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The death of a former prostitute does not often merit public
attention. But then again, Norma Hotaling, who died this week at the
age of 57 from pancreatic cancer, was no ordinary former prostitute.
After twenty years of suffering in the sex trade industry, she not only
found the remarkable courage and strength to pull herself out of
devastating cycles of addiction, abuse and self-loathing, but she also
managed to create an organization, The SAGE Project of San Francisco (Standing Against Global Exploitation), that has saved the lives of hundreds of women and raised public and legislative awareness about the travesty that is the global sex trade industry. Oprah Winfrey made her part of the famous “Angel Network” for
her life’s work and accomplishments.
Human trafficking is an international crime generating more than US
$12 billion worldwide, according to the United Nations. More than
800,000 people are trafficked annually, forced into prostitution and
threatened with death should they attempt to escape the clutches of
their captors. According to Victor Malarek, author of The Natashas: Inside the Global Sex Trade, girls as young as 12 years old, especially from Third World and Eastern European countries, are often tricked into leaving their homelands with
dubious offers of jobs in modeling and other fields, or promises of
wealth and prosperity in other countries. Under these
false promises, they are sold into the sex trade by organized crime,
gangs, pimps and brothel owners, forced into situations in which “they
must submit, or they are raped, beaten and tortured,” he says. As
customers’ demands for slave trade workers who do not have HIV or AIDS
increases, the age of victims proportionally decreases. UNICEF claims
that approximately 1.7 billion children are victimized in this process
annually.
This topic should be of tremendous interest, especially in Israel,
which the lack of law enforcement on the issue has turned the country
into a paradise for international sex traders – and has forged a US$1
billion per year industry. According to a report released in 2005 by
the Knesset Subcommittee on Trafficking in Women, between 10,000 and
15,000 women had been smuggled into Israel over the previous four years
to work as prostitutes in more than 280 brothels in Tel Aviv alone.
There are an estimated 20,000 female sex slaves forced into
prostitution in Tel-Aviv each year paying for 45,000 acts of
prostitution every day. A woman, who is “purchased” at a public auction
for anywhere form $5,000 to $20,000, can have up to 25 “clients” a day.
Traffickers and pimps earn US $50,000 - $100,000 a year from each
prostituted woman.
According to the report, the women, who were mostly from the former
Soviet Union, are forced to work up to 18 hours a day and receive on
average only three percent of the money they earned from prostitution.
Most of the women had been smuggled over the Egyptian border and lured
from Russia and Eastern Europe on false promises of secretarial jobs,
and many were raped and beaten along the way. According to the Israel
News Agency:
These women, many from the former Soviet, are working as
prostitutes in a condition of virtual slavery. Many of the Russian
women who have ended up in Israel’s brothels, some smuggled into the
country from Egypt on the back of camels, expected to find jobs a
cleaners and or working in childcare. There are certain places where
auctions are taking place. The Israeli police well know the names. They
are nightclubs or regular bars. The women are brought there, buyers
come and look at their bodies and their teeth, then the bidding starts.
They are held by the pimps, beaten and totally isolated… They sleep in
shifts, four to a bed…They cannot walk freely. They cannot leave the
apartment as they wish. Usually the passports have been taken.
Until very recently, this topic was hidden in Israel, far from the
public eye and from governmental jurisdiction. The police was often
unable to do anything since Israel had no laws against human
trafficking or prostitution. According to Professor Ruth
Halperin-Kadari, author of Women in Israel: A State of their Own, there has been a steady increase in the number of women sold as sex slaves in Israel.
In 2000, the Knesset passed the Women’s Equal Rights Law, ruling
that anyone trading in human beings for prostitution or who forces a
human being to leave their country in order to deal with prostitution
can be sentenced to imprisonment. “Every woman has the right to be
protected against violence, sexual harassment, sexual abuse and the
trading of her body”.
The Israel Women’s Network, one of the founders of the Coalition
Against the Trafficking of Women, works on lobbying and advocacy on
behalf of the victims of sex trafficking. The coalition’s main
recommendations against the trafficking of women are:
· Investigating the lives of women who were
