The name "Natasha" is the generic name given to the estimated 900,000 girls and women who are trafficked over international borders into sexual slavery each year. Most of these women are smuggled into the Middle East, Asia, and North America. The trafficking of human beings is now the third-largest moneymaking venture in the world, after illegal weapons and drugs, generating about $12 billion a year in illicit income.

Malarek's book begins with the story of Marika, a 19-year old Ukrainian woman who accepts a job as a waitress in Tel Aviv that she found through a job agency. As soon as she gets off the plane, she is whisked away with three other girls and locked in a room with no beds, no food, and no water. The next day they are told to disrobe and are looked over by the owner. He tells them they have been purchased for $10,000 each and will be his property until they can pay him $20,000. Their only way to make money is to have sex with men unknown to them. They are beaten and raped when they disobey any of the owners' and clients' demands.

In the two years he spent researching this heinous international problem, Victor Malarek has gathered hundreds of these stories The trafficking of women is, in essence, modern slavery. Lured by the promise of jobs overseas, millions of women leave their homes, hoping to reduce the poverty in which their families live or simply to escape political oppression. When they apply for these generally nonexistent jobs, they are kidnapped by traffickers, smuggled across borders, and sold into sexual slavery.

For the traffickers, it is a lucrative enterprise. It is very much a "win-win" type of business: the "exporter" can make several thousand dollars a head, with very little overhead, while the "owner" can usually make back his initial investment within a few days. By forcing the women under his control to work as many as 15 hours a day, six or seven days a week, and paying them only enough for food and cigarettes, a pimp can rake in anywhere from $75,000 to $250,000 per woman, according to the police agency Interpol. Moreover the "risk-benefit ratio" is much better than running guns or peddling drugs because legal sanctions tend to be much lighter—when they are enforced at all.

There is no lack of raw material. In the old Soviet bloc, the return of capitalism since 1990 has been an unmitigated disaster for the great majority of the population. Unemployment is rampant, the social safety net has been all but destroyed, and living standards have collapsed—in short, there is destitution on a colossal scale. Desperate people are easy prey. An ad in a local paper promising jobs in the West as secretaries, models, waitresses or nannies nets hundreds of applicants. Or there are orphanages where a crop of 16 or 17-year-olds can easily be "harvested," since the cash-strapped institutions are only too glad to have these children taken off their hands, and some officials knowingly collude with a supposedly long-lost "uncle" or "aunt" who suddenly turns up to take a girl "home."

During the last decade, hundreds of thousands of women from Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Romania have been sold into slavery as prostitutes. Crime syndicates use a variety of methods to capture young women. Malarek provides copious examples. A girl walking down a road in Moldova is forced into a car. An overflowing Romanian orphanage receives a visit from "social workers" offering "apprentice programs" for adolescent girls. A young Ukrainian woman, desperate to help her starving parents, responds to a newspaper ad to work in Germany. An ambitious young graduate signs up with what appears to be a legitimate foreign corporation during a job fair at a Russian university.

The author's description of what occurs next makes the reader cringe. The women, entrusting their lives to unscrupulous traffickers, are packed off to various training centres, particularly in the Balkans. Transported westward to be "broken," they are raped, beaten and terrorized into submission. Then they are ready to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, often in much the same way as a cattle sale.

In cities such as Belgrade, Yugoslavia, stunned women stand naked in secluded apartments waiting to be bought by pimps. Here, a woman can be sold for as little as $500 or as much as $10,000. After being sold, she will be locked in a room, fed one meal a day, burned with cigarettes to destroy her self-esteem, and forced to have sex with up to a dozen men a day, seven days a week, until exhaustion or disease wipe out her market value.

In Germany, up to half a million Eastern European women work as prostitutes. The streets of Italy are lined with Romanian and Moldovan teenagers. Other serious offenders include Greece, Turkey, and South Korea; many of the "Natashas" also end up in Toronto, Chicago or Los Angeles. Among Malarek's most shocking claims is that on a per capita basis the two countries with the most voracious appetites for Eastern European women are Bosnia and Israel.

With respect to Bosnia, Malarek provides an unsavory explanation. Prostitution in Bosnia sprang up to serve the United Nations troops and international aid workers who flooded into the country at the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Malarek underscores the irony of these supposed emissaries of civilization feeding a barbaric industry with descriptions: 60-year-old U.S. military officers showing up at social events with their 14-year-old sex slaves. UN police demand "freebies" in return for curtailing raids on brothels packed with UN soldiers. At a place called the Arizona Market in northwestern Bosnia, "The girls appear naked on stage with numbers in their hands. Men walk up, touch their flesh, inspect their skin and even look into their mouths before they make a bid."

In Israel, it is common to blame rampant prostitution on foreign guest workers. But Malarek argues that these men lack the money to buy sex. Israel's "Natashas," smuggled in via Egypt, service an estimated one million men a month. Many of the "clients" are Orthodox Jews. Malarek quotes Israeli anti-prostitution campaigner Nissan Ben-Ami: "You see a lot of . . . very, very religious men—because these men need sex but the women in their society cannot give it to them when they want it."

In every country where women are trafficked, the police are involved. Enforcement is cosmetic and judges refuse to take the work of a "foreign whore" over that of a local businessman. International plans to crack down on trafficking collapsed earlier this year when the United States backed out of the projected plans to avoid imposing economic sanctions on Israel, Russia, South Korea, and Greece.

Corruption opens borders and secures whatever documents are needed. The women are locked up when they are not working and have no contact with the outside world. The few who are brave enough to go to the police find themselves treated as criminals: typically they are jailed and deported as illegal aliens. Given that the police are often "customers" themselves, the sense of isolation and helplessness these women feel must be overwhelming.

Brutal measures, including murder, are used against anyone attempting to escape. But for those who do manage it or who are deported, the nightmare does not end: as many as half of them end up being re-trafficked. Usually the ordeal ends only when the women are no longer marketable, often because they have contracted AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease. Then they are simply tossed aside like garbage, to make way for fresh recruits. Inevitably, the horror of it all drives some of them to suicide.

Malarek posits that the most appalling aspects of the trade is the targeting of orphans throughout Eastern Europe and cites official statistics from government agencies. In March 2003, for example, the U.S. State Department reported a "pattern of trafficking" involving orphans in Moldova. According to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the girls at risk are those who "must leave orphanages when they graduate," usually at sixteen or seventeen. Most have no source of funds for living expenses or any education or training to get a job. Traffickers often know precisely when these girls are to be turned out of the institutions ("some orphanage directors sold information . . . to traffickers") and are waiting for them, job offers in hand. The State Department also notes that throughout Russia, there are "reports of children being kidnapped or purchased from . . . orphanages for sexual abuse and child pornography" and that child prostitution is "widespread" in orphanages in Ukraine. In Romania, "many orphanages are complicit in letting girls fall victim to trafficking networks." Vast armies of Russian children who have run away from brutal orphanages wander the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The author points out that most people have no idea that these women and children even exist. Except for the street trade, they are largely invisible, held behind locked doors in apartments, brothels, massage parlors and bars. To their clients, they are nothing more than interchangeable bodies. It does not matter that they are enslaved; sex for money is a business transaction. To their owners and pimps, they are perishable goods to be used to the fullest before they spoil. And to the gangs who traffic in these women and children, they are one of the most profitable forms of business in existence today.

Malarek also provides a historical perspective. The international bazaar for women is nothing new—Asian women have been a basic commodity for years, and armies of men still flock to Bangkok and Manila on sex junkets. He explains, however, that over the past three decades, the world has witnessed four distinct waves of trafficking for sexual exploitation: first in Southeast Asia, then Africa, Latin America and now eastern Europe. The first wave of trafficked women came from Southeast Asia in the 1970s and was composed mostly of Thai and Filipino women. The second wave arrived in the early 1980s and was made up of women from Africa, mainly Ghana and Nigeria. The third wave, from Latin America, followed right behind and comprised women mostly from Colombia, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. The latest traffic, from Eastern and Central Europe, has been dubbed "the Fourth Wave" and the speed and proportion are truly staggering. Just a decade ago, these women did not even register on the radar screen. Today, they represent more than 25 percent of the trade.

As Malarek contends, wherever destitution is rife, the social plague of the sex trade flourishes. As long as the marketplace is the decisive factor in society and as long as the bottom line in human affairs is measured in dollars and cents, there will always be an irresistible pressure to turn sex into a commodity. Sex-slave trafficking is a booming industry, run with ruthless efficiency by powerful, multinational criminal networks. These are not casual criminals. They run well-funded, well-organized, influential organizations. They know their business inside out and respond to changes in the market with a speed unmatched by even the most competitive corporations. Their expertise and their ability to exploit the market are surpassed only by their disregard for human life. Women are bought, sold and hired out like any other product. The bottom line is profit.

The outlook is sobering and The Natashas includes a bleak description of changes in the trafficking business. Organized crime groups are increasingly moving toward large hierarchical structures. They no longer want to deal with middlemen. They want to run the schemes for themselves—from recruitment to final exploitation. According to Europol's 2002 Crime Assessment report, Trafficking in Human Beings into the European Union, will "increase the profitability, efficiency and security of operations." The report reflects that within these crime groups there is a desire to be more in control of all elements of the trade, perhaps indicating the elevation of trafficking in human beings within the wider portfolio of organized criminal activity.

Urgent cables, reports and alerts from criminal intelligence-gathering agencies and police forces around the world are also cited in the book, painting a frightening picture of these heightened activities. The most formidable threat to vulnerable Slavic women today is Russian organized crime whose syndicates, now numbering more than 200, are active in 58 countries around the world, including Austria, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Israel, Canada and the United States. Most have their grip on prostitution rackets although they are also behind huge extortion and fraud schemes.

The United Nations sanctimoniously condems this new slavery while their own personnel have been directly implicated in the sex trade in Bosnia. Condemnations from governments change nothing. As Malarek points out, it is time we did more than bemoan the latest victims. It is time we figured out how to stop a "fifth wave" from happening.

Often described as a crusading reporter, Victor Malarek has been a journalist for over 30 years and was one of the first journalists to report on the 1970 FLQ-October Crisis. In 1976, Malarek joined The Globe and Mail, where he garnered three prestigious Governor General's Awards for meritorious public service journalism. From 1990 to 2000, he was host of CBC's award-winning investigative documentary current affairs show, the fifth estate. He is the author of four books and is currently the investigations editor for The Globe and Mail.