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Kazakstan: one and all against this scourge
By Zhanna Borozdina, Irina Sokolova
June 2, 2004
Unemployment, poverty and a lack of social protection are as much a part of
Kazakhstan as they are of any other post-socialist country that is having a
difficult time making the transition to a market economy. These circumstances
along with corruption and the imperfect state of the legal system could not
help but contribute to the growth of organized crime, including its new
manifestation, which was unknown in Kazakhstan until recently - the trade in
women. The various agencies and occasional independent businessmen hiring
people to work abroad search for trusting and poorly educated women, offer to
pay for the trip and promise a salary of 200 US dollars or more, which is a
very large sum for the republic. The rest of the story of the recruits is well
known. The geographic position of Kazakhstan predetermined two paths for the
illegal export of sex-slaves: to the east into Turkey, Arabic countries and
China, and to the west into Russia and beyond.
Residents of Almaty and other cities, which is where the main recruiting is
actually taking place, are becoming victims of trafficking, as are women from
the far villages. The latter are becoming particularly easy prey for criminals
as they trust the outwardly well-meaning citizens, who promise to help with
work abroad. They are rarely interested in seeing the license for working
abroad, they know hardly anything about the lurking danger and even those who
do return home rarely turn to law enforcement. They can't expect help from
anywhere: their relatives, as a rule, are people of patriarchal views. Often
the family members themselves judge the victims harshly, as having "shamed the
family," while government structures still have not developed mechanisms
effective enough to support the victims. NGOs [non-governmental organizations]
take upon themselves most of the work aimed at preventing human trade. It
should be said that over the last few years, Kazakhstan mass media have been
making more efforts to educate the population and inform them of the dangers
lurking behind the deceptive offers of recruiters. As such, there was a massive
information campaign in the country two years ago, in which over 30 different
media outlets took part - for one month, informational materials about human
trade were broadcast on the radio and TV, in newspapers and magazines.
Of course, one campaign isn't enough. This is attested to most of all by calls
to crisis centers and other women's organizations in many cities of Kazakhstan.
Here is just one example that was brought to light with the help of the
national information campaign "Ways to prevent trafficking in women and
minors." According to law enforcement officials of the Pavlodarsk region,
trafficking does not even exist in Kazakhstan. However, by monitoring calls to
the "hotline," several instances of the sale of women were revealed. For
example, in March there was a call from a girl who was scared to say what
happened to her and where. In her words, if there had been such a hotline
before, nothing of the kind would have happened to her. Before long, the
operator took interest in a company that, after later review, was found to not
have a license for this type of business and to be working illegally. The
hotline began to receive calls with threats to end its activities. Together
with law enforcement agencies, the given company's activities were cut short.
However, many who had gone to this company were left without documents and
hence without money. All in all, from December 2001 to February 2002, there
were 424 calls to the Pavlodarsk hotline; 194 (40%) about getting work, of
which 93 (48%) were from women. There were calls about studying abroad (13).
The age of callers ranged from 18 to 48 years old. What is trafficking - this
question was asked 82 times, mainly by teenagers. For students and
schoolchildren, seminars are held on university and school campuses, in which
trainers explain the problems of trafficking for teenagers and ways of
preventing it. In addition, meetings with the region's law enforcement
officials are planned.
The work of the hotline is carried out jointly with the National Commission on
Family and Women's Affairs under the office of the Kazakhstan president, the
International migration organization, with financial support from development
agencies of the USA and Sweden. The hotline has shown that trafficking does
exist in the country and that it is a problem for the government's department
of labor and social relations as well as for law enforcement.
The need for this hotline has been attested to by phone calls from respondents
who say they are thankful for the work it does and for the opportunity to
receive confidential and free consultation when going abroad. In three months
alone, the 18 hotlines around the country received approximately four and a
half thousand calls. The overwhelming majority of them were about getting work
abroad and only 24 were about concrete instances of trafficking. The majority
of them - 6 - were reported in the city of Ust-Kamenogorsk. However, according
to Ekaterina Badikova, the campaign's coordinator and an employee of the
Kazakhstan office of the International Migration Organization (MOM), this does
not in any way mean that the problem is more acute in this city than it is in
other regions. Rather, it shows the effectiveness of the hotline of the NGO
Women's Federation "Status." A representative from the city's office of the
general prosecutor did indeed confirm that in the last few years, no criminal
cases under the article that relates to recruitment of people with the goal of
exploitation had been opened. It's true, she added, that two years ago, four
women submitted a statement that they had been sent abroad into forced
prostitution, but later retracted their statement. Actually, according
Ekaterina Badikova's data, only one such incident made it to court throughout
the entire republic.
To change the situation, amendments must be made to many legal documents of the
Kazakhstan republic and the activities of marriage agencies and companies that
organize the trip for those emigrating, which today may work in Kazakhstan
without a license, must be put in order.
Brief reports from places in Russia
The "Project to prevent trade in women in the Russian Far East and Siberia" has
begun in the Irkutsk region. This program is already successfully in place in
several CIS [former Soviet Union] countries. USAID is the organizer and main
financial sponsor of the project. In the Irkutsk region, the program will be
carried out by the social organization "Baikal Women's Union 'Angara'." The
"Baikal Women's Union 'Angara'" has already started developing a plan of
concrete events to counteract the trade of women in the region. The program
will be realized jointly with the regional administration, the federal
department of employment, UVD, and several of the region's non-profit
organizations. "At this point we can't evaluate the actual scale of the problem
since women often don't even go to the law enforcement agencies for help.
Furthermore, in the region there are no officially registered agencies that
arrange employment abroad. So what we are looking at is an illegal network of
such companies," explained Albina Shirobokova, chairman of "Baikal Women's
Union 'Angara'". One aspect of the project's realization is a plan for
widespread training of non-profit organizations that are working to prevent
women's slavery and the trade in women. The program "Training the trainers"
will be carried out for representatives of forty non-profits in Siberia and the
Far East. For their part, the trained specialists will begin work with
potential victims of women's slave trade - graduates of orphanages, poor women
and representatives of the rural area.
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