O n a hot Sunday night, a car pulls over in the port of Odessa, southern Ukraine. About 30 girls swarm around it, posing in the glare of its headlights. Within a minute, two girls have hopped into the car and the rest go back to chatting and dragging on their cigarettes. Business is brisk, but the girls look bored. For them, this is basically downtime. See more on the influx of prostitutes to Haiti. It took less than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union for Odessa to become a hub for the international sex trade.
The conditions were just about perfect. And so the sex trade through Odessa has hardened in the past few years into something more jaded and much more difficult to stop. But things are not so simple now. See a TIME video on truck-stop killers preying on prostitutes. As recently as , their most common method of recruitment was to send scouts into the nearby towns to lure girls back to the port with false promises of work abroad β as a dancer in Paris or a waitress in Dubai β and then force them into prostitution.
But most of these modern-day slave traders are gone β these days, few of the prostitutes who pass through Odessa have been tricked into joining the trade. The poverty and general hopelessness in many villages of eastern Ukraine, Moldova and Romania now run so deep β especially in the wake of the financial crisis β that the promise of a job as a prostitute abroad is enough to get the vast majority of trafficked women to sign up voluntarily.
They follow the mamachki to foreign resorts or big cities in Western Europe, where the prevalence of sex workers from the exβSoviet Union has earned them a nickname: Natashas. The girls work the streets and hotel lobbies until they get deported or homesick. The cycle ends when they earn enough to retire or, as more often happens, when they get too old for the job β which in this business can be as young as The forced prostitution of women through coercion or violence is still a global tragedy although statistics vary, U.
But the dozen aid workers and prostitutes TIME spoke to in Odessa said that sex trafficking through the city has moved away from being an industry run on fear to one driven by voluntary, if desperate, participation.
