Trafficking – Moldova – Dubai – Story & Video

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TRAFFICKING – Story & Video –
Moldova – Dubai +

FRONTLINE/World is a national public TV
series that turns its lens on the global community, covering countries and
cultures rarely seen on American television.

FRONTLINE
has served as American public television’s – PBS – flagship public affairs
series.

Article: https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2007/09/dubai_sex_for_s.html

Video: https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/flash_point/001moldova/

Moldova: The Price of Sex – Live
Footage of Victims of Trafficking to Dubai +

Dubai:
Night Secrets
 
By Mimi Chakarova
September 13, 2007

Four years ago, I began a photo project on the sex trafficking of young
women in Eastern Europe. I interviewed and photographed girls who had escaped.
Some had been trafficked to Turkey and Russia. Others were taken as far as the
United Arab Emirates, lured by the promise of legitimate jobs and a brighter
future. Once they arrived in the new country, they were priced and sold, and
their documents taken away. The young women told me they were forced to service
mechanics, soldiers, priests, butchers, tourists, and even U.N. personnel who
were supposed to protect them.

I grew up in Eastern Europe and met Vika on my second reporting trip to Moldova.
(You can hear Vika’s story in the FlashPoint slideshow, Moldova:
The Price of Sex.) She told me she had been trafficked to Dubai, at times
serving 30 clients a day. She quickly learned the only English words necessary
to keep her owner from hitting her: “How much?” and “With or
without plastic?” Once, without plastic, her luck ran out and she got
pregnant. It didn’t matter. Her pimp kept her working for the duration of her
pregnancy.

After hearing Vika’s stories, Dubai became a place I felt I had to see to
understand.

Dubai has been described as the Las Vegas of the Middle East. Emerging as a
world business hub in the last decade, the city strives to keep breaking new records:
the world’s tallest building, the world’s first seven star hotel, the world’s
biggest shopping mall, the world’s largest manmade port. Dubai’s free trade
zone is a major enticement for foreign investors, and the boomtown atmosphere
has attracted more than 180 nationalities to come live and work here. In this
playground of the Middle East, I found indoor ski slopes, camel races and
dizzying skyscrapers.

When I arrived to report this story with my video camerawoman Sachi
Cunningham, I was prepared to confront the human degradation of Vika’s
experience, but I was surprised to find something else. I met women working as
prostitutes who told me that they were doing so because they had chosen to.
Sasha, for example, was trafficked from Siberia and serviced clients against
her will. But then she managed to run away from her madam and decided to
continue to work as a prostitute on her own. Her English was good, so I asked
her why she didn’t find a job as a salesperson in one of the many shopping
malls in Dubai. She said she could earn more in one night as a prostitute than
working a whole month in sales. And she wouldn’t have to stand on her feet all
day. Like many other girls I spoke with, Sasha charges $500 dirhams per hour
(about US$140). She told me that the money she sends home to Siberia has
allowed her family to build a house.

I met another woman from Azerbaijan who was living with a
“boyfriend,” the term she used to describe one of her regular
clients. She told me how he would often lock her in the apartment to keep her
services exclusively for himself. When I first met her, she talked about her
son back home and how she had sent money to buy him his first computer. The
second time we met, she was drunk and missing a front tooth. When I asked her
what had happened, she shrugged it off: “We got into a fight, he punched
me,” she said, lighting up another cigarette.

Men outnumber women 3 to 1 in Dubai, and the variety of places to purchase
sex is abundant — from the brothels where Vika described being sold and resold
and the back alleys where migrant workers pay for a few minutes of pleasure, to
the mainstream Westernized nightclubs, often inside upscale hotels, where women
from all over the world congregate according to their nationalities awaiting
the next client.

In a Muslim country, where prostitution is illegal, we decided the only way
to get a closer look at Dubai’s barely disguised sex trade was to visit some of
these clubs and capture for ourselves the city’s night secrets.