sex trafficking sex trafficking Inside the Business of Modern Slavery Siddharth Kara Columbia University Press New York Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 2009 Siddharth Ashok Kara All rights reserved A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org. Library of Congress Cata loging- in- Publication Data Kara, Siddharth. Sex traffi cking : inside the business of modern slavery / Siddharth Kara. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 231- 13960- 1 (cloth : alk. paper)— I S B N 9 7 8 - 0 - 2 3 1 - 5 1 1 3 9 - 1 ( e - b o o k ) 1. Human traffi cking. 2. Human traffi cking—Prevention. 3. Minorities—Crimes against. 4. Minorities—Social conditions. 5. Minorities—Economic conditions. 6. Globalization—Economic conditions. 7. Prostitution. 8. Slavery. 9. Sex- oriented businesses. I. Title. HQ281.K37 2009 364.15—dc22 2008021988 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid- free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Their vessels now had made th’ intended land, And all with joy descend upon the strand; When the false tyrant seiz’d the princely maid, And to a lodge in distant woods convey’d; Pale, sinking, and distress’d with jealous fears, And asking for her sister all in tears. The letcher, for enjoyment fully bent, No longer now conceal’d his base intent; But with rude haste the bloomy girl defl ow’r’d, Tender, defenceless, and with ease o’erpower’d. Her piercing accents to her sire complain, And to her absent sister, but in vain: In vain she importunes, with doleful cries, Each unattentive godhead of the skies. —Ovid, Metamorphoses Contents Preface ix Ac know ledg ments xvii 1. Sex Traffi cking: An Overview 1 2. India and Nepal 45 3. Italy and Western Eu rope 83 4. Moldova and the Former Soviet Union 108 5. Albania and the Balkans 129 6. Thailand and the Mekong Subregion 152 7. The United States 179 8. A Framework for Abolition: Risk and Demand 200 viii contents Appendix A: Selected Tables and Notes 221 Appendix B: Contemporary Slavery Economics 227 Appendix C: Selected Human Development Statistics 259 Notes 263 Works Cited 279 Index 285 Preface After my third research trip into the global sex traffi cking industry, I brooded for twenty- four hours on a fl ight from Mumbai to Los Angeles, wondering how to write this book. Countless faces of torture, savagery, and abject slavery swirled in my mind. I did not know how I would con- vey these stories; I knew only that the truths of the scores of sex slaves I met in brothels, massage parlors, street corners, and apartments across the world must be told, however unpalatable those truths may be. Though I originally intended this book as a systematic narration of my journey into the sex traffi cking industry, a much broader intention began to form in my mind. I realized I wanted to recount a life- altering journey, one that motivated in me a newfound mission to contribute to more success- ful international eff orts to abolish sex traffi cking and all other forms of contemporary slavery. That slavery still exists may surprise some readers, but the practice of violently coerced labor continues to thrive in every corner of the globe. There were 28.4 million slaves in the world at the end of 2006, and there will most likely be a greater number by the time you read this book (see table A.1 for detail). Some are child slaves in India, stolen from their homes and worked sixteen hours a day to harvest the tea that middle- class consumers drink or sew the carpets that adorn their sitting rooms. Others x preface are bonded laborers in South Asia, Latin America, and Africa, who accrue or inherit debts that can never be repaid, no matter how long they work. Slaves in the United States harvest agricultural products: onions, avoca- dos, and corn in Texas, California, Florida, and the Carolinas. Up to 5 percent of the world’s cocoa beans are picked by slave hands in the Ivory Coast. Slaves continue to harvest coff ee in Kenya and Ethiopia, and they burn wood in hellish furnaces in Brazil to produce charcoal that is used to temper the steel in everything from garden shears to car axles. Approxi- mately 1.2 million of these 28.4 million slaves are young women and chil- dren, who were deceived, abducted, seduced, or sold by families to be prostituted across the globe. These sex slaves are forced to ser vice hun- dreds, often thousands of men before they are discarded, forming the backbone of one of the most profi table illicit enterprises in the world. Drug traffi cking generates greater dollar revenues, but traffi cked women are far more profi table. Unlike a drug, a human female does not have to be grown, cultivated, distilled, or packaged. Unlike a drug, a human fe- male can be used by the customer again and again. The brutalities associated with sex slavery are perverse, violent, and utterly destructive. Whips, cigarette burns, broken bones, starvation— every slave has suff ered these tortures, but sex slaves suff er each of these as well as innumerable counts of rape - ten, fi fteen, twenty or more times per day. In brothels across the globe, I met women and children who suf- fered unspeakable acts of barbarity. Meeting these victims was not easy. With each interview, I became increasingly fi lled with heartbreak, sor- row, and rage. Nothing I write can possibly convey the sensation of peer- ing into the moribund eyes of a broken child who has been forced to have sex with hundreds of men before the age of sixteen. I am often asked how I fi rst became “interested” in the topic of sex traffi cking. The seeds of my research were sown years ago, in Winter 1994, when I was a ju nior at Duke University. A story on CNN spot- lighted a young Croatian girl, fourteen years old, from a well- to- do family in Zagreb. She was breaking swimming rec ords across Eu rope and in- tended to swim for Croatia in the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Hopes were high that she would bring home more than one gold medal to the fl edgling country. One night, as she slept, a bomb sent shrapnel fl ying into her bedroom, shattering her legs. She would never swim again. As I watched this story in the midst of stressful fi rst- semester exami- nations, I was fi lled with indignation. This young girl’s talent put her preface xi in the top 0.001 percent of swimmers in the world, and mindless vio- lence had ruined her life. Who was I to bemoan having too many papers to write when there were far more exceptional individuals than I whose lives were destroyed at the age of fourteen? I resolved to travel to the for- mer Yugo slavia and do what I could to help. I joined forces with two Duke graduate students and procured a faculty sponsor, interviewed a handful of students to join us, found one student at Duke from the for- mer Yugo slavia and met weekly to learn Bosnian from her, procured a grant from the Duke board of directors, contacted the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to get placements in refu- gee camps, and spent eight weeks volunteering in those camps in Sum- mer 1995. My camp was located in Novo Mesto, Slovenia, about sixty kilometers west of the Croatian border. The camp was populated by fi ve hundred former occupants of a town in northwest Bosnia called Velika Kladusa. In late 1991, Serb soldiers raided the village, executed the men, burned down the homes, and told the survivors—mostly el der ly and children— that they would kill them if they stayed. The survivors walked for days to reach the Croatian border, where UN personnel sent them to the camp in Slovenia. They were not sent to camps in Croatia, which were much closer, because those camps were full. In the Novo Mesto camp, the refugees lived six to a room, shared the same fi lthy outdoor toilets, and were served two meals a day of stale bread, oily soup, and rotting brown salad. We three Duke students lived just as the refugees did. That summer, I lost eigh teen pounds, struggled to have any sort of positive eff ect on the refugees’ lives, and learned that all they really wanted was to have someone listen. So I listened—to a fa- ther who was once an engineer for Boeing in Sarajevo, who spoke of the destruction of his home and the sorrow that his children had not been in school for almost four years; to the el der ly women who had outlived their children and watched their grandchildren rot from malnourishment; to the teenagers who drowned their sorrows in alcohol and self- hatred. Last, but far from least, I heard stories of Serb soldiers who raped and traf- fi cked young Bosnian Muslim women by the truckloads to brothels across Eu rope. It took me a few years to pro cess my experiences in Slovenia.