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Author and journalist Victor Malarek has a fantastic reputation for thoroughly investigating world events. But writing The Natashas: The New Global Sex Trade, a shocking and powerful book about the buying and selling of women around the world, was not an easy feat—mentally or emotionally. In this special feature, Victor explains some of the difficulties he faced in researching and writing this disturbing and compelling book.
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Long before typing a single word of The Natashas into my computer, I set out on a long and difficult road to gather the tragic stories that would make up the heart and soul of the book. From my preliminary research into this disturbing issue—the trafficking of young women and girls from former Soviet nations for sexual exploitation worldwide—I knew I was in for a tough and, at times, dangerous journey. What I had not anticipated was how upsetting and depressing it would turn out to be.
The Natashas took me into the situations that nightmares are made of. I ventured into brothels and strip bars where scores of young women and girls were held as sex slaves for the platoons of lecherous men who patronized these establishments at all hours. The lost and desperate looks on the faces of these poor girls will remain etched in my mind.
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Every country, every bar, every brothel, every side street that I visited provided me with a mountain of raw material for the book. Every rescued victim that recounted her horrific story could have been a novel onto itself. Every cop and government official—good, bad or indifferent—spewed theories from their perches. And every social activist cited endless studies on the root causes of this pernicious trade.
My notebooks and tapes could have filled several tombs. My challenge was to take all this material and do it justice. I had to keep from veering off course on extraneous debates over such issues as the legalization of prostitution or getting muddled in academic studies filled with meaningless jargon and confusing statistics.
Writing The Natashas meant staying true to the objective I had set out for myself—exposing an international human rights tragedy of epic proportions, and first and foremost, the voices of the victims had to be remain central throughout the book. That was the course I set out in my outline and kept to throughout the writing process.
To learn more about The Natashas, click here.
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