Sex slavery: The growing trade in Israel, thousands of Eastern European and Russian girls lured to Tel Aviv and enslaved into prostitution.
There are an estimated 20,000 female sex slaves forced into prostitution in Tel-Aviv each year. According to a report released in 2005 by the Knesset Subcommittee on Trafficking in Women, between 10,000 and 15,000 women had been smuggled into Israel over the previous four years to work as prostitutes. According to the report, the women, who were mostly from the former Soviet Union, were sold at public auction for as much as $10,000 and forced to work up to 18 hours a day. On average, the women received only three percent of the money they earned from prostitution, and many were raped and beaten. Most of the women had been smuggled over the Egyptian border and lured from Russia and Eastern Europe on false promises of secretarial jobs.
Dozens of brothels and peepshows have sprung up in Tel Aviv and Haifa in the last few years. There are over 20,000 women in prostitution in Tel Aviv. Their customers pay for 45,000 acts of prostitution every day. Women are held in apartments, bars and brothels where they are bought by up to 25 men a day. They sleep in shifts, four to a bed. (Police officials, Michael Specter, “Traffickers’ New Cargo: Naive Slavic Women, “New York Times, 11 January 1998, They cannot walk freely. They cannot leave the apartment as they wish. Usually the passports have been taken.
Amnesty International investigation of the trade in Russian women suggests Israel’s police and government officials have largely ignored the abuse.
