Victor Malarek - The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It

The

JOHNS

ALSO BY VICTOR MALAREK

The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade

The

JOHNS

SEX FOR SALE AND THE

MEN WHO BUY IT

Victor

MALAREK

Arcade Publishing New York

Copyright 2009, 2011 by Victor Malarek

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61145-012-5

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Norma Hotaling, 19512008.

Norma was a beacon of hope and courage an extraordinary woman who transformed her tragic experiences in prostitution into a mission of social justice for those who had been trafficked and victimized in prostitution.

Unfortunately, power is something that women abjure once they perceive the great difference between the lives possible to men and women, and the violence necessary to men to maintain their positions of authority.

CAROLYN HEILBRUN,
WRITING A WOMAN'S LIFE

S TEFA THOUGHT SHE WAS GOING to clean hotel rooms in Paris. Instead the sixteen-year-old Moldovan, who had just graduated from high school, was sold to a trafficker by her best friend's boyfriend. Under the cover of darkness, she was smuggled into Serbia and taken to an apartment building outside Belgrade to be broken. Weeks later, she was stripped naked, paraded on a stage in front of a dozen men, and auctioned off like an animal. She was purchased by an Albanian pimp and a few days later smuggled into Italy. She walked the streets of Mestra, a town outside Venice, wearing cheap makeup, a short skirt, a low-cut halter, and stiletto heels. Throughout the night, men and women drove by in their cars, rolled down the windows, and shouted, Whore! But no one ever stopped to ask if she needed help, she recounted when we spoke at a safe house. Nor did any of the johns who put money down for her bother to look into her pleading eyes. To them, she was just a prostitute, their property for an hour.

One night, after yet another beating for not making enough money, she summoned up the courage to bolt from her captor.

THE PHOTO IN THE ROMANIAN PASSPORT was of a timid, happy nineteen-year-old. A warm smile radiated from a round, innocent face, and her eyes sparkled with the excitement of youth. Two years later, Svetlana was unrecognizable. Sitting on a wooden bench in a police station in the town of Ferrazaj, Kosovo, near the Macedonian border, she was almost catatonic, staring blankly at a small, brown teddy bear clutched in her trembling hand. An hour earlier, she had been rescued from a brothel.

Svetlana had been trafficked to the war-torn region for the express use of UN peacekeepers and support personnel. As a police officer tried in vain to get her to respond to his questions, I noticed numerous reddish-blue welts along the backs of her arms and legs. They were cigarette burns one for each time she balked at taking on another john. Clearly, she had been tortured. A gauze bandage covered her left wrist. She had attempted suicide.

IRINI PENKINA WAS BROKEN after one week. She was beaten and raped repeatedly by her pimp, seasoning her for the scores of johns who would line up to use her body for their sexual pleasures and perversions. For the next several months, the twenty-three-year-old Belorussian woman serviced truckers and bankers, cops and sex tourists. After each encounter, she stood weeping in the shower, trying obsessively to scrub away the filth with a bar of soap. Some nights she refused to work. For her insubordination, she was beaten, thrown to the floor, and degraded anally by her pimp and his cohorts, to remind her who was boss.

When Irini had answered an ad for a job in a foreign land, she thought she was signing on to work as a waitress. Instead she was imprisoned in a dank apartment with three other trafficked women a Moldovan, a Bulgarian, and a Ukrainian. Any fool entering her bedroom could tell instantly she didn't want to be there. Her face said it all. But the seemingly endless stream of johns scurrying in at all hours of the day and night saw her as nothing more than a Slavic whore. No one ever offered her any help. No one ever responded to her screams. Then one evening she locked herself in the washroom and hung herself with a pair of black pantyhose.

This tragic event took place in an apartment in Thessalonica, Greece, directly across the street from a police station. Irini Penkina died alone in the cradle of democracy.

BEFORE I SET OUT to research and write my previous book, The Natashas, on the trafficking of young women and girls into the international sex trade, I had never really thought much about prostitution. Like so many men, I had been programmed from a young age to accept all the lame excuses I'd heard about the flesh trade: that these women were making money the easy way, on their backs; that it was all about sex and no one was being hurt; that the women chose to be in this so-called profession. Throughout my adult life, I had listened to men and women parrot the adage that prostitution is the world's oldest profession. However, after hearing many such chilling personal accounts as those of Stefa, Svetlana, and Irini, detailing the horrors that women and girls as well as young boys are forced to endure night after night all around the world, I have concluded that prostitution is the world's oldest oppression. No group in society is so victimized, so brutally terrorized and abused, as the women and children who are trapped in the vicious cycle of prostitution. And what is so baffling is this exploitation continues to be one of the most overlooked human rights abuses on the planet today.

In my research for The Natashas, I spoke to dozens of prostituted women. Their heart-wrenching stories of rape, gang rape, torture, maiming, murder, and coercion to perform acts they were ashamed of ripped into my conscience. I could see in their eyes the terror of the nightmares they'd survived. I could feel the deep sadness of their souls, and I could hear the shame and humiliation in their voices. And I wondered why none of the men who had used these women could see, feel, or hear these things too. I guess it was because they simply came for sex. They paid for it, got it, and left relieved. For them the woman was nothing more than an orifice and a pair of breasts, provided for their gratification.

Over the past two decades, there has been a global explosion in the numbers of johns venturing out for paid sex with young women and children. According to the U.S. State Department's 2008 Trafficking in Persons Report, more than eight hundred thousand hapless human beings are trafficked worldwide every year as slaves, and most are young women earmarked for the international flesh trade. They join an estimated 10 million women and children ensnared in sex markets around the globe. Most prostituted women report servicing an average of five clients a day; some see upwards of twenty. Extrapolate from this the number of men purchasing sex on a daily or nightly basis worldwide, and the total is staggering.