MOSCOW: Driven by family poverty and low pay, Katrina finally accepted a job offer as waitress at a restaurant in Bangkok. The job turned out to mean striptease and prostitution. The 28-year-old Katrina had her passport taken away and was held in debt bondage for three years. She could not leave her work place.

Katrina had left her hometown Smolensk four years ago after graduating from the local university. She was among about 50 other women from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus aged 18-30 who were taken to Thailand by an agent promising good income. “Given the financial pressure from the family, I decided to go notwithstanding the consequences,” Katrina (not her real name) told IPS. “When I arrived in Bangkok, I was enslaved, sometimes beaten and forced to sleep with different men throughout the night.” It took her more than three years to get away.

Hers is the kind of story becoming increasingly more familiar in Russia, according to research by the Russian non-governmental organisations group, The Angel Coalition. The coalition comprising 61 groups was set up in 1999 to fight increased trafficking of women from Russia and other former Soviet states. The coalition cites studies from the United Nations, the US State Department and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to say that more than 500,000 women from the former Soviet Union have been trafficked to more than 50 countries in the past 10 years.

The group says that as many as 80 per cent of the women trafficked were ensnared by criminal gangs. It said Ukraine and Russia are the largest source of trafficked women. “The trade is secretive, the women are silenced, the traffickers are dangerous, prosecution is rare, and few agencies have the staff and adequate finance to rescue them,” the Coalition says. The scale of trafficking has been increasing, with Moscow becoming the primary transit point, director of The Angel Coalition Oleg Kouzbit says.

“Few of these countries have laws to prevent trafficking or to prosecute traffickers, and these criminals are free to operate with impunity,” Kouzbit told IPS. The coalition sharply criticises the Russian government for failure to take decisive action against the growing problem, even though the government is enacting new legislation to curb such trafficking.

“We are confident we will be able to provide the government with the information it needs to formulate a comprehensive programme to abolish the trafficking of women and children in Russia,” Kouzbit said. “Russian women have suffered enough exploitation. They do not deserve to become (prostitutes) of the world.” The Angel Coalition set up a rehabilitation project and staff training facilities earlier this year in partnership with ‘Women and Children First’, the MiraMed Institute, and similar non-governmental organisations with some funding from the Sweden-based World Childhood Foundation.

So far the St. Petersburg Psychological Crisis Centre has served as a model and training centre for many NGOs helping trafficked women. It has rehabilitated more victims than any other shelter in Russia and continues to develop innovative strategies to attempt successful reintegration of victims into society. Many women are being driven into prostitution also by low income. The Moscow Centre for Gender Studies said in a report that the average monthly wage of women in 2004 was 6,929 roubles (230 dollars). Beyond low income it says a lack of social awareness is a major hurdle to overcome. The problem is little publicised because the victims are usually too ashamed to lodge a formal complaint. Gangsters often threaten them into silence.

Kouzbit estimates that no more than two percent of women make complaints to the police on their return.

—Dawn/Inter-Press News Service