Traffickers' New Cargo: Naive Slavic Women

to appear in The New York Times

Michael Specter

Published: January 1998

Keywords: women, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, trafficking, prostitution, human, taffic, trade, crime, criminal, slavery, global, economy, sex, East, Eastern, Europe, European, Organized Crime, Eastern Europe, Violence against Women

Abstract:

Selling naive and desperate young women into sexual bondage has become one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises in the robust global economy. The international bazaar for women is hardly new, of course. Asians have been its basic commodity for decades. But economic hopelessness in the Slavic world has opened what experts call the most lucrative market of all to criminal gangs that have flourished since the fall of Communism: Eastern European women with little to sustain them but their dreams. Pimps, law-enforcement officials and relief groups all agree that Ukrainian and Russian women are now the most valuable in the trade.

Disciplines:

Publication: traffickers-new-cargo.pdf