“The real action is in the Emirates, Dubai or Antalya,” says Masha, a stick-thin 19-year-old who teeters a little on her heels. “Don’t be confused,” she says. “Nobody takes us by the hair and drags us onto the ships.” She gestures over at the mouth of the port. “Those are like the gates to freedom for a lot of us,” she says. “Yeah, like the Statue of Liberty,” adds another girl, and the group of them erupts into laughter.

This is not better or happier news, but it adds to our understanding of how some women migrate out of bad situations. The fact that they don’t need to be kidnapped, coerced, lied to and forced doesn’t make their choices any nicer. The point is, given very few options, these women prefer to get into sex work. The figure of the prostitute who’s made it financially and goes – or is sent – back home to show the trappings is a classic one – I have met her myself in more than one country. The story she tells is true – it’s possible to make much more money selling sex – though it is hardly worth it if you can’t figure out how to do it without suffering too much.

This excerpt comes from Time, which means the reporter had better resources and a bit more time to do a decent investigation. I can’t say whether he passed up or missed opportunities to find out about less miserable situations. The thing to understand about all such stories is that the investigator or reporter goes into the field with only one or two contacts (aka gatekeepers) and may never run into people who would tell a completely different story. To talk with all sorts of potential migrants takes a real commitment of time and money, wherever you try to do it.

Prostitution, Ukraine’s Unstoppable Export
By Simon Shuster, Time

But the prostitutes who pass through Odessa these days do not harbor the naive dreams of their predecessors from the ’90s. And so the sex trade through Odessa has hardened in the past few years into something more jaded and much more difficult to stop. “Reporters always come here demanding to see the victims,” says Olga Kostyuk, deputy head of the charity Faith, Hope, Love, which provides assistance to Odessa’s sex workers. “They want to see the men, the pimps, the manipulators behind all of this. But things are not so simple now.”

For one thing, there aren’t many pimps left in this city of one million people, at least not the men who engaged in the most vicious forms of sex trafficking. As recently as 2006, their most common method of recruitment was to send scouts into the nearby towns to lure girls back to the port with false promises of work abroad — as a dancer in Paris or a waitress in Dubai — and then force them into prostitution. But most of these modern-day slaves traders are gone — these days, few of the prostitutes who pass through Odessa have been tricked into joining the trade. “Now the typical situation is that an experienced girl gets off the plane from Turkey covered in gold, diamonds and furs, and goes back to her home village,” says Svetlana Chernolutskaya, a psychologist who has counseled prostitutes in Odessa for years. “She finds the girls who are in a tough spot, and tells them how much money they can make turning tricks in a foreign country.”

The poverty and general hopelessness in many villages of eastern Ukraine, Moldova and Romania now run so deep — especially in the wake of the financial crisis — that the promise of a job as a prostitute abroad is enough to get the vast majority of trafficked women to sign up voluntarily. They follow the Mamachki to foreign resorts or big cities in western Europe. . .

– Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist