Delal Pektas/MEDILL
Victor Malarek, an investigative journalist, talks at a Ukrainian Catholic church on Saturday about human trafficking.
by Delal Pektas
Oct 13, 2010
As the curious audience filled up the room at Sts. Volodymyr and Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church, investigative journalist Victor Malarek pulled up a chair to talk about the tragedy of human trafficking.Malarek, the keynote speaker at Against Their Will: The Reality of Human Trafficking, first started by saying that human trafficking is not a woman’s issue; it is a man’s issue. He said men are responsible for the international slave trade and until they take responsibility for their activities, the situation will not get better.
“The absolute truth is prostitution is not the oldest profession, it is the oldest oppression of women, it is the oldest suffering of women,” Malarek said.
Human trafficking is an international problem where young women and men are trapped into the sex trade against their will. The vast majority of women who are in prostitution are impoverished from Third World countries, Malarek said. They are pulled into prostitution when applying for “jobs” in the West that organized crime advertises in newspapers for nannies and waitresses, he said.
The victims are kidnapped by pimps the minute they land in the country they thought was going to offer them a brighter future, a better life. Instead, they end up in brothels.
“Poverty is not a choice,” Malarek said. “This is a really devastating situation and as I always say, it’s of epic proportion and it’s a modern day slave trade.”
Rachel Durchslag, executive director at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, was among the speakers at Saturday’s event. She talked about human trafficking in Chicago and that it is a growing problem in our own backyard.
She said that in Chicago, the average age of entry into prostitution is 14. According to the National Runaway Switchboard, Durchslag said, one out of every three teens on the street will be lured into prostitution within 48 hours of running away.
“It’s true that the sex trade is a global pandemic with as many as 2 million women worldwide forced into sexual slavery,” she said, “but the sex trade is very much an issue that plagues our own city, that it’s the one that tends to hide itself behind motel rooms, massage parlors, brothels and strip clubs.”
“Illinois generates the fifth largest amount of calls to the National Trafficking Hotline,” Durchslag said.
She also talked about the research conducted by the Center for Impact Research in Chicago. Out of 222 victims of prostitution interviewed, 62 percent started prostitution before the age of 18, over half had run away from home and 70 percent were encouraged to go into the sex trade by a family member.
Based on the arrest statistics in Chicago, Durchslag said, women are blamed for being in the sex trade and “customers” are not held accountable enough for their actions.
Human trafficking: A modern slave trade growing in our own backyard
Source: MEDILL REPORTS Chicago
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