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The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade

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'The Natashas : Inside the New Global Sex Trade' is certainly not the first book to expose the international human slave trade, but it is essential reading all the same. Human trafficking, or "trafficking in persons," as it is called by the US State Department, is a complex and revolting issue. The more we learn about it, the more we are aghast at such a disgusting crime. Our hearts break for the victims and despair under the weight of the overwhelming numbers involved. There are many books, some quite good, others less so, but most of them are out of date--predating The Natashas by many years. However, The Natashas is one of four recent books that stand above the rest. They are unquestionably accurate, moving and informative. Together, these four books are the essential beginning course in understanding human trafficking.

'The Natashas : Inside the New Global Sex Trade' offers a desperate truth about the victims, their experiences, dark and ugly. Not an easy book to read, but an essential part of understanding the human cost of human trafficking.

This is the third book to read in understanding human trafficking. First, read 'Race Against Evil: The Secret Missions of the Interpol Agent Who Tracked the World's Most Sinister Criminals;' then 'Illicit : How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy;' followed by 'Woman, Child for Sale: The New Slave Trade in the 21st Century.'

This is a very informative book and one of the saddest I have read. The sad plight of Eastern European women in the sex trade has reached monumental proportions. It doesn't look like there is anything to stop the trade unless politicians seriously get involved. I was very moved by the personal stories of these women. Malarek did the right thing by investigating hot spots himself in various countries. Well written and doesn't drag. Engaging and honest.

Just as when Auschwitz and Treblinka were in operation, few people today are paying attention to the mass annihilation of countless hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the worldwide rape mills. These females are the seed corn of struggling Eastern European nations: 1 in 5 has a university degree, and most of the others are at least trying to get a university education. They answer bogus job offers which lead to sex slavery in hopes of having enough money to finish their higher education. Instead, they end up dead, insane, crippled or in halfway houses far from home. Only when this issue becomes a drumbeat among humane citizens in all informed and educated countries will concrete action ever be taken to stop this enormous destruction of human lives and potential.

Despite what P. Pray said about Malarek's book, it is well-researched. Malarek travelled extensively and interviewed numerous people in the Czech Republic, including the Czech/German border area which is apparently an entire region given over to mob-controlled sex slavery, heavily guarded by many on-the-take Czech cops. P. Pray is probably in the 'Natasha' business himself.....think about this book, and the victims it describes, the next time you hear a guy making veiled leering comments about his trip to Prague/Berlin/Amsterdam/Munich/Moscow/Dubai/Greece/Istanbul/Bangkok/Manila/Vegas/Atlantic City.....read this book and you'll realize that when Anne Frank said that people were generally good at heart, that she'd spent too much time in the attic. As an Army officer, I was especially shocked and saddened by the descriptions of girls being repeatedly and routinely raped, traded and sold by US servicemen and contractors in Bosnia, Kosovo and South Korea, with the knowledge and complicity of senior US commanders. I had heard soldiers making sniggering comments about "juicy bars" in the Balkans and Korea; now I know what they were referring to. And this is the Army/Marine Corps full of self-styled "God-fearing Christians" which fights for "freedom" in Iraq and elsewhere?! "How can Satan cast out Satan?" If God punishes the perpetrators of slavery and industrialized rape, then the US and many other states are in for some serious retribution......

Given the ubiquity of the governmental, bureaucratic and NGO corruption described by Malarek, the only probable solutions to the sex slave trade are 1) general social awareness of the crimes within countries able to press politically for solutions, as well as source nations of trafficked women; 2) AGGRESSIVE acts like economic sanctions by states like the US against nations like Germany, Greece, Italy, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, et al which are either exporting their females for sex slavery, or importing them; and 3) the "Medellin solution": emulation of the Columbians who destroyed Pablo Escobar's criminal drug-trafficking empire by tracking and executing large numbers of those connected with the drug trade which undermined Columbian society. Widespread resistance networks of victims' families, their friends and sympathizers, and patriotic citizens in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic states and other afflicted countries, ready and eager to kill pimps, procurers, mob accountants and bankers, as well as those who knowingly abuse sex slaves, would dramatically gain world attention to the trade. Especially if American johns were the ones being shot or stabbed!

"A gun not words is needed" --Ilya Ehrenburg, after the liberation of Maidanek extermination camp, 1944

I found the book "The Natashas", by author Victor Malarek to be a very compelling and disturbing book to read. I was utterly shocked to read about what is happening in our third world countries today, regarding the "trafficking" of young girls and women from the USSR and Eastern European nations.
The most disturbing aspect that the author Victor Malarek brings to light is that nothing much is being done about the selling of women and girls from the Russia/Ukraine provinces. He points out that there has been a few "raids" on brothels and bars, but beyond a few of these raids, there is still a lot to do about the selling of women and girls illegally in Eastern Europe.

My only criticism with the book is the repetition of the three nations that are involved in the trafficking of these women. Every few pages one reads "Russia, Ukraine, & Moldova". Towards the middle of the book the reader knows that these nations are the ones heavily involved in the selling of women, and the repetition is unnecessary.

Bravo Victor Malarek! I could not put this put down. It is a gripping book; and a global concern that everyone should be aware of, that is happening in the world today.

The end of the Cold War saw one of the greatest opportunities in the history of the world for one society (the US) to help another (the USSR). The breakup of the USSR and the fall of communism provided the US with an opportunity to create a democracy where none existed, to instruct a nation on the principles of freedom, tolerance, respect for human rights, and civil society. Instead, American exported its businessmen to Russia to teach them how to steal and cheat each other. One result of this was the breakdown of civil society, loss of economic wealth, decline in the respect for law, and the erosion of Soviet-enforced equality between men and women. As a consequence, hundreds of thoussands, if not millions of women, were sucked into the prostitution business and many were taken or tricked to go overseas. These victims are generically called Natashas in the parlor of the trade; hence the title of the book.

The author documents the lives and traumas of many of these Natashas. They are sometimes quite young, in the early teens, and come from all over the former USSR, including places like the Ukraine, Chechnya, Dagastan, Belarus, and Russia itself. The book shows the pipelines that take the girls from various Russian cities to their final destinations in brothels, stripbars, prisons, and sometimes cemeteries in places such as Japan, S. Korea, Israel, Europe, Arab capitals, and N. American cities such as New York, Chicago, Miami, etc... Many, if not most of the girls are tortured, raped, beaten, starved, and often kept locked away in small rooms, attics, back alleys, old warehouses, and other places where the sun don't shine. The net effect of this is to destroy the Russian youth; the women who are the victims, and the men who are often the initial perpetrators. Worse, Western countries have not been particularly helpful in stopping this trade, and some in the Russian government even benefit from it.

Overall, an eye-opening book and a must-read for those interested in modern politics and culture.

I read this book while on vacation and once I started reading I could not stop. I read the entire book within 24 hours! It is simply amazing and quite powerful.

In shocking detail the author describes as to what happens to people mostly young teenage women from Eastern Europe that are victims of sex trafficking. They are manipulated and tricked into going to other countries promising a future in a new job that is completely unrelated to prostitution, e.g., waitressing, modelling, travel agency work, etc. However, once they are at their destination, they are told they need to pay for their trip expenses and cannot leave until they have paid off their debt- in many instances, they die due to disease, murder, or simply abandoned because they are not marketable anymore. Should any of these women oppose, they are usually beaten, raped (often), or tortured until they have succumbed to their pimps and in many instances, murdered.

To suggest that most women have a choice in prostitution is simply naive and moronic. What's worse, in many instances most women are forced into it and in the instances where they are not forced to become prostitutes, it is either that or starvation. People who advocate for prostitution should take a step back and attempt to analyze it for what prostitution really is- exploitation for money.

More amazing is U.S. government complicity in human trafficking in Bosnia via the Department of Defense's subcontractor- DynCorp, Inc. In many instances, Dyncorp employees wer buying and selling teenage girls often leaving them to live in cages or squalor. Quite disturbing but not unheard of!!!

This book is a masterpiece narrative on human trafficking!!! You will be shocked and you will or want to cry. But nevertheless, a traumatic narrative that must be told about human trafficking and its impact on the human population in the 21st century.

The fall of the soviet union opened up eastern europe to one things: money for sex. The rotten Soviet economy caused the people to be impoverished but at the same time it had offered them education so they were not willing to live a meager life, as many do in Africa and elsehwere, then the state had made them 'open minded' and thus there was no traditional soceity to take care of young women and support them, so they were lured by jobs abroad and sold into slavery. PRimarily they went to Western Europe where "open democratic progressive" soceity tolerated the enslavement of more than a million prositutes. These women were kept chained up 'servicing' "enlightened" europeans, the same europeans who condemn 'human rights abuses' and they serviced these Germans and French and other europeans who couldnt rape 12-15 year olds in their own countries. In addition these sex slaves were bought and sold by NATO and UN troops in Bosnia, which became a center in the trade and traffiking in women in the 1990s after it became a colony of NATO and the UN.

This is a brilliant book, heartrending and tragic. However despite the fact that it exposes the role of the UN and western europeans in the sex-salve trade in eastern european women it doesnt shed light on either the origins of the illness, Communism, or the more racist and colonialistic aspects of this. Western Europeans, who pretend to beleive in human rights, are overwhelmingly the clients who purchase these slaves' services and it is also the West that has created this and tolerated it. The same west that likes to lecture these eastern european nations on 'democracy'. It should have been pointed out the blatent hypocrisy that takes place whereby Western europe colonized Eastern europe to enslave its women and literally rape it.

A tragic story.

Seth J. Frantzman

Having traveled throught Western Europe, Eastern Europe (CIS), Moscow, and St. Petersburg, I have seen many of the subjects of this book in hotel bars, on the streets, etc. I have always assumed that they were "doing what they have to do" to support their financially ravaged families at home. My assumption was way off. This book was an eye-opener. I am amazed that such evil (the slave trade) still exists in our 21st century world.

Victor Malarek's book, "The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade" is to date the most compelling, readable book on trafficking that I have come across. While other books on trafficking focus on statistics (or lack of), policy, and Tier rankings, Malarek goes deeper. His book actually explains the above things and for good measure, he actually goes to different trafficking spots and reports on corrupt police, women jumping off balconies onto tanks to escape, and how contractors and "peacekeeping forces" are implicit in the traffic.

His account of the DynCorp issue and the subsequent...nothing that resulted after the Army investigated remain some of the most solid evidence to show that there is something desperately wrong ...and that there are Americans going unpunished. Men buying women ("She can't be a day over twelve")and keeping them as slaves in their rooms while working for DynCorp abroad is worth the price of the book alone.

Eyeopening and opinionated, I trust this author. He went out and got the information himself instead of rehashing the same questionable statistics over again (14,500-17,500 people are estimated to be trafficked into the U.S. per year - empirical data-based or imaginary State Department number?) Additionally, he was raised in group-home settings in Canada, which gives him street cred in my eyes.

The sex trade is a multi-billion-dollar, global industry, so it's strange to think there's been no comprehensive expose book until now. Victor Malarek's The Natashas: Inside The New Global Sex Trade is the first to expose this major human rights issue, and comes backed by the authority and expertise of one of Canada's leading investigative journalists. After drugs and weapons, women and girls sold for sex is the third most profitable commodity in the world. The problem isn't limited to a specific region: Malarek gathers the stories of women from all walks of life as he reveals the experiences of women kidnapped into the sex slave trade in an eye-opening shocker.