THE ULTIMATE GROWTH INDUSTRY
TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN AND GIRLS
by Jan Goodwin

The California travel agency brochure could not be more blunt: "Sex Tours to Thailand, Real Girls, Real Sex, Real Cheap," it reads. "These women are the most sexually available in the world. Did you know you can actually buy a virgin girl for as little as $200? You could fuck a different girl every night for the rest of your life." There is even a prize for the man who has sex with the most girls during the tour. As for AIDS, the brochure continues, "Thailand is safe. And all the places we visit are police protected."

What the ad copy doesn't say is that these "virgin girls" are frequently children who have been kidnapped or sold into brothels. Forced into prostitution, sometimes even chained to their beds, they lead lives that are brutal, and frequently short. Averaging 15 customers a day, they work all but two days a month. They must perform any act demanded by their customers, most of whom refuse to wear condoms. If they object, the brothel owners beat them into submission. According to human rights activists working in Thailand, a large percentage of the prostitutes there are under 15, and girls as young as eight are sold into the industry. Within six months of being sold into the sex trade, a girl is commonly HIV-infected.

But you don't have travel to Asia; sexual servitude can be found here in the U.S. too, as an 18-month under- cover investigation by the Global Survival Network dis- covered. For example, women from the former Soviet Union can be found in brothels in New York, Bethesda, Maryland, and Los Angeles. Fleeing a collapsing economy at home, these women pay up to $3,000 in "processing fees" for what they are promised will be good jobs abroad; instead they are sold into sexual slavery. The industry is tightly controlled by the Russian mafia, whose contacts with their own government and immigration officials facilitate acquisition of the necessary visas and passports. Women trying to escape have been murdered, and the threat that family members back home will be beaten to death is also used to keep women in line.

According to GSN, which is based in Washington, D.C., every year trafficking in women and girls puts bil- lions of dollars into the coffers of criminal syndicates worldwide-an amount rivaling their incomes from drugs and guns. And there is another plus in trading in human flesh: dope and weapons can only be sold once; a woman or girl can be sold again and again.

As the disparities in the global economy widen, girl children and young women are increasingly seen as cur- rency and quick profits. The United Nations estimates that, around the world, some 200 million people are forced to live as sexual or economic slaves, the latter often involving sexual exploitation as well. In Southeast Asia alone, a reported 60 to 70 million women and children have been sold into the sex industry in the last decade. "Slavery is one of the most undesirable consequences of globalization," says a UN spokesman, adding, "We regret that this is not considered a priority by any country at the moment."

Nor is trafficking in women and girls limited to prosti- tution; it is also used to supply the forced-marriage indus- try. In China today, for example, there are now three males for every two females in the population over the age of 15. This as a result of the government's "one child, one couple" policy, combined with the traditional, and still powerful, requirement for a son. If the first child is a girl, the fetus may be aborted, or the infant abandoned or even killed. As a consequence, young women and girls are being sold into marriage, in a revival of a once-standard feudal practice. According to Chinese government reports, in the first 10 months of 1990 alone, trafficking in brides increased by 60 percent over the previous year. Either kidnapped or sold by impoverished families, the young women are purchased by potential bridegrooms for up to $600. The government's Office for the Eradication of the Kidnapping and Sale of Women acknowledges some 50,000 such kidnappings per year (although human rights organizations believe the real numbers are much higher). And the profits are enormous. In a five-year peri- od, from 1991 to 1996, Chinese police freed 88,000 women and children who had been kidnapped for this purpose.

Particularly disturbing is the violence to which these forced brides are subjected. The abducted women, who can be as young as 13 or 14, are frequently gang-raped by the slave traders before being sold, a practice that is intended to terrify them into passivity, and is no doubt effective in many cases. Those who try to run from their new husbands are violently punished, even maimed, by the traffickers, in ways that are too sickening to be printed here.

In some cases, sex tours from the U.S. to the Third World are offered as a means by which lone- ly men can find a mate. Norman Barabash, who runs Big Apple Oriental Tours out of Queens, New York, views his tours as a social development program. Until recently, $2,200 bought 10 days and 11 nights of "paradise" in the Philippines; since last year, when Big Apple was banned from doing business in that country, Barabash has been sending American men to Thailand. Women in these countries have no jobs, and are dying to get American hus- bands, he says. "They are so set on landing one, they will do anything their conscience allows." According to Barabash, some 20 to 25 percent of his clients end up mar- rying women they meet on the tours.

Big Apple is only one of some 25 or 30 similar opera- tions in the U.S. that ride on—and promote—the myth that "exotic oriental women are thrilled to meet American men, and know how to please and serve them," says Ken Franzblau, a lawyer for Equality Now, a human rights organization. Franzblau went underground for almost two years to investigate sex-tour companies in the U.S. "I posed as a shy man who felt insecure around women, and inquired about taking such a trip," he says. "I was told that all kinds of kinky sex would be available, and that the tour guides would negotiate prices for me with the pimps."

Franzblau points out that the operators demean women at both ends of their business. Reads ones brochure: "Had enough of the American bitches who won't give you the time of day, and are only interested in your bank account? In Asia you'll meet girls who will treat you with respect and appreciation, unlike their American counterparts." These operators insist that American women are unloving, feminist manhaters, he says. "At the destination end, sex tours create the ever-increasing demand to bring young women and girls into the sex industry."

In the Philippines and Thailand, prostitution is ille- gal. Here in the U.S., as well as in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Australia—all countries where sex tours originate—such "tourism" is likewise illegal, although in this country, the law applies only to traveling with the intent to engage in a sexual act with a juvenile, which is punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment. In the four years this law has been in force, however, there have been no prosecutions.

It is also illegal in virtually every state of America (including New York where Big Apple operates), to pro- mote prostitution, or knowingly profit from it. Yet sex-tour operators openly advertise in magazines and on the Internet, and the websites of many feature hardcore pornographic photographs of promised "delights." So, too, do the videos they send potential customers. An hour-long video sent to men interested in going on a Big Apple tour and viewed by OTI shows what is described as a wet T- shirt contest, but in reality is more a sex circus in which young women are stripped, and a mob of raucous over- weight, aging American men suck on their nipples, per- form oral sex, and otherwise explore their body cavities as they are passed around the crowd. The video also offers "daily introductions to ladies of your choice who will be your companion for the night or around the clock." As two young women are shown cavorting naked in a Jacuzzi, the voice-over cautions that if viewers don't take a tour, they will "miss an afternoon at a sex motel with two lovely ladies."

There is nothing subtle or obscure about the promo- tional video and its customer come-ons, but in a letter to Democratic Senator Catherine Abate last September, Queens County District Attorney Richard Brown wrote: "Our investigation [of Big Apple Oriental Tours], which has been quite extensive and included the use of under- cover operatives as well as assistance provided by the FBI and the US Customs Service, has disclosed no provable violations of New York's criminal laws." At the time the decision not to pursue an indictment was made, the DA's office was in possession of the video.

After that ruling, Equality Now met with the DA, and offered additional evidence, including records of Franzblau's conversations with Big Apple's owner, and the reports of two men who took the tours. The DA has subsequently reopened his investigation of the company.

Many other countries are also lax about cracking down on trafficking. The Japanese not only appear to con- done the industry, they actively obstruct interference in it. Due to massive unemployment in the Philippines, even for those with college degrees, some 80,000 Filipinos work in Japan; 95 percent of them are women employed as "dance entertainers." Commonly, the passports of these "guest workers" are confiscated on arrival and their salaries withheld; according to Mizuho Matsuda, the director of HELP, the only shelter for abused migrant women workers in Tokyo, many are forced into prostitu- tion. Japan's criminal syndicate, the Yakuza, is heavily involved in trafficking women for the country's sex-and- entertainment industry, and like their Russian counter- part, have contacts in the government, and therefore often enjoy its protection.

A grisly side of a grim industry is highlighted by the death of 22-year-old Maricris Siosin, a graduate in modern dance. Five months after arriving in Tokyo, she was sent home in a closed coffin, with a death certificate stating she had died of hepatitis. When her family opened the cof- fin for the funeral, they discovered she had been beaten and stabbed. An autopsy conducted by the Philippines National Bureau of Investigation and confirmed, at the request of Equality Now, by a leading pathologist in the U.S., showed that a double-edged sword had been thrust into her vagina.

In Japan, S&M has a long tradition, and extremely violent S&M comics are readily available. Many male commuters openly read them instead of newspapers as they travel to and from work. One theory is that Maricris was forced to participate in a "snuff' movie (a porno flick in which the woman is actually killed).

A Philippine government mission which was sent to Japan to investigate the murder was turned away by Japanese authorities. Similarly, Maricris' family has been denied access to medical documents and police records. Some 33 Filipino workers died in Japan the same year Maricris was killed. At least 12 of these deaths took place under "suspicious circumstances."

In other countries, local authorities facilitate sex trafficking. In the southern Thai town of Ranong, for example, brothels are surrounded by electrified barbed wire and armed guards to keep girls from escaping. The local police chief condones the practice, describing the brothels as an important part of the local economy. And while prostitution is illegal in Thailand, customers and owners alike have no fear of arrest. The police can be bought off, or accept payment in kind—free use of the brothels; a number of them also act as procurers for the traffickers.

The government periodically promises to crack down on the industry, but because of the amount of money it generates, invariably looks the other way. Of the five million annual visitors to Thailand on tourist visas, three out of four are men traveling alone, many of them from Europe, the Middle East, Japan, and the U.S. When raids are planned, the police often alert the brothels ahead of time. The only people arrested are the young prostitutes. Tragically, they are then frequently "recycled," often wit the assistance of the local police, who resell them to agents of a different brothel. And so the tragic circle remains unbroken, until the girls become too sick to work, or die on the job, like the five young prostitutes on Phuket island, a popular vacation resort for foreigners in southern Thailand: When fire broke out in the brothel where they worked, they burned to death because they were chained to their beds and unable to escape.

Tourism in Thailand generates $3 billion annually, and the country's international image as a sexual par- adise has made prostitution one of its most valuable eco- nomic subsectors. That international reputation is one even the U.S. Navy has recognized. The first port of call and liberty shore leave for much of the U.S. fleet after the Gulf War was Pattaya, a beach resort notorious as a center of Thailand's sex industry. This apparent reward for service was given despite the fact that at that time at least 50 percent of the prostitutes in the region were HIV-positive. Another major destination for sex traffick- ers is India, where an estimated 15 million women and girls, many of whom have been sold into it from impov- erished Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, work in the sex industry.

"Women and girls are moved between a lot of dif- ferent countries," says a spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch. Moreover, trafficking is not only a global phenomenon, it is "a hidden one." For example, the orga- nization reported recently, the U.S. gives Thailand $4 million a year to control the traffic in narcotics, but no U.S. aid is aimed at curtailing sex trafficking there. It is imperative that the U.S. government "recognize the severity of the problem," says Human Rights Watch. "And the United Nations also needs to be very aggres- sive in fighting this modern form of slavery."

Jan Goodwin is an award-winning journalist and author, and a long-time human rights activist.