckers and migrant workers who ply the main road between
Berlin and Prague, this particular seven-mile stretch of E55
is the "Highway of Cheap Love," the longest brothel in the world,
a smorgasbord of lust. Travelers can pause at rest stops, munch
on french fries and sausages and, for just $30, pick up a girl--maybe one as young as 15--for half an hour in the bushes
or in a truck cab or shabby motel. For the men, the encounters
are alluring, if seedy, interludes at a bargain price.
</p>
<p> For the young women, the story is different. Many have been
coerced into sexual servitude. Some, abducted by con men, are
raped and psychologically pummeled into submission. As they
strut their wares, their pimps lurk in cars in the shadows,
calculating the night's take. But not all the pimps are gangsters.
Often it is Father who sits in the backup car or Mother who
negotiates the deal for her daughter. Little Brother may appear
with a sponge and a pail of soapy water to wash a client's car
for an extra $5.
</p>
<p> Desire has cash value; the market has no rules, possesses no
scruples. From Eastern Europe to the Himalayas, from Tokyo to
Tegucigalpa, transaction by sordid transaction has created a
multibillion-dollar sex trade. It is encouraged by massive socioeconomic
movements: the collapse of the Soviet empire, the increase in
global mobility, the wrenching disparity of worldwide incomes.
But its effect is most devastating on an individual level. Poor
women and children are commodities traded on the street, products
bartered, haggled over, smuggled and sold as hedges against
hunger or as cruel but quick routes to profit. Souls do not
count, only bodies, debased over and over, unmindful of social
cost or disease.
</p>
<p> Few corners of the earth are immune to the corrupting influence
of the burgeoning sex trade. Eastern Europe, once prudishly
communist, is pockmarked with streetwalkers and whorehouses.
Poverty has forced many of its young people to prostitute themselves
in the fleshpots of the West. In Nepal's Himalayan hill villages,
some 7,000 adolescents are sold each year to slave traders for
the sweat-drenched brothels of Bombay. In Brazil an estimated
25,000 girls have been forced into prostitution in remote Amazon
mining camps. In Italy, Nigerian streetwalkers are flooding
into Bologna, while in Belgium, the neon-bright windows of Antwerp's
red-light district are filled with Ghanaians in lacy underwear.
Around Miami, massage parlors owned by Cuban immigrants import
prostitutes from Colombia, Nicaragua and Canada.
</p>
<p> Historically, authorities have winked at "the world's oldest
profession." If 100,000 German men a year choose to visit Thailand
on package sex tours, who is to object? Only recently has anyone
begun to ask how many of Thailand's 2 million prostitutes are
minors; how many have been sold by parents or husbands as indentured
servants to brothel owners; and how many have been kidnapped
from villages in Burma, Laos and southern China to service the
new breed of tourist. A 1991 conference of Southeast Asian women's
organizations estimated that 30 million women had been sold
worldwide since the mid-1970s. Such figures are at best guesses
and at worst only the tip of the iceberg. "The sex industry
is a huge market with its own momentum," says Wassyla Tamzali,
director of UNESCO's women's-rights department. "You have an
infernal race between the client and the pimp to expand the
boundaries, to find the newest experience possible. Selling
a 14-year-old girl has become so commonplace, it is banal."
</p>
<p> When the Iron Curtain disintegrated, few would have guessed
that in less than five years it would lead to a massive exodus
of poverty-stricken East European women, desperate to sell themselves
for what rarely turns out to be the good life. Police say a
quarter of Germany's 200,000 prostitutes are now from the former
East bloc. Even in the puritanical Middle East, charter flights
full of Russian women disembark weekly at Dubai's airport, ply
their trade on 14-day visas and head home, loaded with color
television sets. At the Gallery, a Brussels nightclub, a naked
Hungarian couple thrash about in what appears to be a live sex
act, to tape-recorded groans. Across the Belgian capital at
the Aloha Club, Lenka, a 21-year-old Czech stripper, outfitted
in fake leopard skin, entertains clients with $470 magnums of
champagne. Half the peep shows in town are now staffed by East
Europeans--up from 1% three years ago, according to police.
</p>
<p> In Tel Aviv the number of brothels has skyrocketed in five years
from 30 to 150--largely because of an influx of Russians into
Israel. Though some are new immigrants driven to the trade by
financial troubles, most are temporary visitors who enter the
country on tourist visas. Scores of ads for "entertainment services,"
many boasting "hot new Russians," riddle the Israeli papers.
Bars in major Chinese cities now offer blond, blue-eyed Russian
"hostesses," while in Tokyo, Russian girls are the latest addition
to the menu in fancy "hostess" bars. In Modena, Italy, last
fall, police rounded up more than 100 women from Bulgaria, Poland,
Romania and points east. Allegedly lured as dancers by a self-described
theatrical agent, they were then forced "to be nice to customers
or else." The agent is now awaiting trial. Even war does not
halt the traffic. In Kac, a cluster of rundown farmhouses in
northern Serbia, dark-haired Valenka gyrates half nude at the
local bar and beckons customers upstairs for one-on-one at $62
an hour. The 24-year-old emigrated from Donetsk, in Ukraine,
where her meat-packer parents earned $2 a week and she could
not support her baby daughter. Now married to a Serbian pimp,
she says, "So many Ukrainian women would welcome the chance
I am getting."
</p>
<p> The clients' wives may not be so lucky. Turkey's Black Sea region
has seen its divorce rate jump 20% in the past three years,
along with an explosion of gonorrhea and syphilis--all the
result of the invasion of thousands of "Natashas," female traders
from Moldova and Belarus in the former Soviet Union.."Natasha
yat asagi!" (pronounced Natasha yatashi) is the new mating call:
Turkish for "Natasha, jump into bed!" The women swarm in with
suitcases of cheap goods to hawk by day. By night they sell
their services. The town of Hopa, which three years ago had
no hotels, now has 32. "The whole Black Sea region has become
a huge brothel," says Kemal Unluer, a municipal official in
Trabzon (pop. 160,000). A night with "Natasha" can cost $150,
so the gold chains once common around the necks of Black Sea
men are disappearing. "I love these Natashas," sighs a customs
officer on the Georgia border. "God measured and created them."
Hasan D., a Trabzon hotel worker, explains, "Married men do
not want to practice what they see in porno movies with their
wives. But they can with Natashas." As for the Natashas, Irina,
a Russian art-history graduate, put it bluntly: "We are milking
the Turks for all they are worth."
</p>
<p> But for every satisfied Natasha, how many in the spreading diaspora
are victims of pimps and gangs? "Almost all the women are abused,"
claims Antwerp social worker Patsy Sorenson, who has helped
more than 40 East European prostitutes escape. "The Georgian
Mafia is the most violent: rapes, threats with guns and beatings."
Equally notorious in Berlin and Prague: the so-called Chechen
Boys, North Caucasians who reportedly deal in weapons, counterfeit
money, drugs and women. Francine Meert, head of Le Nid, a Brussels
aid group, says, "Many of the girls have broken teeth. They
say they fell downstairs. But there are so many of them that
either this business has the worst-maintained stairs in the
world or these girls are being punched." In a brothel in Bautzen,
Germany, last year, women were beaten with bats and administered
electric shocks. In Prague girls in the trade were cut with
razors to make them submit. "The Mafia that supplies these women
is more violent than anything we've seen before," says central
Brussels police chief Emmanuel Herman.
</p>
<p> The victimization is a direct result of the former East bloc's
economic distress: in Russia alone, 75% of the unemployed are
female. "The naivete is unbelievable," says Prague vice-squad
chief Petr Vosolsobe. "The vision of earning hard currency blurs
the girls' senses." Besides the usual promises of dance- and
waitress-jobs, myriad ruses are used. One Russian student of
German literature received an invitation to complete her education.
She sold her stereo to pay for gifts for her "host family" in
Germany, only to arrive and be forced into a brothel. Others
are lured by traffickers posing as marriage brokers. On a Belgian
television documentary last month, Tibor, a tall, handsome Hungarian
pimp, revealed his method: "I went to Romania. I heard a lot
of girls wanted to leave. I took the kind of girl no one would
miss if she disappeared. Girls who were having trouble with
their parents or who lived alone. So when they were resold,
no one would look for them. It is as if I sold a kilo of bread.
They buy them like that."
</p>
<p> Women from the old East bloc are not the only ones enticed into
Western Europe. In the past two years Spanish police have dismantled
more than a dozen slave-trafficking rings. In January a Barcelona
police inspector was sentenced to seven years in prison for
forcing Guatemalan women into prostitution. He swindled them
out of $4,000 each, promising legitimate jobs, and then held
them captive once they arrived in Spain. In another Spanish
case, 400 Dominicans brought to Lerida, Majorca and Ibiza were
threatened with reprisals against their families if they refused
to submit. Authorities say Dominican flesh traders often add
a cruel twist: promised lucrative jobs, unsuspecting women mortgage
their parents' homes at usurious rates to pay for false papers
and plane fares. If they are sent back by immigration officials,
or refuse to prostitute themselves on arrival, their families
are turned into the street. "I thought I was going to work as
a waitress," a young Dominican, transported to Greece, told
BBC television, her eyes welling with tears. "Then they said
if I didn't have sex, I'd be sent back to Santo Domingo without
a penny. I was beaten, burned with cigarettes. I knew nobody.
I was a virgin. I held out for five days, crying, with no food.
((Eventually)) I lost my honor and my virginity for $25."
</p>
<p> One skin-trade network, investigated by police in the Netherlands,
Belgium and Germany, lured 3,000 women from Latin America and
Asia--as well as Eastern Europe--into prostitution in West
European cabarets between 1985 and 1991. Ring members in Germany
used their artistic agencies to recruit poor Filipinas in Manila,
promising jobs as "folkloric dancers." After flying to Cyprus,
where they were given six-month work permits, the women found
their earnings confiscated to pay the airfare. Weakened by a
meager food allowance, they were ordered to have sex with cabaret
customers. When the women, devout Catholics who were supporting
families back home, refused, they were beaten. "There were mass
rapes to break their will," says Dusseldorf criminal investigator
Gerd Heitzer. Eventually the victims submitted and were rotated
through European strip clubs on temporary "artist" work permits
granted by Swiss, Dutch, Belgian and German governments.
</p>
<p> Trafficking victims are overwhelmingly female, but men--whether
by predilection or poverty--are also caught up in the sex
marketplace. At Paris' Orly airport last month, 15 Algerian
transvestites became hysterical when French police tried to
deport them without allowing them to change out of their skirts,
high heels and wigs. Hauled before a judge, the men, sporting
beards after a week in prison, said they were driven by unemployment
to come to Paris every six months in order to feed wives and
children in Algeria. The judge allowed them to change clothes,
but it was too late to avoid shame and reprisals: the day of
the arrest, French police had transmitted their photos to Algerian
authorities. In Frankfurt last year, police raiding a bordello
discovered that more than half of the 30 Thai seductresses were
men who had undergone transsexual surgery. Most likely recruited
by pederasts when they were young, they would have discovered
that their marketability as male prostitutes shrinks as they
grow out of their teens.
</p>
<p> If European rackets are burgeoning, trafficking incidents are
also cropping up in the U.S. In Houston, Korean-controlled nude-modeling
studios have been supplied by flesh traders who bribe American
soldiers based in South Korea. The G.I.s are typically paid
up to $5,000 to marry Koreans and bring them back to Fort Hood,
Texas, where they divorce them for an equal sum. The women,
who speak no English, are then forced into brothels in Houston,
Detroit and other cities. Compelled to repay the marriage fees
and plane fares, and threatened with violence, "these women
live in fear," says Harris County civil prosecutor Terry O'Rourke.
A local crackdown has sizably cut down the traffic since the
late 1980s, but it still continues, and crime rings are now
supplanting some of the Korean women with Salvadorans. In Los
Angeles the trade is export oriented: White Americans have been
lured to Japan on singing, dancing and modeling contracts and
then coerced into prostitution. "It's a recurring scam," says
Los Angeles vice detective Fred Clapp.
</p>
<p> In Asia the sex trade has long operated on an industrial scale.
In the 1960s and '70s, Japanese men flocked in organized sex
tours to Taiwan and South Korea; later on, they preferred the
Philippines and Thailand. The practice still flourishes, but
in the 1980s the traffic became two-way, with Filipina and Thai
prostitutes migrating to Japan. Despite the efforts of citizens'
groups to publicize the problem, little has been done to help
the estimated 70,000 Thai "hostesses" now working in Japan as
virtual indentured sex slaves in bars usually controlled by
yakuza gangsters. The women, many of them ignorant villagers,
are sold by Thai brokers for an average of $14,000 each and
resold to the clubs by Japanese brokers for about $30,000--a sum they are obliged to work off, but rarely can.
</p>
<p> Each month the Thai embassy in Tokyo repatriates about 250 escapees.
But Japanese officialdom has been largely indifferent to the
plight of prostitutes, and there are several recorded instances
in which police, especially in rural areas, have handed escaping
girls back to their abusers. Three recent murders--Thai prostitutes
who killed their "Mama-sans," or female bosses, while trying
to escape--are focusing attention on the women's plight. Citizens'
groups, believing the accused are less in the wrong than the
deceased, are lobbying for a fair trial. "When I arrived in
March 1991, I realized I was sold," Gun, 25, wrote a watchdog
group in a letter from the Shimozuma Detention Center. "My life
was like an animal's. I was sold three times. I begged [my
boss] to let me go home, but she said I owed much money and
must pay it back. Every day I had to sleep with men. I was not
allowed to leave even during menstruation. I was told if I escaped,
they would track me, kill me--and my parents too."
</p>
<p> The sex trade sprouts inexorably in new areas. In Ho Chi Minh
City, by one report, the number of prostitutes has recently
increased from 10,000 to 50,000. Morocco has become a Mecca
for Saudi sex tourists. The next tier of prosperous Asian countries
is following in Japan's footsteps, with South Korea and Taiwan
developing their own sex-tour operations. And last year, attesting
to the growth of market economics, more than 240,000 people
engaging in prostitution were arrested in China. Sex tourism
takes on ever more ingenious guises as well. To Bombay, a center
for inexpensive medical treatment, Arabs are flocking for such
common ailments as high blood pressure or skin infections--excuses to stay a week or a month and patronize the brothels
that have sprung up around the hospitals. These establishments,
catering specially to Arabs, feature dancing girls in gaudily
carpeted and chandeliered halls. Once the "patient" chooses
his girl, they move into a room with a bed decked in flowers,
like the nuptial ritual in glossy Hindi films. The rate: between
$100 and $1,000 a night.
</p>
<p> Globally, prostitution plays a significant role in transmitting
the AIDS virus. In Haiti, once a favored vacation spot for U.S.
homosexuals, the virus flourished for years until political
turmoil and negative publicity shut down the trade. But in many
places the danger has yet to register. "If a young prostitute
is found to have AIDS," says Peter Racine, a counselor who works
with Honduran street children in Tegucigalpa, "they send her
away to a smaller pueblo, where she continues to work." In Berlin,
German streetwalkers are complaining about Polish women pouring
into the city and turning unprotected tricks. Naively, the Poles--laid off from regular jobs and trying to support families--hope to cash in quickly and return home in a few months.
Raised as Catholics, "their AIDS awareness is nil," says social
worker Wiltrud Schenk. "They get embarrassed if you mention
the word condom." In Bombay farmers migrate to town off-season
for construction jobs. They visit the brothels--where a third
of the prostitutes are HIV-positive--and later infect their
wives. The virus is sweeping the subcontinent: from half a dozen
HIV-positive cases in 1986 to a million today--and an estimated
10 million in the next decade, when the number of people suffering
from the full-blown disease is expected to rise to 1 million.
Even in worldly-wise Amsterdam, half of the 400 streetwalkers--most of them drug addicts--are reportedly HIV-positive.
</p>
<p> Public concern over the flesh trade is rising. Last year Pope
John Paul II expressed "horror over the degrading practice of
sex tourism." In 1990 he had warned that "men, women and children
must not be used as objects at the expense of their inalienable
dignity." And a backlash against the sex trade is taking form
in several countries where it has long been entrenched. In Manila
the new mayor, Alfredo Lim, vows "to eradicate prostitution,"
and has padlocked 300 bars. Under a new law, pimps and clients
will face prison and deportation. In Karachi human-rights lawyers
are mobilizing opinion against rackets that have kidnapped 200,000
Bangladeshi women into prostitution in Pakistan. In Negombo,
Sri Lanka, a recent mecca for European pedophiles, Catholic
priests staged protest marches until embarrassed authorities
agreed to combat the trade.
</p>
<p> The issue has been debated recently in the Swedish, Danish,
Swiss, British, Thai and Cypriot parliaments. Germany last year
stiffened antitrafficking laws, and Belgium is set to do likewise.
France has cracked down on the use of its Minitel--a widely
