Web sites feed boom in sex trade and slavery

[An Metet]

Published Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2001, in the San Jose Mercury News 
BY KEVIN G. HALL 

Mercury News Rio de Janeiro Bureau 


RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- At Agencia Roberta, a call-girl service in this tourist haven known for sun and sin, business is booming, thanks in large part to the Internet.

Italians, Germans, Americans and other foreigners can make arrangements for services in advance, even before their planes touch down. The oldest profession in the world is getting a boost from the newest technology.

``It's globalization,'' explains Vanessa, a manager of the online escort service that charges men about $150 for three hours of pleasure.

``Everybody has a Web page. All the prostitutes know about this,'' says Betty, a freelance hooker in Rio who speaks over a rattling television and the laughter of children. She advertises her Web site in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo.

The Internet gained early fame as a tool to arrange consensual sex via chat rooms. But it also has a more sinister function. It has become a tool that aids the exploitation of women who are tricked or forced into prostitution around the world. Digital cameras mean these women find themselves performing sex acts for voyeurs across the globe. With a few clicks of a computer mouse, a man can log on anywhere from suburban Maryland to rural Montana and be transported instantly to a bedroom in Thailand or the Ukraine.

``People can get so selective that they can now see a particular type of woman doing a type of act, and can do that from a global connection out of sight. Over time, it will increase the demand for real sex slaves,'' warned J. Robert Flores, vice president of the National Law Center for Children and Families in Fairfax, Va., and a former high-ranking official in the Department of Justice's obscenity and child-exploitation division.

Law enforcement officials have known that women are often held against their will and forced into sex at Asian brothels or those controlled by the Russian mob, even in the United States. But now there is a new twist: The act can be sold around the world, Flores said.

``The Internet has made the sex market even stronger, and has even made it possible to market women around the world,'' said Flores, who says few Web sites are actually so bold as to advertise sex slaves.

In Brazil, prostitutes have become prime targets for global sex syndicates, who lure them to foreign countries and then enslave them, said Carla Dolinski, a police investigator who leads anti-trafficking efforts in Rio. An estimated 75,000 Brazilian women work in Europe as prostitutes, many against their will. Dolinski said police recently received a complaint about a widely circulated e-mail trying to recruit Brazilian prostitutes for work in Spain. And there are well-documented cases of ordinary women being tricked into traveling abroad for work, only to be forced into prostitution.

One of them is 20-year-old Beatriz, an ebony-skinned woman with a cover-girl smile. She left her home on the rough outskirts of Rio de Janeiro for the tourist island of Lanzarote, near the Canary Islands. She said she thought she would be part of a Brazilian dance troupe, but she ended up enslaved in Lanzarote, forced to perform sex acts for Spaniards and other tourists -- without pay -- until she managed to escape.

Another Brazilian woman, who asked to be called Ana, said she was lured to Tel Aviv, Israel, two years ago believing she'd be a high-paid waitress. After she arrived, her documents were confiscated and she was told the icy truth: She was now an unpaid prostitute at the service of the Russian mob. She was put to work the very afternoon she arrived. Like Beatriz, she escaped. Her captors murdered one of her friends for not cooperating.

Beatriz and Ana did not find out about their ``jobs'' through high-tech means, but Dolinksi fears that e-mail and Internet sites will more easily entice other desperate women to travel across the globe for promises of a better life, only to suffer similar fates.

``If a foreigner has a site offering $1,000 a month, the girls will go. It is difficult to investigate when it comes from outside of Brazil,'' Dolinski said.

Authorities are still trying to document the myriad ways the Internet is involved in sex trafficking, but sites that are little more than marketing tools for traffickers are proliferating.

One Web site, for example, features private chat rooms for men who may or may not be aware of the misery they are supporting. They exchange tips on brothels around the world where authorities say many women are virtual slaves.

``Almost all the girls have babies, but still, they are good!!! If you like the young, but legal, baby-faced Lolitas, you cannot get it any cheaper,'' says one man's posting on the site about his trip to Brazil.

Another site notes that sex with Brazilian minors is illegal. Even so, it suggests that if ``you are under 50 and white, or even better, blond and blue-eyed, try flirting with any girl from 16 years up, in the street, near high schools.''

The site notes that the Brazilian government has cracked down on child prostitution, but it appears to justify sex with minors by noting ``they will either return home and get abused or roam the street penniless eating at garbage dumps.''

The Internet appears to offer countless ways to deceive and promote illegal activities. Flores points out that many sites offer to help find a marriage partner. But, he adds: ``If you go to those sites, the vast majority of them offer nude pictures of these women. The reality is that after you have been on the site for a few minutes, what you really are talking about is buying and selling of women,'' which is against the law.

A Miami-based Internet site claims to be a matchmaking service, by offering ``mail-order brides'' and charging fees to introduce men to foreign women.

The site, which features photos of women along with information about them, tells cybersurfers not to let worries about their own looks or a lack of money deter them from trying to contact women on the sites.

``If you make only $800 a month you will still be making many times more than the average Cuban worker,'' the site says.

A site from Rugby, N.D., called Your Destiny advertises a buyers' market since, it says, there ``is an overabundance of young single women in Russia.''

Authorities are worried about these subtler approaches. Some are legitimate matchmaking services, but experts think many are a ruse for trafficking women into the United States.

The Justice Department estimates that 50,000 to 100,000 women and children have been trafficked into the United States in the past few years. Lawmakers are considering legislation to grant special visas to women tricked into slavery who are willing to testify against their captors.

There are no statistics on how the Internet's mail-order bride-sites have abetted trafficking, but experts believe they have and that traffickers will become even more sophisticated in using the Internet to reap profits from their trade.

At the same time, anti-trafficking activists in Brazil and around the world say they will try to fight back with the very same tool -- tapping the Internet to warn women about sex slavery.

Cristina Leonardo, a human rights attorney in Brazil, is trying to set up a Web site dedicated to providing information about known traffickers. Her ``Project Against the Trafficking of Humans'' would create a national and international telephone center where people provide tips to authorities. 

Through her Brazilian Defense Center, Leonardo also is trying to create online training programs, so police and the courts can share information around the world to better protect women from this modern-day scourge.