The Price of Sex

Mimi Chakarova is a photojournalist from Belguim who created a documentary called the Price of Sex. Her goal was to find out why so many women are being trafficked for sexual exploitation. She interviews an umber of people ranging from trafficked women, social workers, psychologists, attorneys, and NGO (non-governmental organizational) experts in order to lean more about sex trafficking.

There is not an abundance of text on this site which is purposeful. Her pictures are some of the most captivating photographs I have ever seen. When you look at the pictures or videos of the trafficked woemen, it can affect you in ways that words never could. Looking at the pain in suffering in the faces of the women she interviews will put a knot in your stomach. They are that powerful.

She also has her two past works on tthe site that also cover the issue of sex trafficking. One is called Vika's Story. It's a story about Vika who was trafficked at 19. It's a distrubing account on her experiences while she was forced into prostitution in Dubai. The other is a video of her work in Dubai. She found that some of the women who were intially brought there under false promises of work, later embraced the life of prostitution because of the large sums of money that they could make.

Prostitution in Dubai


Chakarova's coverage on sex trafficking goes into great detail about why the women leave their homes to go find work far away from their homes in order to have a better life. For example, the country of Moldova has an unemployment rate of 80 percent. That is an incredible number. Mothers who are not able to provide their children or families with the most basic of needs will do almost anything in order to get money like migrating to another country. Unfortunately, this kind of desperation is exactly what traffickers look for because they know that these girls can be easily infleunced.

Now as great as Chakarova's coverage on this topic is, one can only wonder why it was only picked up by PBS. Why wouldn't a major news station like Fox, NBC, or CBS air something like this? Wouldn't sex trafficking fall under the category of important? One reason might be because the focus of Chakarova's work is on Eastern Europe. Maybe since it's not focused on the United States, news stations don't think it's important. But, it should be considered so seeing that sex trafficking happens in the United States all the time. It's typical of the people not to care about anything unless it personally happens to one of them, which is really sad. But it just goes to show how most people would rather be ignorant of reality than to face the truth.