Here is a telling image of globalization, capitalist-style, at the start ofthe 21st century: a young Russian woman dressed in a skimpy halter, tightjeans and stiletto heels stands by a Czech highway close to the Germanborder, yelling at passing motorists: “Ich mach alles!” — I do everything.

The highway in question, E-55 between Dresden and Prague, is so crammed withthese women that it has been dubbed the “Highway of Love.” Because pricesare relatively cheap, it is popular with German and Austrian men and noweven attracts a clientele from around the world. Many of the women areteenagers and some not even that. They come not only from Russia but frommany other old Soviet bloc countries, notably Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria,Georgia and Moldova. But out on the “Highway of Love” they’re all justRussians and they all come with a generic name — Natasha.

The “Natashas” are part of a vast new underground economy — the traffickingof women and children. Groups like Amnesty International and UNICEF havebeen sounding the alarm about it for years. Now a new book by CTV reporterVictor Malarek — The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade — paints a harrowingpicture of this merchandising of human beings.

The numbers are staggering: 800,000 to 900,000 women and children a year arebeing trafficked, according to the U.S. State Department. UNICEF believes thatthe numbers for children alone could be as high as one million.

The money is also staggering — $12 billion a year, which means that humanshave become almost as lucrative to traffic as drugs or weapons. It is verymuch a “win-win” type of business: the “exporter” can make several thousanddollars a head, with very little overhead, while the “owner” can usuallymake back his initial investment in a few days. By working these women asmuch as 15 hours a day, six or seven days a week, and paying them onlyenough for food and cigarettes, a pimp can rake in anywhere from $75,000 to$250,000 per woman, according to the police agency Interpol. Those areprofit margins that even Enron would envy. Moreover the “risk-benefit ratio”is much better than running guns or peddling drugs because legalsanctions tend to be much lighter, when they are enforced at all.

And there is no lack of “raw material.” In the old Soviet bloc, the returnof capitalism since 1990 has been an unmitigated disaster for the greatmajority of the population. Unemployment is rampant, the social safety nethas been all but destroyed and living standards have collapsed — in short, there is destitution on a colossal scale.

But in the wonderful world of capitalism, one person’s misery is anotherperson’s market opportunity. Desperate people are easy prey. An ad in alocal paper promising jobs in the West as secretaries, models, waitresses ornannies nets hundreds of applicants. Or there are orphanages where a crop of16 or 17-year-olds can easily be “harvested,” since the cash-strappedinstitutions are only too glad to have these children taken off their hands,and some officials (for a price) knowingly collude with a supposedlylong-lost “uncle” or “aunt” who suddenly turns up to take a girl “home.”

Soon the victims are packed off to various “training” centres, particularlyin another traumatized part of the world, the Balkans. Here nobody makes anypretence: rapes, beatings and burning cigarettes are commonly used toterrorize the women into submission. Then they are ready to be auctioned offto the highest bidder, often in much the same way as at a cattle sale. At aplace called the Arizona Market in northwestern Bosnia, “The girls appearnaked on stage with numbers in their hands. Men walk up, touch their flesh,inspect their skin and even look into their mouths before they make a bid.”(The Natashas, p. 37). The market was originally set up by the U.S. army as amodel of the benefits of the free market, and it seems to have demonstratedthat only too well.

Many of the women are then shipped around the world, most often to westernEurope, North America and the Middle East (notably to Israel, Turkey and theoil-rich emirates). Corruption opens borders and secures whatever documentsare needed. The women are locked up when they aren’t working and have nocontact with the outside world. Alone, penniless, in a strange part of theworld and living in constant fear of their “employer,” it isn’t any wonderthat most of them submit to their enslavement.

The few who are brave enough to go to the police find themselves treated ascriminals: typically they are jailed and deported as illegal aliens. Giventhat cops are often “customers” themselves, the sense of isolation andhelplessness these women feel must be overwhelming.

Brutal measures, including murder, are used against anyone attempting toescape. But for those who do manage it or who are deported, the nightmarestill isn’t over: as many as half of them end up being re-trafficked.Usually the ordeal only ends when the women are no longer marketable, oftenbecause they have contracted AIDS or some other sexually transmitteddisease. Then they are simply tossed aside like garbage, to make way forfresh recruits. Inevitably, the horror of it all drives some of them tosuicide.

It is hard not to be overwhelmed by moral outrage in reacting to a storylike this. But outrage on its own doesn’t get you very far. Malarek hasplenty of outrage but precious little insight, and often undercuts the casehe is making with inane comments and stereotyped characterizations. (Itdoesn’t help that the writing often seems like imitation Dashiell Hammett.)

We are told, for instance, that in contrast to the plight of the Natashas,Western prostitutes “choose” to be in the sex trade. But nobody “chooses” tobe a prostitute — people are only forced into it by dire circumstances, mostoften poverty and addiction. This may be a more indirect form of compulsionthan the Natashas face, but it is no less crushing, and the ultimate fateof “domestic” prostitutes can be just as horrifying, as the Green Rivermurders in Seattle or the Robert Picton mass murder case in Vancouverdemonstrate all too grimly.

Malarek is also obtuse when it comes to men’s “lust,” the force thatpresumably drives the sex trade. All he has to offer is a little homily onhow men should keep their pants on: there is “no biological imperative” tohave orgasms, so it really comes down to a moral choice, i.e. the men whouse prostitutes are evil. Masturbation isn’t much better, since a lot ofinternet porn exploits Natashas as well. So if you aren’t lucky enough tohave a satisfying consensual sexual relationship — and that would apply to avery large chunk of humanity — then the only “decent” thing to do isabstain.

This is a very old line of argument — the Christian church has beenpreaching it for 2000 years, but not with much effect: the “oldestprofession” is still with us, flourishing in fact. Of course individualsbear responsibility for their acts, and a man who pays for sex isvictimizing the woman whose body he is “purchasing.” But to leave it at thatis to completely miss the crucial question — which is why it is that so manymen keep “choosing” to be evil.

(In passing, it is worth noting how selective this kind of traditionalmorality is. Surely greed, as much as lust, is what drives the sex trade.Why not demand that traffickers abstain from greed? But that seemsinconceivable: you can do without sex but it is impossible to imagine aworld without greed — impossible, that is, for someone who takes the systemas a given.)

We need to shift the point of view from an individual to a socialperspective. What does it say about the state of marriage today, and ofsexual relationships generally, that a million women and children a year arebeing trafficked into prostitution, on top of the millions of un-traffickedwomen already in the sex trade? And think about where many of the Natashasend up — Bosnia, Israel, Turkey — areas of the world ravaged by war andsocial turmoil. Sex and family life aren’t immune from this larger brutality. How could they be?

The crux of the issue is not evil people but an evil system. So long as themarketplace is the decisive factor in society, so long as the “bottom line”in human affairs is measured in dollars and cents, there will always be anirresistible pressure to turn sex into a commodity. In the last threedecades, there have been no fewer than four waves of mass sexual enslavementof women, first in Southeast Asia, then Africa, Latin America and noweastern Europe. In other words, wherever destitution is rife, the socialplague of the sex trade flourishes.

Pious condemnations from governments change nothing. (And no one is morepious than the United Nations, whose personnel have been directly implicatedin the sex trade in Bosnia.) It is time we did more than decry the latestvictims. It is time we figured out how to stop a “fifth wave” fromhappening.