Stolen from Mongolia for sex

Nomin, 25, was lured by a newspaper ad to study for free in Korea only to be forced to work as a prostitute on Jeju Island. Three years after she managed to escape, she's still without a job and at risk of being re-trafficked. (James Wasserman/GlobalPost)

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ULAN BATOR, Mongolia – Nomin wanted to go to college.

Three years ago, unable to afford tuition in the Mongolian capital, the native of remote Zavkhan province spotted an ad in a newspaper advertising a scholarship to study in Korea — no tuition, no living costs. All that was required was a high school diploma and a passport.

She handed over her documents to a Mongolian couple supposedly working for the university, and within weeks Nomin was on an airplane bound for Seoul with two other young women.

“When we arrived the couple told us it’s not a good time to enter university. They told us we had to work in a nightclub until the semester starts,” says Nomin (not her real name), now 25, in a near whisper during an interview in an Ulan Bator parking lot. “Everybody was speaking Korean. We were wondering what was going on.”

The girls were taken to Jeju Island, locked in a small apartment, beaten and forced to prostitute themselves in a local hostess bar. Three months later, with the help of a Mongolian businessman she met at the club, Nomin escaped through a bathroom window and made her way to Seoul and eventually back to Mongolia. Her family still doesn’t know what really happened to her.

Between 3,000 and 5,000 Mongolians are trafficked every year, according to NGO estimates; the vast majority are women and children recruited by deceit to work in the sex industry. They are lured by promises of lucrative jobs in nightclubs and massage parlors only to find themselves trapped in a system of modern slavery. Their passports are confiscated and they are locked in “debt bondage,” in which traffickers demand exorbitant repayment for travel and other costs.

Some, like Nomin, manage to escape. Most, lacking money, travel documents and assistance of any kind, stay for several years. Many are beaten, forced to take drugs, raped and sold repeatedly. They work in the bars of Beijing, the saunas of Macau, and the brothels of Erlian, a Gobi desert boomtown on the China-Mongolia border.

“Trafficking is growing very fast,” says Amgalan Erdenechuluun, a project officer at the Human Security Policy Studies Center, an NGO in Ulan Bator. The young women “want to believe that there’s something better out there. But when they reach the destination country they find themselves trapped in a nightmare. They’re just slaves.”

According to the U.S. State Department’s 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report, released in June, Mongolian trafficking victims have been found in a growing number of countries as far reaching as Germany, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and more. And an increasing cohort of Mongolian women are entering into arranged marriages with foreigners – mostly South Koreans – but end up in situations of involuntary servitude.

Traffickers prey on the desire for a better life. Some are friends and relatives of the victims, who are generally uneducated and desperate for a way out of poverty. Targets are often prostitutes who are misled about pay and working conditions; others are recruited by advertisements in newspapers or on late night TV. In one recent case, 19 women were trafficked to China on the promise of jobs as flight attendants.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/asia/090629/stolen-mongolia