“Amateur” Prostitutes Also Exist

Part of the US Department of State’s report on trafficking in Armenia raised agitation in the RA.

According to that famous report, the RA authorities do not seriously investigate messages on involvement of state officials into trafficking; such messages can be often found in the conclusions of Media or NGO researches. In other words, the Americans charge our officials in shutting eyes on trafficking. As a result, Armenian law-enforcement bodies one by one are trying to prove on figures that they are not wasting their time and really combating trafficking. Yesterday was the turn of Karen Babakekhyan, Deputy Chief of the Main Department on Struggle against Organized Crime of the RA Police, Head of the Department on Struggle against Illegal Drug Circulation and Trafficking. In order to show the work of the Police in combating trafficking Mr. Babakekhyan prepared a special report. For example, in 2005 there were 31 criminal cases instituted on pimping and organizing trafficking; by 13 of the cases people were charged with trafficking. 46 people were convicted by those criminal cases. 13 criminal cases related to pimping and organizing trafficking have been instituted in the current year. Criminal proceedings were started against 28 prostitutes within past five months of 2006. But the most interesting is the statistics of employment of prostitutes, according to which 71% prostitutes in the RA are women without a constant income, 21% are employed in services, 4% are students, and the most important is that the rest 4% are employees. It means that there are women for whom prostitution is not the main, but secondary profession, in other words, a hobby. In short, our law-enforcement bodies combat trafficking quite hard, but, nobody knows why, the “damned” trafficking rate does not decrease at all, however, the Americans say that it hasn’t. By the way, the report, prepared by Babakekhyan, contains large portions of statistics on combating illegal drug circulation, which is probably explained by available bigger figures. It is worth mentioning that last year 737 criminal cases were instituted in connection to illegal drug circulation, i.e. in this field our law-enforcement bodies have fulfilled a 5-year plan just in one year.

V.H.

Published in: “Haykakan Zhamanak” #109(1590), 15 June 2006 (Official translation)