Tens of thousands of women are trafficked every year into the sexual slavery of prostitution. Deception, intimidation, and body parts in bin bags, forms the terrorising reality for those whose lives have been stolen and traded as a sexual commodity in the twenty first century slave trade.
A former head of the Vice Unit in the London Metropolitan Police, Paul Holmes has repeatedly stated, that:
“the UK vice trade is out of control. … ‘sexual slavery,’…It’s a huge problem’.” [1]
Former Inspector Holmes is an exception. The norm is that of callous complicity and indifference by the authorities – an indifference that not only serves to leave women and children vulnerable, but makes them easy prey to criminals who know that the ‘problem’ is tolerated by law enforcement agencies, who implement a derisory token deterrence. The response of the police in the summer of 2003 on finding the body parts of two women prostitutes in Liverpool was to issue “personal attack alarms”, and to advise prostitutes for the moment: “not to use unsafe routes to ply their trade”. The BBC reported that:
Detectives have named one of two women whose dismembered bodies were found in a Liverpool alley. Hanane Parry, 19, had been working as a prostitute in the Everton area, where the body parts were discovered. … The bodies … were found … cut up and placed in bin bags. … Chief Superintendent Mike Langdon said: “We will be handing out personal safety advice and personal attack alarms to prostitutes and encouraging the use of safe routes. “Obviously at the moment it would be preferable for them not to use unsafe routes to ply their trade.” [2]
“Ply their trade”? These poor women are not carpenters or electricians, they are not trades people, they are victims of a system of exploitation.
Chambers Dictionary defines prostitution as: to hire out for indiscriminate sexual acts. This dispassionate tool-shop-hire-description, belies the scale and savagery of the human exploitation that is involved in prostitution, and hides the capitalist system’s involvement in human trafficking, behind a false notion of personal choice.
Based on the ECPAT[3] European Law Enforcement Groups’ definition, I use the term trafficking to mean:
Any behaviour which facilitates the entry into, transit through, residence in or exit from any territory, for the purposes of sexual exploitation. It is irrelevant whether force is used or the child / woman has been misled.
This article is not addressing the issue of sex, but that of exploitation. It is important to understand and separate the life enhancing activity of sex, from that of prostitution and human trafficking. While the sex act maybe involved, the issue is not about pleasant consensual sex, no matter how much the “punter”, “end user”, “abuser”, may delude themselves, – underpinning the ‘trade’ is forced exploitation.
Prostitution is not a life style choice. There may be some individuals for whom it is, but the idea that prostitution for the vast vast majority of women and children subjected to this form of exploitation is a life style choice, is a lie, perpetrated by parasitic exploiters and imperialism’s Hollywood myth making machine. It is economic and social conditions which aid criminals to force women and children into what is organised slavery. Imperialism and war intensify the economic and social conditions upon which human trafficking and sexual exploitation thrives. As a result, the numbers of women and children forced into prostitution have increased enormously.
The Scale of Human Trafficking
According to the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons 2002 Report: “Trafficking has reached staggering dimensions around the globe.”[4]
Despite the deliberate and institutional hindering of the gathering of evidence detailing the scale of the exploitation involved, case studies and figures are beginning to emerge, which provide fragmented evidence of the horrendous and obscene reality of the trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation:
Police estimate that: 10,000 illegal immigrants are working as prostitutes in Britain today. Many are from Eastern Europe, brought here by ruthless … human traffickers.[5]
Up to 1,400 women a year are smuggled into the country (UK) illegally …and forced into prostitution under threat of violence or reprisals against their families back home.[6]
Over the past year (2002), at least 700,000, and possibly as many as four million men women and children worldwide were bought, sold, transported and held against their will in slave-like conditions.[7]
The Balkans and the former Soviet Union are the main routes into western Europe for the trade, which is said to make … throughout the world up to $12bn (£7.6bn) a year.[8]
The same crime groups that traffic in drugs and weapons are often the same gangs that traffic in human beings.[9]
Albanian criminals are trafficking girls as young as 12 and prostituting them on the streets of London.[10]
The influx of women from Eastern Europe into the UK vice trade, is out of control.[11]
Why is the ‘trade’ out of control? What has caused such a massive increase in human exploitation? Is it economic and ideological forces, or is it as some contend, mysterious millennial forces?
Hyped-up Dates Distorting the Proletariat’s Reading of Reality
Are dates themselves of social significance? In terms of human social development, 1917 marks an enormous advance, while 1914 and 1939 mark high points in imperialism’s relentless necessity to slaughter. The peddlers of mystification, who manufacture ‘culture’ out of all manner of distractions, even set great store by dates that end in zeroes. Hence the second millennium, ending in three zeroes, provided an excuse for a massive diversionary spending spree, and when it’s someone else’s money that is being spent, spending over £800 million[12] on a temporary domed tent, along with dozens of other multi-million pound schemes, such expenditure is not regarded as excessive. But impulse spenders, like imperialist warmongers, can be so fickle. They become addicted to spending and bombing, finding it impossible to give up, they’re never really satisfied, one bombing raid doesn’t satisfy them, one war is never enough. They buy a millennium dome, and within 12 months, there fed up with it, and it’s something else.
Imperialist warmongers can be quite brazen. Just when you’ve spent millions on the millennium, they turn round and say it wasn’t such a big deal after all, but this new date is. Take the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, few made more of a song and dance about the millennium than Tony, but come the 2001 Labour Party Conference, and this is how he starts his speech:
“In retrospect the Millennium marked only a moment in time. It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history.” Prime Minister Tony Blair’s 2001 Labour Party Conference speech: Independent 2 October 2001.
This is not September 1970 when Salvador Allende in Chile, became the first Marxist to attain the Presidency by free democratic elections, nor is it 11 September 1973, when an American CIA backed coup overthrew and shot the democratically elected Marxist President Allende and installed the brutally repressive military dictatorship of Pinochet.
No, for fickle, and increasingly fanatical Tony, 11 September 2001, is just the latest date to be harnessed for the purpose of perpetrating political deception in the service of imperialism’s greedy beneficiaries. This event, at which under 3,000 people lost their lives – amounts to a couple of hours worth of children who die daily[13], due to preventable hunger and hunger related diseases. In a capitalist dominated world, where there is enough food produced to feed everyone, tens of thousands of children die every day. But Blair and the imperialist system he represents, spout platitudes about “evil” and “the poor and dispossessed”, while the political and social reality of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, reinforce the fact that imperialism, which is the monopoly stage of capitalism, is an obscenity.
For the international proletariat, who bear the brunt of the exploitation resulting from imperialism’s economic impositions and warmongering, the 11th of September attacks on the military heart and the economic head of the world’s dominant imperialist power, mark a date that has been cynically used by US/UK imperialism to increase their flagrant abuse of international law, and to cowardly carpet bomb and illegally occupy country after country with impunity.
Blair, Bush, Clinton, Robertson, Albright, Cook, Solana, Shea, Straw, Thatcher, Reagan, Nixon, MacDonald, Atlee, Roosevelt and all their predecessors, have perpetrated political deception in order for imperialism’s greedy beneficiary class, the bourgeoisie, to continue to make obscene profits from state-funded wars and the stripping of assets from subjugated countries.
Unlike the Millennium and September 2001 ‘moments in time’, a date that marks a far more significant turning point in history, is 1991. The year 1991, as the social degradation and wars of the last decade and the opening of the twenty-first century bear witness, marked an enormous socially regressive step for the international proletariat. The undermining of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, was heralded by every rancid anti-communist organ on every continent, as a new world order that would deliver a peace dividend. What has been delivered in reality, is a taking the piss dividend. Yet millions remain duped, and still buy into the anti-communist deception which imperialism peddles.
In order for international social development and genuine liberation to advance, it is imperative that lessons are learnt from the restoration of capitalism in formerly communist societies, and that the increasing imperialist subjugation of countries under the guise of liberation, be exposed as the malignant capitalist deception that it truly is.
1991: Putrefied Capitalism is Restored
1991 was the year when capitalism returned, like a disease that was thought to have been eradicated, to re-infect the communist Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. In capitalist Britain, the bourgeois media promoted this return as a social advance that was going to deliver a peace dividend, and in defiance of logic, declared the return of the old moribund system of capitalism, as being a “new” world order.
The rebranding of the old cancerous disease of capitalism, was also celebrated in Britain by the Trotskyite counter-revolutionary press, who exposed their true political function, and aped the mainstream capitalist media, except from a pseudo ‘left’ position of course. The front cover of one such publication dated September 1991, had the prerequisite close cropped image of two or three people cheering, with the word: VICTORY!, emblazoned across it, and the declaration spelt out underneath: “People Celebrate Soviet Dis-Union”. Over a decade later, we are now in a position to ask the question: How does the Trotskyite counter-revolutionary rhetoric measure up against the material and social reality?
What has the “Soviet Dis-Union”, which the Trotskyite’s gloated over, meant economically?
One can understand the enemies of the proletariat crowing at the undermining of the Soviet Union, after all they had schemed, lied, and been bribed for decades, to bring such a situation about. The reality though was very different from that which the poisonous Trotskyite counter-revolutionaries had been deceitfully prophesying. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, did not, as they had hoodwinkingly been claiming, herald the start of a new proletarian revolution, but the restoration of capitalism with all its attendant social ills. What is amazing, is that anyone still listens to Trotskyites, given that they are capitalist agents or the deluded followers of capitalist agents, who have served to inflict nothing but indignity and misery upon the proletariat of the former Soviet Union. A Union that paid with millions of lives, in order to prevent the spread of the brutality that is capitalism with the gloves off, namely fascism. A Union that is no longer available to stand as it did throughout its existence, as a bulwark against the creeping fascism that is once again emerging.
Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, wrote an assessment of the immediate economic impact on the people, of the restoration of capitalism. It is titled: “Economic Shock Treatment” in the former Soviet Union, in which Professor Chossudovsky states:
When assessing the impact on earnings, employment and social services, the post-cold War economic collapse in parts of Eastern Europe appears to be far deeper and more destructive than that of the Great Depression. In the former Soviet Union (starting in early 1992), hyperinflation triggered by the downfall of the ruble contributed to rapidly eroding real earnings. “Economic shock treatment” combined with the privatization program precipitated entire industries into immediate liquidation leading to the lay-off of millions of workers.
In the Russian Federation, prices increased one hundred times following the initial round of macro-economic reforms adopted by the Yeltsin government in January 1992; wages on the other hand increased ten-fold; the evidence suggests that real purchasing power had plummeted by more than 80 percent in the course of 1992. [14]
To translate Professor Chossudovsky’s figures into an equivalent for us in Britain, taking just the catastrophic drop in purchasing power alone, leaving aside all the horrendous ramifications of the collapse of the universal provision of the social welfare infrastructure, an 80 percent drop in purchasing power, is like having every pound you own, suddenly turn into 20 pence pieces.
What has the “Soviet Dis-Union”, which the Trotskyites gloated over, meant for life expectancy?
Under communism, life expectancy for males up until 1991, stood like that of other developed countries, at 70+ years. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, with the restoration of capitalism, life expectancy declined every year, reaching a situation in 1996, whereby:
for many of the countries of the former Soviet Union, life expectancy fell even farther than in previous years. In Russia male life expectancy dropped to only 57 years, nearly as low as in many industrialized countries at the beginning of the 20th century. [15]
An almost twenty year drop in life expectancy for a developed country is historically unprecedented.
What has the “Soviet Dis-Union”, which the Trotskyite’s gloated over, meant for women?
Research published almost a decade after the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union, states that:
“The largest number, of the more than 175,000 victims trafficked annually from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, come from Russia and Ukraine.” [16]
That is 175,000 lives destroyed.
How much concern is expressed for these victims of market forces? How much recognition is there for the misery and degradation resulting from the restoration of capitalism? Would this have been happening without the ideological catastrophe that culminated in 1991?
Since the communist system was replaced with capitalism’s market forces in 1991, trafficking and the sexual exploitation of women and children has increased massively. As have the number of victims whose lives have been destroyed by the restoration of capitalism.
Former Communist Children Experience Capitalist Reality
Take the example of Anna, a Romanian girl who was sold to criminals in 1998 when she was just 12 years old. The brutality and degradation she had to endure before running away from her pimp, after being prostituted on the streets of London, sheds light on the reality of the restoration of capitalism’s market forces on former communist societies.
Anna was first sold by a relative for £600. Years of harrowing abuse followed, as she became another statistic in the slave trade in children from former communist countries, supplying the western European market’s demand for the prostituting of increasingly younger children.
Anna was “brought to London in July 2001, when she was 15. By that stage she had already been sold on twice. Weeks after leaving Romania she was taken to the capital of Macedonia, Skopje, where she was forced to work in a strip club and have sex with customers. A few months later another gang bought her for £2,300. She was taken to Albania and then by boat to Naples, where she was again forced to work as a prostitute.” [17]
Anna’s living nightmare is just one example of exploitation perpetrated by the growing problem of Albanian criminals who have established themselves in Britain over the past 10 years. The pimp Anna ran away from was an Albanian, Mustapha Kadiu, who used to threaten her at knifepoint, saying he was going “to kill her whenever she failed to earn between £400 and £500 a day – (she charged £30 for straight sex).” [18]
A conservative estimate would indicate a £100,000 a year return from the exploitation of just this one victim.
I would urge a word of caution here, in terms of not falling into the trap of viewing this as a cultural problem, which some of imperialism’s apologists attempt to do. It is poverty and the exploitative economic capitalist system that creates the conditions for trafficking to flourish, and for a greedy few to make millions, from the ruthless exploitation of others.
As tens of thousands of former Soviet citizens are now learning in practice: a prostitute is a victim of the capitalist system. Former Soviet and East European citizens are experiencing first hand what happens when capitalism’s dominant class – the bourgeoisie – gets the upper hand. As Marx and Engels observed in 1848:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand,…has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.”…It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. And in place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation. [19]
Imperialism – the monopoly stage of capitalism, deceitfully and deliberately manipulates the economic and social conditions so as to perpetuate human exploitation. And since the undermining of the Soviet Union, and the spread of imperialism and its capitalist ideology, trafficking and prostitution have increased massively, as have the profits accrued from it.
American research bears this out:
The sex trade has become a development strategy and source of income with profits in some countries amounting to 14 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) …. Reportedly, profits from sex trafficking and sex industries, rival and surpass those from international drug trafficking. However, the penalties for human trafficking are far less punitive in most countries than the penalties for drug trafficking. The same crime groups that traffic in drugs and weapons are often the same gangs that traffic in human beings. [20]
Capitalism Approved Crime
A glaring case of capitalism co-ordinating the criminality involved in the trafficking of drugs, weapons, and human beings, is the Albanian KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) and their Albanian criminal gang off shoots, which thanks to US/UK directed NATO, now operate across Europe and throughout Britain. Over the period of the 1990’s:
Drug barons in Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia (with links to the Italian mafia) had become the new economic elites, often associated with Western business interests. In turn the financial proceeds of the trade in drugs and arms were recycled towards other illicit activities (and vice versa) including a vast prostitution racket between Albania and Italy. Albanian criminal groups operating in Milan, “have become so powerful running prostitution rackets that they have even taken over the Calabrians in strength and influence.” [21]
This situation has not arisen by accident, but has been intentionally engineered, As Professor Chossudovsky’s paper on ‘The KLA: gangsters, terrorists and the CIA’, forcefully states:
the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is upheld as a self-respecting nationalist movement struggling for the rights of ethnic Albanians. The truth of the matter is that the KLA is sustained by organized crime with the tacit approval of the United States and its allies. [22]
This is not just Professor Chossudovsky’s opinion, but a matter of documented evidence compiled by Europol (the European Police Organization based in the Hague) and reported by The Times newspaper:
‘Following a pattern set during the War in Bosnia, public opinion has been carefully misled. The multibillion dollar Balkans narcotics trade has played a crucial role in “financing the conflict” in Kosovo in accordance with Western economic, strategic and military objectives. Amply documented by European police files, acknowledged by numerous studies, the links of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to criminal syndicates in Albania, Turkey and the European Union have been known to Western governments and intelligence agencies since the mid-1990s. [23]
Misleading public opinion, and the suppressing of evidence of US imperialism’s complicity in international crime, not just trafficking, but terrorism, carpet bombing, assassinations, gross breaches of international law, and the illegal and violent occupation of countries, is more than a pattern, it is a constant on-going process driven by an economic system based on exploitation. That economic system is capitalism.
[to be continued]
NOTES:
[1] John Gibb: The Observer. Sunday February 23, 2003. [2] BBC News Tuesday, 22 July, 2003. [3] ECPAT – End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking. [4] US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2002, p. 7. [5] Ibid. [6] Gaby Hinsliff: The Observer. February 23, 2003. [7] US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2002. [8] Ian Traynor: The Guardian. Friday December 13, 2002. [9] Janice G. Raymond, & Donna M. Hughes: SEX TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES: INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC TRENDS. Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. March 2001 p. 90. [10] The Guardian, Monday December 23, 2002. [11] Former Metropolitan Police Inspector and operational head of the Vice Unit at Charing Cross for six years, Paul Holmes, quoted by John Gibb: The Observer. Sunday February 23, 2003. [12] Just maintaining the empty shell of the Millennium Dome is “costing taxpayers £250,000 each month”, and has been doing so for over two years. See Guardian 29 July 2003. [13] “Over 12 million children under five will die from poverty-related illness this year”. Publicity leaflet published by the World Development Movement 2003. [14] Michel Chossudovsky, Ottawa, 1998. Global Poverty in the 21st. Century. [15] Encyclopædia Britannica 1994-2000. Year in Review 1996, More Developed Countries. [16] U.S. Department of State Congressional Research Service Report 98-649 C. May 10, 2000. Francis T. Miko: Trafficking in Women and Children: The U.S. and International Response. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid. [19] Abridged quote from: MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. [From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels] First published in 1848. [20] Janice G. Raymond, & Donna M. Hughes: SEX TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES: INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC TRENDS. Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. March 2001 p. 90. [21] Michel Chossudovsky: The KLA: gangsters, terrorists and the CIA. emperors-clothes 1999. [22] Ibid. [23] Ibid. See Roger Boyes and Eske Wright: Drugs Money Linked to the Kosovo Rebels. The Times, London, 24 March 1999.
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