Ninety-eight percent of Ukrainian refugees arriving at train stations in Poland, Roumania, Hungary and other countries bordering Ukraine, are women and children who have fled the bombing of their country. Penniless, drained, frightened and traumatized, separated from husbands and brothers, alone and vulnerable and wondering how they are going to feed their children, as soon as they disembark, they are being systematically targeted by sex-traffickers who offer them shelter, money, work and passage to a 'safe' country.
However, the women who accept these offers will most likely wind up sold into sex slavery in the brothels of Europe, where, because they are white, they are worth more money to their traffickers. in Hungary, women have been warned to keep their phones charged and note down license plates of any cars they enter. UNICEF warns that the many unaccompanied children disembarking from these trains are particularly vulnerable to traffickers.
At the same time, searches for porn featuring Ukrainian women in war scenario's are spiking on the internet. Porn ads with names like "We are bombed and we f__k" and "Porn action during the war in Ukraine" are getting a lot of hits, as part of the "normal" monetizing of tragedy by the porn industry.
Today, we will speak with TWO POWER HOUSE GUESTS, women who have devoted their lives and careers to fighting the sexual exploitation of women. They are Taina Bien Aimee, Director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW); and Dr. Gail Dines, a leader in exposing the porn industry and its effects on women and men.
We'll discuss the current exploitation of Ukrainian women--both by pornographers and sex traffickers, that has greatly escalated since the invasion of Ukraine--and how this situation is an extension of norms that have existed for thousands of years under the "spoils of war" patriarchal system which includes the routine rape of women of the losing side in any war. We'll also discuss the sex industry and the harms it does to women around the world, and what approaches we can best take to deal with it.
GUESTS
Dr. Gail Dines / BIO
Dr. Gail Dines is a professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Wheelock College, where she is also chair of the American Studies department. Having researched and written about the porn industry for over twenty years, Dr. Dines is internationally acclaimed as the leading expert on how pornography shapes our identities, culture, and sexuality. She is a consultant to government agencies in the US and abroad, including the UK, Norway, Iceland, and Canada. In 2008, she co-founded the nonprofit Stop Porn Culture. As board chair, she elevated Stop Porn Culture’s international profile and helped it to develop into the feminist health education organization Culture Reframed. Dr. Dines is co-editor of the best-selling textbook Gender, Race and Class in Media. Her latest book, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, has been translated into five languages and adapted into a documentary film. Dr. Dines is a regular guest on television and radio, including shows on ABC, MSNBC, CNN, BBC, CBC, FOX, and National Public Radio. She has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Guardian, Vogue, Marie Claire, and Cosmopolitan, and she writes for The Huffington Post. She is also a featured speaker in documentaries, such as Beyond Killing Us Softly: The Strength to Resist, Mickey Mouse Monopoly, and The Price of Pleasure: Pornography,Sexuality and Relationships. Dr. Dines is a recipient of the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.
Taina Bien Aimee / BIO
Taina Bien Aimee is the Executive Director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), She has dedicated her career to ending violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world. She was one of the founding board members of Equality Now, an international human rights organization, and later served as its Executive Director for a decade. As the Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, Taina continues to advocate for the right of each individual to enjoy the full spectrum of fundamental human rights. She also serves on the boards of the New York Women's Foundation and New York City's Commission on Gender Equity. Taina’s work on gender justice has informed her perspective on human trafficking and sexual exploitation. “I never understood why prostitution is so often considered an exception to gender-based violence and discrimination,” notes Taina, “when, in fact, prostitution exists only because of it.”
MORE BACKGROUND ON UKRAINE / UKRAINIAN WOMEN
The trafficking of Ukrainian women was a problem long before the invasion and bombingof the country by Russia. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Ukrainian economy--which had been based on economic arrangements with that country, went into a tailspin from which it has never completely recovered. Unemployment had been holding at about 2% in 1991, but began to steadily rise to its present 9-1/2 %, as jobs became harder to come by, inflation rose and a succession of pro and anti-Russia presidents changed hands and policies many times.
The basic path of the Ukrainian economy was the same as that of Russia — a handful of oligarchs grabbed everything and the population was impoverished.
But Ukraine's post-communist collapse was even worse than Russia's. A 50 percent decline in GDP from 1990 to 1994, and further declines for the next few years. So, basically Ukraine has been an economic basket case. The decline in GDP might have been as high as 60 percent. To put that in perspective, the decline in the Great Depression in the U.S. was about 30 percent.
As jobs became harder to come by, many Ukrainians left the country in search of work. Many women worked as domestics abroad and others were vulnerable to the false promises of sex traffickers and wound up in the brothels of Germany, a country where the sex industry had been completely decriminalized and where more women were in demand, as German women would not work in the 'race-to-the-bottom' conditions in which trafficked women from other countries--often from Eastern Europe--whose passports had been stolen by the traffickers--were forced to work.
Ukraine does not have a good record on sexism. According to Ukrainian "Youth blogger" Marichka Naboka: "The stereotypes ingrained in women’s lives, like the unfair burden of domestic responsibilities and pay inequality are so common in Ukraine they go unnoticed by most women. Gendered behaviors are “especially rooted,” in more rural areas."
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report for 2017 ranks Ukraine at 61 out of 144 countries with a score of 0.705. While the indicators for health, education, and economic participation for women in Ukraine align with the global average scores, political empowerment lags far behind (103 out of 144 countries.) Only 12% of members of the Ukrainian Parliament are women, as compared to an average of 30% in EU countries.