Poverty and the explosion, yes.
When I started to look into this issue to write The Natashas, what I looked at was the fall of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany. The social safety net in Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, and all of those former Soviet countries is completely shattered; there's nothing left.
What has happened is that alcoholism and family breakdown have just devastated those countries. Russia, for example, has over one million children in institutional care—abandoned orphans. Ukraine has 100,000. This is because women have been told they have to saddle the responsibility of the family with an alcoholic husband or an abandoning husband. Women make up the vast majority of the unemployed in Russia and Ukraine and all of those former Soviet countries.
What happens is that criminals within those countries target every resource they can possibly use and exploit. They've now targeted young women and girls.
One of the things that got me interested in this book was that I found out that a lot of young girls who have ended up in the orphanages in Ukraine and Russia and other countries have been targeted because no one speaks for them. They come out of these institutions without even knowing how to boil water, let alone anything else. Once you've been in an institution and you leave—and I know this because I grew up in an institution in Quebec—nothing else matters. You have no one to turn to, you exist on your own, and you try to make it on your own.
These girls and young women have been targeted—deliberately targeted. Some may know what they're going into, but when you're really hungry.... I've gone to Russia, Ukraine, and other countries, and the kind of poverty they face day in and day out, we don't understand; we can't even comprehend. Our welfare people are living on easy street compared with what they have. They are repeatedly targeted and are sent out to foreign lands. It's very easy to smuggle into Germany, Spain, Turkey, the Middle East, and everywhere else.
My chapter on the Internet is called “Click of a Mouse”, because with a click of a mouse you can get anything you want. The sex trade on the Internet is incredible. Two seasons ago on W-FIVE I did a documentary for CTV, going to Costa Rica. I didn't have to do much research. I just turned to my producer and said, do you want to see how quick it is? I went to the computer, and we got villages and towns throughout Costa Rica, with pictures and videotapes of young teenage girls and young women. We could just go in with a click of a mouse—any country, any city, any village in those countries.
With a click of a mouse I can see pictures, videotapes, prices. Whatever I want, the Internet is providing it. You can not believe how much is on the Internet. No matter what you put on the Internet.... If I have a sore back and enter “massage”, 90% of what's going to come up is sex sites. These women are targeted through the Internet.
In some of the brothels I went into to see what the heck was going on in various countries, the guys had their computers right up there, with the pictures of the girls, and there were guys writing in from Canada, the United States, Japan, Israel, France, Germany, Spain, wherever. They would just type in, see what they want, and they would go on their “business trips”, and go out there.
Remember, the demand is not about sleazy guys who are low-life trailer trash or that sort of thing; these guys who are going out are husbands and professional men who get onto airplanes to do business on behalf of corporations, and then go and abuse women and do things to them that they can not do here without getting into serious trouble.
Canada as a source? Years ago I wrote a book called Haven's Gate: Canada's immigration Fiasco , in which I said we have to worry about what is happening in Europe, with the floods of refugee claimants and all of the other things that are happening with economic migrants, or we will suffer the same consequence. Well, we didn't pay attention and we suffered the same consequence.
What is happening in Europe will happen here. What is happening in the United States now will happen here, because they are going to come here if we turn a tolerant or blind eye to this. We are right now not at it, but years ago, when I used to read NOW magazine and Eye Weekly magazine in Toronto, the prostitution page was half a page, maybe three-quarters of a page. Now, it's four, five, or six pages. But look at it; it's foreign women—Thai, Filipino, Ukrainian, Russian, South American from any South American country you want. So it's now starting to come here.
A lot of people never question, who are these girls? Why do we have all of these foreign women here from destitute countries and men having a field day? No one is asking, how did these girls get here, and do they really want to do what they're doing?
There's a study by the San Francisco Women's Center that questioned 854 so-called prostitutes around the world, including Canada, the United States, Germany, Japan, and others, and 89% desperately said they wanted out, that they were trapped and there was no way out. What can you do? We don't offer them anything. Yet these legalization forces don't talk about the 89% who desperately want out. They don't see themselves as happy hookers. So we allow this to continue.
Canada can easily become a real problem if we don't keep our eyes open, and if we start to entertain the idea of legalization, you will see foreign women quickly fill the void that local women who have real jobs won't do. The classic example of that is the strippers who we brought in from Romania to do things that Canadian strippers told me they would never do under any circumstances because they wouldn't debase themselves that much, but impoverished women who have nothing can easily do it.