Price of a Woman -- Israelis Forcing Poor Foreign Women Into Prostitution

By Aryeh Dayan

At the Beit Berl, shocking facts were revealed -
police and public organizations are trafficking in women.
(Photo: Ariel Schalit)

A police van will be setting out sometime in the next day or two from the Neve Tirza women's prison near Ramle. It will head for Ben-Gurion International Airport, where the young woman in the back of the van will board a Russian passenger plane. The policemen will hand her a new Russian passport issued by the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv, and will make sure she gets on the plane and leaves the country. And once she takes off for Russia, no one here will be able to judge the credibility of the disturbing story she told the few Israelis who had tried to help her.The Israel Police has taken steps to speed up her deportation, even though they should be greatly interested in the full details of her tale. For if the story is correct, it is altogether possible that some of her blue-uniformed escorts are part of a covert operation in which women are bought and sold into sexual slavery.

She told her story at Neve Tirza to volunteers for the Hotline for Detained Foreign Workers. Sigal Rozen, chair of the hotline, recounted her story at a conference held last weekend at the Beit Berl College, "Prostitution, Trafficking in Women and the Establishment in Israel."

The woman, who is to be deported from Israel this week (Rozen was only willing to identify her by the fictitious name "Larissa"), has Russian citizenship and arrived in Israel about six months ago.

Larissa told the hotline's volunteers that shortly before her arrival, she read an ad in a local newspaper in Russia, offering work to young Russian women as au pairs in Israel. She contacted the advertisers, who explained that Israeli law forbade her from working there, and that they would have to prepare forged documents for her and smuggle her into Israel via Egypt. Larissa said the explanation sounded convincing. She was flown to Cairo and transported from there via the Sinai Desert to an area close to the border with Israel, where she was led on foot by Bedouin smugglers into the Negev. She was then picked up by a man who drove her to Tel Aviv.

At this point, she still believed that she had been brought to Israel to work as an au pair, but in Tel Aviv the truth came out: Russian smugglers sold her to an Israeli pimp, who took her forged documents away and coerced her, amid physical force and threats, to engage in prostitution.

Rozen says that until this point, Larissa's story is no different from those of numerous other women brought to Israel from the Commonwealth of Independent States. Some were brought on fraudulent grounds; others knew in advance that they would be working as prostitutes.

However, Larissa's story takes a surprising twist, which, if true, casts a crimson stain on the Israel Police. Larissa told the hotline volunteers that she eventually managed to escape from her pimp. She hid from him in various places, but some time afterward was arrested by the police. She told the volunteers that she was in fact rather pleased to be placed under arrest, assuming it would spell the end of her misery here.

Sold to another pimp

"To her great horror," Rozen told the gathering at Beit Berl - which included the police commander of the Tel Aviv district, Chief Superintendent Yossi Sedbon, who did not visibly react to the story - "she was taken by one of the policemen to another city, where she was transferred, for a fistful of dollars, to another pimp. She subsequently learned that that same pimp to whom the policeman sold her had once worked for the police."

Rozen's version of events is based solely on what she heard from Larissa. The police, she added, have no record of her arrest. And as far as the police are concerned, Rozen went on, "that is the proof that she is lying." Later on, Larissa managed to run away from the second pimp as well, and worked for a while as a waitress. After she was arrested for a second time - again, without any documents - she was brought to Neve Tirza prison.

Larissa told the hotline volunteers that she was prepared to testify to the police or in court against the two pimps. But Rozen says the police were not anxious to hear her evidence. The police investigator assigned to Larissa's case explained to Rozen that "in her two arrests, she failed to lodge any complaint against the pimps. Only after her incarceration in prison did she suddenly remember her willingness to testify against them."

It took three weeks for the investigator to find time to see her in Neve Tirza and take down her statement. The police will not use her testimony to indict the two pimps. Rozen claims the officer told her that "Larissa did engage in prostitution, but the tall tale that she's selling - that she was sold to a pimp by a policeman - is completely fabricated."

Representatives of the Interior Ministry, who also interrogated her in prison, reached a different conclusion. "Larissa," the ministry employees determined, "was not engaged in prostitution at all, but in the drug trade." However, they concurred with the police's contention that "her entire story is made up." Larissa continually said that she would be able to identify the policeman who sold her to the second pimp; the police continued to disregard her. At the end of last week, after she was issued a new passport by the Russian consul, the police determined that she would be deported this week.

The Beit Berl conference, which was jointly arranged by the college's department of social sciences and a consortium of public organizations that are fighting prostitution and trafficking in women, pitted two members of the establishment who were invited to take part - Chief Superintendent Sedbon and attorney Anat Savidor, a senior deputy prosecutor for the central district - face to face with the harsh criticism leveled by members of the women's lobby. The latter group included Dr. Arella Shadmi, a sociologist who investigates police handling of violence against women, and representatives of several organizations: Women's Equality Representation, the New Masculinity Movement and We Are Equals.

Harsh reality

At one session of the conference, six women engaged in prostitution took the podium. Their remarks may have been representative of a harsh social reality, but what they had to say was jumbled and unfocused. None of them related to the issue of trafficking in women from overseas. Statements made by participants at other sessions left the impression that Israel is becoming a center of trafficking in women, a phenomenon that is taking its place in the world's consciousness as the "slavery of the 21st century."

In a booklet published by the Toda'ah (consciousness) Institute, an Israeli organization that is affiliated with the World Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, the editors state that four million women and children are smuggled each year for the purpose of prostitution. Approximately 700,000 are smuggled to the United States, and at least 3,000 are smuggled to Israel. When compared to the overall populations the United States and Israel, the Toda'ah booklet points out, the dimensions of the problem in Israel are 2.5 times worse than in America.

A police report filed last year states that in Tel Aviv alone, there are about 150 houses of prostitution in which foreign women are forcibly employed. But at the conference, Chief Superintendent Sedbon estimated that that number has now topped 200.

"There is widespread import of women, primarily from the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Turkey, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and lately, South Africa as well," the conference organizers wrote in a position paper distributed at the gathering. "Based on the statements of the women, it seems that about 30 percent of them did not know that they would be occupied as prostitutes, but rather that they were assured employment as babysitters, medical masseuses, models or waitresses. And the remaining 70 percent never imagined the conditions in which they would be employed. According to many statements, when they arrive in Israel they go through an 'educational seminar' that includes rape and sale by auction, after which their passports are taken from them and they are imprisoned in sealed apartments. They are forced to work in prostitution in order to repay the 'debt' incurred in bringing them to Israel. They and their families abroad are threatened that if they try to escape, they will be caught by the police, and when, after several months they have 'repaid' their debt, they are sold to another house of prostitution, and a new 'debt' is created."

Chief Superintendent Sedbon confirmed that this is in fact the case. He was even able to provide additional details. Sedbon spoke in a calm and even bemused tone of voice, as if he were describing a phenomenon that he himself had nothing to do with. His statements, which were intended to defend the establishment against the claim that it is shutting its eyes to the problem, actually became the mainstay of the indictment.

"The price of a woman in Tel Aviv today," said the commander of the Tel Aviv district, "varies between $5,000 and $15,000. It depends on her looks and the quality of the forged documents in her possession. Anyone who thinks the phenomenon can be eliminated doesn't know what he's talking about. We have deported blond women and they came back as brunettes. We have deported brunettes, and they came back as blondes. It is impossible to hermetically seal all of the transfer points. Last year, about 2,000 travelers at Ben-Gurion Airport were denied entry, but the traffickers know we are looking for women who look like prostitutes, so the women arrive not looking like prostitutes."

Greater enforcement at the airport, said Sedbon, would not help. Some of the women arrive aboard tourist ships that anchor in Haifa and Ashdod; others are smuggled through the Sinai. "There have even been instances of women who swam from Taba to Eilat," he said.

Sedbon claimed that the police are trying to fight the phenomenon, but gave the impression that he had come to terms with its continued existence. One must understand that the situation has expanded over the past decade, in part due to laws of supply and demand, he explained. "There are now about 200,000 foreign workers and tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the Tel Aviv area. What can you do? They simply need sex services."

Sold for $15,000

Following are three of the statements that were read at the conference:

"I am Ilona. I was sold for $15,000, and a few months later I was sold once more. They forced me to accept 150 clients a week. Lots of people knew about me and the other girls. There were taxi drivers and people from the grocery store who brought alcohol, and also the (women) doctors who gave us pills against pregnancy - take them all month long, so that we wouldn't lose any work because of the blood. And the doctors checked us after we were beaten and gave us painkillers. But the worst thing happened with the policemen who knew about me. One time I managed to run away and went to the police. They referred me to a policeman who knew Russian, and I spoke with him and he listened very intently. An hour after he listened so intently my boss, the pimp, arrived at the station and took me home and there he gave me the worst beating, so that all the girls would see what happens if you run away. After that, I couldn't work for a few days."

"I am Yanna. At the airport I was picked up by Ilyosha. I had six or seven clients a day on Ben-Yehuda, and I made him NIS 600-700 a day. I got food, cigarettes and NIS 20 a day. After two weeks, he sold me to Peter and Gershon, and I worked for a month at their massage parlor - 10 or 15 clients a day, NIS 150 for half an hour, and for me - NIS 20 a day, food and cigarettes. After two months, Peter sent me to another bar.

Whenever I wasn't working I was locked in an apartment, and they brought me whatever I needed. Peter said that I could go after I had made $40,000 for him. I had between 7 and 10 clients a day at the bar, and there I had to earn NIS 700. If I had a slow day, I had to work harder the next day. They also beat me at the massage parlor - the employees and the manager. But I met someone there from Ramallah, and ran away with him. After a few months, we went to Cyprus and got married. I brought the marriage papers to the Interior Ministry, but the clerk there said that if I didn't have enough toilet paper, I could wipe my ass with the papers."

Sigal Rozen, chairperson of the Hotline for Detained Foreign Workers: "Before the hearing in court, I went to the prosecutor's office. Yalena refused to testify in front of the defendants, but the prosecutor was insistent. ... If a woman wasn't interested in testifying in front of her pimps, she had to emphasize the fact that she had been raped by the pimp. Yalena had also been forced to have sex with the pimp, but he gave her NIS 20, so she did not consider it rape.

"On the way to court I asked if there was a chance that either of them would receive the maximum sentence allowed by law. The prosecutor was amazed, and said, "What are you talking about? If they get anything at all, it won't be for trafficking; it'll be for the other offenses.

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