Videos

FRONTLINE: SEX SLAVES

57 minutes, produced 2006 by Frontline, WGBH Boston.

Twenty-one-year-old Katia left home on what she believed would be a trip to buy goods in Turkey, but instead she was sold into sexual slavery for $1,000 by the man who agreed to take her there. "He didn't look like a person who would do something like that," said Katia's husband.

"He sold my wife for $1,000 because she'd given birth before, . . . as merchandise she was only worth $1,000. Girls who haven't had children are more expensive.

Frontline follows Katia's husband on an extraordinary journey deep into the world of sex trafficking to try to find his wife, who was four months' pregnant when she left home, and then free her from the violent pimp who now "owns" her. Along the way, the production teams takes a hidden-camera look at the various traffickers, pimps and middlemen who illegally buy and sell hundreds of thousands of women each year. Lured by traffickers who prey on their dreams of employment abroad, many of the women are then kidnapped and "exported" to Europe, the Middle East, the United States and elsewhere. During this process, they may be sold to pimps, locked in brothels, drugged, terrorized and raped.

As Katia's husband searches for her, we learn what she might be enduring from interviews with other trafficked women. "We worked for as long as we had clients. They didn't see us as human beings, but just as flesh that they could use." Another responded: "There were 22 girls in a three-bedroom apartment, and each girl got beaten up at least once a day. One girl ran away and went to the police for help, but she was taken back to her pimp. Policemen . . . used our services."

As the story of Katia is brought to an extraordinary conclusion, SEX SLAVES exposes the government indifference that allows the global sex trade to continue. The SEX SLAVES producer states: "The prosecution rate is abysmal in most of these countries." She continues: "The official line is that we're doing as much as we can; we have a counter- trafficking unit; we're trying to prosecute . . . we know that there is a level of corruption; we know that there is bribery. But without the political will to address this, traffickers will continue to operate with impunity. That's why we set out to investigate this story."

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