Selling Olga: Stories of Human Trafficking

by Louisa Waugh

It’s seems inconceivable in the 21st century, but human trafficking is now the world’s fastest-growing illegal according to U.S. government estimates, between 700,000 and two million people have become victims. Following three years of in-depth research, award-winning author and journalist Louisa Waugh has produced a vivid, unflinching account of how this immoral commerce operates and why it thrives. Throughout Eastern Europe, a combination of war and poverty has led to women being sold in bars, confined, and coerced into sex work. And while Waugh focuses especially on one woman, Olga, who tells her own story in angry, heartbreaking detail, she also introduces us to many others across Europe including Nigerian women in Italy and migrants trapped in other forms of forced labor. She helps us understand why, in spite of global awareness, relentless anti-trafficking campaigns, and increasing numbers of imprisonments, this type of crime hasn’t disappearedand why, in spite of everything, there is hope for change.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, True Crime, Biography, Prostitution

262 pages, Paperback

First published August 24, 2006

Reviews

[Raúl Omar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my life. -This should be my whole review, but let me explain why this book became so important for me:

I found this book while doing research about human rights and human trafficking. I was absolutely shocked while reading this account of trafficking in the 21st century and my scope about the matter completely changed.

Louisa Waugh does an extensive research and a series of interviews that tell the tales behind the numbers. Before reading this book and while doing some research I was astonished by the numbers: the increasing amount of trafficked woman, the high death rates, the low rates of rescued woman and so on. This book opened my eyes and told me the obvious (yet ignored by many): each number is a person, each person has a story of pain and suffering, and no one should ever be victim of trafficking.

Waugh goes beyond the facts, official reports, international agreements and legal framework: 'human trafficking' says nothing, and 'modern slavery' is an understatement for me. By telling these tales of of trafficking, the author gives this horrible situation a new depth: victims suffer more than we can imagine, and of course, more than what we are told by the media, international organizations and governments. We are told about people trafficked, we are not told about their living conditions, nor the extreme violence (physical, sexual and psychological) they experience.

I believe the most important aspect of this book is that it made me realized three things that have since shaped and defined my understanding of human behaviour:
1) We judge too quickly: I'm tired of listening "She's a prostitute because she wants to" or "this person deserves what happened to him/her" or worse: "It's her fault, she could have said no". Well, it's not that easy, we can't know the whole story.
2)To lose the sense of proportion is easier than we think: as soon as something (bad or good) starts repeating, we get used to it and tend to believe it's 'normal'. Human trafficking is a very common practice worldwide and commonly thought to be 'normal'. That's terrible because it becomes harder to fight, and it makes it harder to help the victims.
3)How easily we say 'that's not my problem': As soon as I lay the book down I wanted to fight pimps and traffickers. A couple of weeks later I was thinking 'Honestly, there's nothing I can do, let those who can -not my problem- solve it.

This is a very violent and explicit book, should be taken seriously, not a light reading, not something to joke about, yet something everyone should be aware of.

This review was also posted in my blog

[Victoria (hotcocoaandbooks) · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author of this book was doing research to write about human trafficking and spent time talking to many victims of trafficking, people who work with victims of trafficking, and people who come in contact with them or are related to them. It was mainly focused on trafficking in European nations such as Albania, Italy, & England, but there were others as well involved. It was interesting to see how different countries have different laws regarding those who are in prostitution and are sexually exploited. There was one account focused on Bonded Labor slavery while the rest was on sexual slavery. It was quite interesting and very sad. I've read a lot of books that focus on Russia, South-East Asia, Africa, India, and the US so this gave me a new type of environment setting that I got to learn about. It was very informational and had really varied accounts that are worth reading. Good book. Not my favorite (as I've read over 30 human trafficking books) but definitely in the middle of books I enjoyed on that subject.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have any interest in learning more about human trafficking, I would highly recommend this book. British author Louisa Waugh describes her journey to learn about human trafficking through her first-person account of her research focusing on trafficking in Eastern Europe. She visits Moldova, Serbia, Albania aand other Balkan states to learn about trafficking victims, how trafficking works, and to analyze ways in which governments and NGOs are responding to this humanitarian crisis. She also examines how trafficking plays out when people are trafficked into the UK. This book was eye-opening and did an amazing job at uncovering and describing the complexities of this issue and how these complexities need to be considered in our societal response to this crisis. Very powerful and fascinating book.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I genuinely learned a lot from this book. I guess I never knew that human trafficking was such a morally complex issue. I think the most interesting thing I read in this book was the forward, which discusses the average attitude toward trafficked women. We want them to be innocent, unaware they are about to become prostitutes, and indignant about being forced to perform sex. If a girl agrees to become a prostitute, and she is being treated as a slave, we are much less sympathetic. I agree with the author when she says that every woman everywhere, regardless of what they have done and what they agree to, deserves basic rights concerning her working conditions. And no one should be sold or traded, for whatever purpose.

This book is a little dense, but a good read all the same.

[Lisa Bennett · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this would be an interesting book to read, but I found it really difficult to read, in the way that it's written. It was more like a long essay, or the sort of talk you would hear at a conference. It was all too technical, too many figures, statistics, information about organisations and companies etc. All of that to me was unimportant and boring. I didn't wanna read about that, I wanted to read these women's stories. I thought that was what I was getting by reading this book, but only about 10% of the book were stories of human trafficking, the rest was the boring info stuff, which really bored me and put me off. I've read so much better than this!

[Amanda Munoz]

Waugh did an excellent job writing this book in the form of a journey--the journey taken in researching this book. She excellently portrays the need to deal with the source, (often a need for better employment, or employment at all) as well as the need for better care for trafficking survivors. In the cases of many of the women in the book the need is not so great for warning against solicited migration so much as it is for opportunities in their homelands; just as the key to a healthy diet is not learning to spurn unhealthy food, but stocking up on good food to begin with.

[Annaliese Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I happened to pass this book on my way out of the library, and for some reason, I decided to pick it up and read it. worth it. I learned a lot about how trafficking devastates a person, a community, a country. I learned that the UN isn't as innocent as it seems. I learned empathy only gets so far.

[N · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's an ice cream shop near where I live which has been shuttered for years. Just another victim of bricks-and-mortar retail decline, you might think. Except the real story is that the owners got prosecuted for modern slavery -- they'd been keeping a chap as a literal slave, making him live and work in the shop, unpaid, serving ice cream to little kiddies.

Human trafficking is something that I'm fortunate enough to not think about very often, but it's worth remembering that it's right there under our noses. Still.

The stories Louisa Waugh unearths are genuinely fascinating and, of course, very sad. Who knew the 90s wars in eastern Europe opened up so many opportunities for sex trafficking? (War! What is it good for? Well, this, apparently.)

It's a shame that, as a book, Selling Olga is so unfocused. It's essentially an anti-travelogue. Follow me as I visit the most depressing town in Moldova to research modern slavery! It's not Waugh's fault that her material is so depressing, but it is her fault that she didn't figure out a more coherant way to structure this book.

[Linda Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been naive about human slavery and trafficking by assuming it doesn't exist. This book for me is a beginning in understanding the realities of this inhuman treatment of women and how I want to get involved to see an end to this reality.

[Heidi Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

She walked the streets of Chisinau and also walked some village streets in Moldova. She interviewed victims and workers who worked in the shelters.