by Victor Malarek

Author Information: An award-winning journalist with more than thirty years of experience in Canadian news. Works with CTV's current affairs show W-FIVE as it's senior reporter. Prior to joining W-FIVE, Malarek was the investigations editor for The Globe and Mail from 2000 to June 2003 and from 1990 to 2000 he was a host of CBC's investigative documentary show The Fifth Estate. In 2001, his investigation into the Toronto Police Union led to a fourth Michener Award and in 1997, he won a Gemini Award as Canada's Top Broadcast Journalist.

Book Description: Award-winning Canadian journalist Malarek reports on the most recent wave in the global sex trade, sparked by the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. According to the U.S. State Department, at least 800,000–900,000 impoverished young women, many of them orphans, from Eastern and Central Europe, are lured with promises of jobs as waitresses, nannies or maids in Western Europe or North America. Instead, they find themselves imprisoned in apartments, massage parlors or brothels in countries ranging from South Korea, Bosnia and Japan to Israel and Germany. With "ruthless efficiency," in the words of one European official, Russian and other organized crime syndicates control this human trade, which offers high profits with little risk of interference thanks to "complacency, complicity, and corruption" on the part of national governments and law enforcement.

One of the more horrific examples Malarek offers involves sex slaves in Bosnia who serviced NATO and UN peacekeepers after the war in 1995. Malarek recounts the affecting first-person stories of numerous victims. The author has excellent research skills and clearly makes his case with the hope of creating enough outrage to stop this traffic in women. However, his hyperbolic, tabloid style of writing is distracting. The facts are horrendous enough to speak for themselves. (Publishers Weekly review)

Recommendation: This book was recommended to me by frequent Orange Ukraine reader and commenter IIU.

Book Links

Full Bio at CTV Canada
Brama Review
Powell's
Amazon