"Sexy Ukrainian Women Looking for Love": The Fight Against Sex Tourism

Late last year, as Ukraine started getting seriously hit by the financial crisis, a man in a faux-leather jacket stood on Kiev’s main avenue, Khreschatik Boulevard, strapped into a red-lettered billboard offering "Sexy Ukrainian Women Looking for Love." Next to him on a small table was a folder of pictures of potential "brides." Women walked past, averting their gazes.

Anna Hutsol, a young woman wearing long shorts and high-top sneakers, emerged from the metro stop. She rolled her eyes at the sign before heading to a nearby café.

"People think of Ukraine as this giant brothel," she said. "They can’t tell you about any landmarks or monuments in Ukraine. But they can tell you that there are pretty girls in Kiev who wear next to nothing when it’s summer, and that Kiev’s an easy place to find so-called love."

Hutsol, 24, has cropped, tangerine colored hair. She founded the feminist organization FEMEN last spring to fight the culture of sex tourism in Ukraine. FEMEN organizes its activism via VKontakte, a Russian version of Facebook, and stages provocative protests that have won press attention.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1993, Russian mail-order brides became a distressing cliché, but as Russia grew wealthy its women were less reliant on foreign husbands. So foreigners looking for an easy marriage turned to Russia’s neighbor, Ukraine. Traveling there was once a lengthy process involving embassies and visa fees, but in 2005 the nation dropped visa requirements for citizens of the European Union and the United States. Consequently, more than 20 million people visit Ukraine each year, and the capital, Kiev, is now a popular tourist destination.

Unfortunately, one of Kiev’s main tourist attractions seems to be women. When the visa laws changed, Ukraine, once just a notorious source of sex-trafficked women, now became a sex-industry destination as well, a gateway from East to West. Explained one sex worker, prostituted Ukrainian women who had worked in other Eastern bloc countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland then came home. Child pornography also grew more prevalent, since it was now easy to enter this relatively poor country and exploit underage victims, especially homeless children and orphans.

Prostitution is illegal in Ukraine and difficult to track. Official police reports claim there are 12,000 prostitutes, but FEMEN believes the numbers are much higher. If someone is caught soliciting, a nominal fine is paid. No customers or johns are apprehended. In regional cities, police contact the prostituted woman’s parents, a shaming technique intended to decrease the incidence of prostitution.