Re: Vivtek: I'm just saying that there's a decent chance that they knew they were at high risk of ending up working as strippers at the very least when they agreed to the deal, and either they chose to go through with the "job interview" with the intention of joining that line of work, or they were just looking for something temporary with other plans. The fact that they're Russian has nothing to do with it, but the fact that they're willing to travel that far to another country for a dubious job position, and then actually go through with some weird interview in a nightclub at midnight, does seem more questionable to me than the possibility that they were at least somewhat aware of what they were doing. Maybe that's just my cynicism for media coverage, and naive hope for human intelligence.
I'm absolutely sure they knew there was sex and stripping involved, and I'm equally sure they have no idea what that actually means. They probably know there's no future in stripping in Moscow, but I would guess they think everybody in New York shops on Fifth Avenue, and if sex gets them that, what's the harm?
I think you're sadly underestimating how shocked Eastern Europeans can be when confronted with the reality of America. Especially 18-year-olds. And even if they "knew what they were getting into" in terms of there being sex, that still doesn't touch what human trafficking is about, which is a slow and steady process of degradation. They'd give up their passports, they'd never see actual money, and the first hit of crack or heroin is always free at some rich guy's party - but pretty soon, it's not free, they're increasingly in debt, they feel trapped (and are trapped) and they think there's nobody in hell who will help an ugly, crack-addicted, no-longer-so-pretty woman.
So either you think Russians, or non-Americans, or whoever, "know what they're getting into" in that situation, and it's just fine, or you haven't thought it through. I'm banking on the latter.
This is not a question of human intelligence. We've all gotten into situations where a flashy fast talker got us into something that trapped us - ever had a cubicle job with a software consulting shop? Our monkey brains always fall for that crap, which is why this particular story was so heartening - somebody actually stopped it before it started, and that's fantastic.
As I said earlier, Bingo's attitude was half humorous, half assholery - I wish he'd stopped at just the humorous half. Sure, maybe this particular nightclub with sex ads where a mysterious guy wanted two 18-year-olds without much English to meet him at midnight for an interview after another job "fell through" and they were in another city wasn't a human trafficking situation. Given the preponderance of flashing red flags, though, I'm damn happy we didn't give this benefactor the benefit of the doubt, even if the club itself had lots of prosperous young people attending.
I think human trafficking is a lot more diverse and complex than the one-dimensional narrative you're describing. From one of the MetaFilter threads, http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-10-10/news/17314668_1_massag... is the last in an excellent series of articles on a young woman who was tricked into a year of prostitution in the US by human traffickers. She didn't give up her passport, she did see actual money (in fact, she paid off tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt she had accrued in Korea, before working prostitution for a bit longer to make some money she could keep), and she's living with one of her former clients.
She's apparently very ashamed of what she did, and there was one occasion on which a violent client put her in fear of her life (and got away with it), so this is not some kind of Happy Hooker outcome. But she also didn't end up "never seeing actual money" or "an ugly, crack-addicted woman," nor is it reported that the other prostitutes handled by the same trafficking ring ended up in such a situation.
I thought it was pretty cool to go to the club and check it out. I thought it was pretty uncool to disparage the possibility of danger, especially given that people who do in fact follow up on human trafficking for a living were taking the matter seriously.
I have nothing against rationality, and I agree that Metafilter can take on some serious pile-on momentum, but really - if my 18-year-old daughter had been in the progress of doing something as colossally stupid as this in Moscow, and a bunch of online Russians headed it off at the pass, I would not at all be pleased if one of them went to the club and said, "Hey, this is a perfectly cool club and I didn't see any actual sex slaves in residence, so you should all get over yourselves."
Going to the club, though, especially after they were all, "OMFG don't mess with the mafia, bingo!" - that bit, I really liked. I mean, it's a club; if they regularly offed their clientele it wouldn't stay open long.
I like to qualify this statement: some educated people. And not no clue, but a bit naïve.
But this was a trafficking issue. And I think that most Europeans and Americans at this age would have realized this. No hard data on this, just personal experience.
Disclaimer: I am from Europe. Already visited the United States.
How can you know that you know what the US is like?
My (now) husband had done a 2-month roadtrip with his family in an RV across the northern US and Canada, and when he came to stay with me for 3 months in southern Maryland, he was shocked, and appalled, by too many things to count.
I know many Europeans who have been all over different parts of the US, and still don't know a lot of things, like how easy it is to fall through the cracks, how badly you can fall, and how hard it is to get seen by a doctor.
But no idea is a bit too much for me. And I don't like the nationalist approach. Yes, it is always shocking for me to realize that universal health care is not seen as a basic human right. But I can also understand this, based on the history of the United States.
I would go as far as to say, that it is very difficult for an American to see why Europe is acting so strange sometimes.
But to the point: commenting the Europeans have no idea, is discriminating.
To be more general, then: nobody really gets the reality of other countries until they've left theirs - but since America makes most of the world's blockbuster movies, everybody has an "America of the mind" that is an internally consistent model. I hasten to add that Americans have the same model - even though we live here and see reality all the time.
Europeans and the Japanese, for instance, think that society naturally agrees that education is a good thing. After all, educated people have created everything worthwhile in life, right? Doctors are educated, government administrators are educated, engineers are educated - stands to reason! Americans, on average, mistrust educated people, to such an extent that education can actually be a liability for anyone proposing public policy.
And yet this is not reflected in movies, where scientists or engineers may be goofy, but they're always respected. So the America of the mind is profoundly out of synch with real America, in ways that flummox anyone who tries to live here in the blithe assumption that America is a first-world nation.
That's just one example off the top of my head. This is in no way discriminating against Europeans - everybody thinks America is movie-America. It's just that it really, really isn't.
I'm basing this on Europeans who've lived here for an extended time (really mostly my wife) and have come to realize how truly jarring is the discord between movie-America and the reality of how we think.
