By Tamara Freeze
The magic and excitement of New Year’s Day was strongly felt in Moscow. Sparkling snowflakes slowly fell on shopping displays, women’s furs, and pigeons’ feathers. New Year’s Dat has always been an optimistic holiday in Russia; it’s the only day in the year when Russians immerse themselves in the hustle and bustle of festivities and in the euphoria of shopping, cooking, and playing family games. After three years of living in Los Angeles, I was enchanted by the joyous rapture of the Russian New Year. But under it all, lurked a subtle scourge upon my homeland.
I was not there to enjoy the holiday. I had volunteered at the Center for Abused Women (CAW) to help victims of a new, fast-growing multi-billion-dollar business: human trafficking. After arriving in Moscow from Los Angeles, I was assigned to the Urals Region (city of Chelyabinsk) to provide psychological and legal assistance to two victims of trafficking in Denmark: Katya and Zhenya. Like thousands of women in Eastern Europe, Katya and Zhenya were tricked by a vague local advertisement into taking “jobs abroad,” only to find themselves sexually abused and forced into prostitution at an adult bar near Copenhagen. Katya, 18, and Zhenya, 22, who had endured brutal violence from pimps and “clients,” appeared to have a long list of STDs - sexually transmitted deseases. To make matters worse, both had a criminal record for allegedly violating their visa status and using fraudulent documents in Denmark. When their brothel was raided by local police, the victims were deported, but no criminal charges were filed against their abusers. Ignorant ostracism and indifference awaited Katya and Zhenya in their native land.
So they sat in front of me, quiet and apathetic, hardly interested in me and whatever I was about to do. It is a bitter irony, I thought. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we had sought a better life abroad, but had found divergent fortunes. Even though my “patients” appeared from the start to have no interest in filing criminal charges against the organized group that put them in the brothel, I had a feeling something constructive could be done.
No support from the men i uniform
My journey started one snowy morning with a trip to the local police station (the GUVD). The Center for Abused Women notified me that a few complaints had been filed at that station, accusing several work-abroad businesses of using fraudulent travel documentation. In addition, a number of women who responded to the “agency” that recruited women for jobs in foreign countries were missing. My trip turned out to be quite an experience: police officers categorically refused to cooperate by providing copies of the necessary documents. They citied the reason that many of the documents were “probably already missing by now.” As I exited the building, the guard at the door dropped a sympathetic hint that the enforcement officers were poorly paid and that access to the documents could be arranged if “certain conditions” were met. The reign of bribery and corruption at the very doors of the Chelyabinsk GUVD was disappointing, as I realized that Katya and Zhenya had no support from the men in uniform.
Breaking through the bureaucratic walls
Just as my efforts began to take an asymptotic spiral, the case was finally filed in a regional court on behalf of Katya and Zhenya. The news was thrilling. It took me several weeks to break through the bureaucratic walls of various law-enforcement agencies and finally find a civil rights lawyer to file criminal charges against the Ariadna recruitment agency. The documents from the GUVD were obtained after someone telephoned a few officials. The most daunting task that lay ahead of me (a task which placed my encounter with corruption and bureaucracy into a rather manageable perspective) was that I had to explain to the victims the far-reaching consequences of the case and convince them to testify against their traffickers. The prospect of testifying was particularly grim, since there were very few instances of victims doing so in trafficking cases, due to the threat of violence. Testifying would mean going to war with Russian organized crime. CAW coworkers assured me that this mission was one that no sane woman would accept and no lawyer would support.
Nonetheless, the lawyer who ultimately agreed to take the case seemed to have little trouble with it, but Katya and Zhenya rejected outright the proposal that they testify in court. They looked at me as if I were advising them to commit suicide. They seemed awestruck by my belief that justice could be served, but they themselves were deeply disillusioned and enraged by the law-enforcement practices that had backfired on them so routinely and painfully. I did expect an adamant “No,” but was determined to turn that “No” into at least a “Maybe.”
The case still pending
In my final weeks as a CAW volunteer, I did convince Katya to testify in court when her case was called. Unfortunately, at the same time, Zhenya disappeared, and even though I filed a missing person report with the police, few, if any, efforts were made to find her. It is not clear whether she was re-trafficked or whether, as I sincerely hope, she just decided to leave Chelyabinsk to seek a normal life somewhere else, of her own freewill. Even though the criminal charges were filed against Ariadna, the case is still pending. Katya’s lawyer, Vasily Kravtsov, advised her to proceed slowly with the case, since the government had declared an amnesty for many criminals. It appeared that a few convicted traffickers had been released and had not been persecuted again. Even though Katya’s case continues almost a year after the atrocity of her sexual slavery was committed, I am hopeful that one day her perpetrators will be tried and convicted.
Human rights beyond the Siberian terrain
As I left the snowstorm in Chelyabinsk and returned to Los Angeles, to my home, I could not help but think about Katya. There was a pessimistic feeling in Russia that international human-rights law was something elusive and intangible, beyond the Siberian terrain. Human rights is a fairly new concept to insular Russian communities. Chelyabinsk is located fairly far from Moscow and it seems to me that no aspect of international law (except commerce) had touched the Ural society. I left Chelyabinsk with grief and hopegrief, because I realized that the notion of international human rights was still an elusive subject in the region, and hope, because it was no longer intangible to me, as I had tasted a small bite of success by helping Katya in my attempt to promote enforcement of laws against the horrid practice of human trafficking.
I realized that the victims of trafficking needed broader legal and political assistance from governmental and international agencies than was currently provided. I approached the problem of human trafficking with the aspiration to understand the cultural conventions and psychological polarization of Russian society, which has changed so rapidly in the last 10 years. The magnitude and importance of the trafficking problem is still comparatively underestimated in the Urals region, and there is no clear guidance for legal professionals on prosecution of the latter practice. One of the trafficking firms in the Perm Region was convicted for “tax evasion,” but nothing else.
