THE VULNERABILITY OF RUSSIAN ORPHAN GIRLS TO TRAFFICKING

 

According to the Department of Social Protection and Ministry of Education, there are currently 800,000 Russian children living in mixed-sex institutions; 70% of them are girls.  Most of these girls will spend more than 10 years of their development in institutional settings where they receive sub-standard educations and learn few, if any, of the normal coping and social competency skills required for successful employment after institutionalization.  When orphans are emancipated at age 17, more than half are recruited to a life of crime and/or prostitution, 10% commit suicide, and 30% are addicted to alcohol and other drugs during their first year of living independently.  Orphanage graduates are unprepared for the Russian job market because they are unprepared for life.  They do not behave appropriately in the workplace.  They are loud, often aggressive and notably unreliable with little sense of personal responsibility.  They do not know how to work with co-workers because their entire interpersonal experience has been with their peers and caretakers in a Russian institution.

            As a group, most become sexually active with the onset of puberty by the age of 12 – generally at the instigation of older teenaged boys but often at the hands of male caretaking staffing in the institution.  By the time of graduation, most have had multiple partners, have not had control over their own bodies and up to 25% have had forced abortions.  If an orphan becomes pregnant, she is forced to either have an abortion or to leave the orphanage and loose state support.

            Orphanages are an active recruiting ground for the pimps and traffickers who recruit and abduct thousands of orphan girls each year into prostitution.  Some are lured with promises of lucrative jobs in cities or abroad – others are simply abducted.  A survey of orphanages in Russia’s third largest region revealed that more than 300 teenaged girls were reported missing and unaccounted for in 2005.

            Where do they go?  They follow the “road of child slavery” to Moscow.

According to the Moscow militia, there are up to 50,000 victims of trafficking in the City of Moscow at any one time; 70% of them under the age of 16.  Most are held in mobile “tochkas” or brothels that move around Moscow, are linked to organized crime and are “protected” by corrupt police. 

Each year, 3000 children (approximately 70% of them classified as “unaccompanied from other regions”) pass through city run shelters which is the only point where they can receive assistance. In 2006, MiraMed implemented the first program for providing psychological, medical, legal and social service assistance to trafficked children in Moscow shelters.  The project has revealed a social service system which is overwhelmed by the shear numbers of children trafficked from orphanages, small Russian cities and villages and from the regions of the former Soviet Union – predominantly Tajikistan, Moldova, Ukraine. 

At the current time, real mechanisms for returning girls safely from Moscow to their countries and regions of origin do not exist – particularly since the majority came from orphanages.  As a result, many return to the streets of Moscow and their pimps and traffickers.  From Moscow, thousands are trafficked into Europe, Scandinavia, the Middle East and North Africa.  Russian child prostitutes can be found in nearly every country of the world.

Girls in institutions suffer the same degree of extreme vulnerability as child refugees.  Without support and protection from family and community, all children are vulnerable to predators.  Driven largely by the internet, the growing world markets for child pornography and child prostitutes have made the sexual exploitation of vulnerable children an extremely profitable business.  The more children suffer, the more that predators thrive.  It is essential that awareness of the risks and extreme diligence in the protection of vulnerable children be a priority not only for the sending countries but for the receiving countries as well.  Globalization requires us to increase our own boundaries of responsibility far beyond our “villages”.  We are all responsible for the safety of the world’s children – and the most vulnerable are the poorest, the unwanted, the invisible.

Are they less important than any of the rest of us?

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Dr. Juliette M. Engel, Founding Director

MiraMed Institute - http://www.miramedinstitute.org