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Caucasus journalists are join their efforts against human traffic

Zahir Amanov

To Iran – to collective oral sex...

Those who are sinless

By Gulnaz Guliyeva

The causes and consequences of "white slavery" Women who experience deep stress encounter a lack of understanding in society after being liberated.
Human trafficking is a new business that is gaining momentum and is well-organized not in some distant country, but in Azerbaijan. No matter how much the words "white slavery" and "the sexual exploitation of women and children" frighten us, they are a graphic example of human trafficking. But our task is not to frighten society, but to be ready for the fact that someone around us or we ourselves might fall victim to human traffickers.
Our attempts to talk to victims were not crowned with success, but with the help of the psychologist of the women's crisis centre, Azad Isazada, we will try to inform the reader about the causes and consequences of human trafficking.

"Mama Roza in the role of a saviour

14-year-old Elina (the name is fictitious), who lives in Baku, was in love with a young man, and ran away from home and married him. The young man turned out to be a drug addict and at one of the moments when he was under the influence, the brother of her husband and the son of her husband's sister took advantage of the situation and had a sexual intercourse with her. She spent a long time having to satisfy the sexual demands of the men in her husband's family. After her husband was arrested for drugs, Elina was left high and dry with a child. Strange as it may seem, but a "Mama Roza" offered to help her, saying that she can work as a vendor in a shop in Turkey. But when she arrived there, it turned out that she had been sold for prostitution. On her return home, Elina who was left high and dry could not find any other job but prostitution. The next trip was to Nakhichevan, where she had to service businessmen from Iran and Turkey. Luckily, one of her clients of Turkish nationality decided to help her and get her out of this fatal situation. He took in her and her child, solved all her problems and brought her to the centre for psychological rehabilitation.

The victim of deception

However, it is necessary to draw a clear line between prostitution and trafficking in women, because a prostitute can also fall victim to "white slavery". Even if prostitution is regarded as a publicly immoral activity, every prostitute has the right to get her wages and to be treated well by her clients, but in the case of slavery, women have no rights and are cruelly exploited.

There are two types of trafficking here. In the first case, a girl is involved in prostitution through deception and continues this way of life, and in the second case, a girl who volunteers to work as a prostitute falls victim to deception. Being hired on certain conditions, they are taken abroad and sold as slaves.

The question is not about pity or social justice, but about the fact that it is already human trafficking. She was deceived and exploited. There are more and more slaves.
The head of the centre, Matanat Azizova, said that about 7,000 people have appealed to them since the centre was set up three years ago, and 50 of them had fallen victim to human trafficking. The sexual exploitation of women was more common. Such cases do not simply take place in Azerbaijan, their number is increasing more and more.

Inside Azerbaijan, trafficking is blossoming in places of intensive economic activities. So-called Mama Rozas hire 15-20 girls and take them to various places where intensive construction work or trade is going on. The centre has cases when girls were taken to cities where the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is being laid and to the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic which is often visited by businessmen from Turkey and Iran. This is a well-organized criminal business which is well-aware of the situation in the country and in places where their services are in demand.

Sweet dreams

Experience shows that economic and social problems in the family are the main reason why women believe human traffickers. It is interesting that smart girls were "silly" and did not understand what was going on instead of sweet dreams. "It is astonishing that the more stupid and obvious the lie was, the faster they believed it."
The promises were so sweet and the social base was so low that they believed in the fairy tales of human traffickers, the psychologist said.

The standard situation in which a woman who rises to the bait of human traffickers is the following. A girl is offered a job in an office or a supermarket, for example, in Turkey, where a Russian-speaking employee is needed. It is interesting that Azerbaijani girls fall exactly for the fact that Russian-speaking girls are needed. As a rule, these are girls from districts who are promised good money up to 1,000 dollars per month.

Living in a family with many children, where new cloths are rare, the appearance of a man who promises good money abroad is regarded as something like "I'll get out of this hole at last" and the young girl becomes optimistic and hopes for the best in the future. The first thing they say is that she can make money for university education and help improve the social situation of her family, psychologist Azad points out.

She goes there full of optimism, because before she had to sit at home, do the housekeeping and had no interest in life. She understands that this offer is a chance to make quick headway. She goes there in a very good mood, building "castles in Spain" beforehand.

But for some reason, on the day of the flight, the weather conditions are bad and she has to fly to Turkey through Dubai, Pakistan, India or even Nakhichevan. They take her passport under the pretext of re-registering her papers, and then they go to spend the night in a motel, where she is kept by force and subjected to sexual violence.
As a rule, the psychologist points out, they do not get to the destination they had promised in order to cover their tracks.

When the castles collapse

But the psychological picture of what is going on does not look so simple. The young girl, who did not live in a good psychological climate before she met "Mama Roza", has positive emotions after her promises and hopes for the future, and suddenly she gets a massive psychological blow and her castles start to collapse.

In the language of psychology, the victim gets an acute psychological stress, which is supplemented by repeated or group rape and beating. In these conditions, the victim falls into deep depression.

Almost all of them, the psychologist says, thought about suicide at this moment and some of them tried to commit suicide. The second reaction is refusal to eat, hoping to starve to death. It has to be taken into account that the organizers of this criminal business command psychological methods of pressure and the girls are under constant psychological pressure. They also blackmail them taking the girl's photograph during a sexual intercouse and threatening to send the photo to her family.

Despite all her attempts to fight, the victim is forced to provide sexual services to clients on the first day. The daily occurrence of the events leads to certain monotony and they turn into a conveyer-belt where the number of clients does not matter. More often, these are clients with pathological sexual fantasies that she has to carry out. Refusal to service a client is always followed by a punishment which could be brutal beating, imprisonment in a basement, refusal to give food and so on. Usually, the victims were young girls from 18 to 25 with broken psychology.

The "dowry" of the slave

According to the psycologist, the victim can be saved after acute stress, but routine daily work in a brothel, daily insults, beatings and sexual violence often lead to chronical stress.

Usually, the victims returned home with a "bunch" of psychological and physiological diseases and each of them was difficult to treat. Apart from psychological diseases, the victims has venereal diseases, sterility as a result of repeated abortions and frigidity as a result of repeated and crude sexual intercouses. "All these diseases become a serious obstacle to having a family at home in the future," the psychologist stressed.

Repeated untraditional sexual intercourses cause certain addictions that she cannot satisfy after returning home because the local society thinks it is immoral.
Moreover, repeated contracts with various clients during one day make her used to looking at a man and appraising him as a client.

Communication with clients, as a rule, leads to dependency on alcohol and drugs. For example, victims who worked in Europe had a disease like women's champagne alcoholism because they had to get their client to buy this expensive drink.

The first stone

But society has to realize that it is still possible to help these people. "A victim of trafficking can be treated only if her environment is ready to accept and support her. Unfortunately, more often, the closest environment is not ready for that and society does not accept her," the psychologist pointed out. "The closest environment should understand that it is also responsible for the fact that their daughter or sister became a prostitute".

At the end, I would like to recall an episode from the Bible, when a crowd of people, accusing Maria Magdalena of adultery, was going to beat her with stones. But remember what Jesus said then - "let those who are sinless throw the first stone at her" and then the crowd dispersed.