The Journey 91. Dr. Juliette Engel: Save the Children from Sex Trafficking

Publisher RA “Kris” Millegan talks with Dr. Juliette Engel about her book “Angels Over Moscow: Life, Death and Human Trafficking in Russia” (her memoir of how she saved children who were sex trafficking victims in the former Soviet Union), how the same trafficking is happening here in America, and what can be done about it.

Kris: A lot of Americans think [life in] Russia is like [some] World War II flick. They think Moscow is like Berlin in the ‘30s. But it’s quite a modern city. Americans are ill-served by our education and our media. What was it like living in Russia and what are the Russian people like?

Juliette: I started working in Moscow in 1990, working on maternal/infant healthcare reform. Going back and forth. Then I lived there for ten years. I found it infinitely fascinating. The people are very warm, caring, and kind. I never had a bad experience. People weren’t rude. I just loved living there. I loved the music. The culture. The arts.

I was absolutely stunned when I moved back to the United States and [saw] how bad things were here and how we’d really switched places with Russia.

They had completely rejected communism. The Christian church and all the major religions were back. They had been banned in the 1920s and it became a crime punishable by death to even possess a Bible or other religious books.

In 1993, with the new constitution and the break-up of the Soviet Union, religion was no longer illegal. [The people] had to claw their way back into their culture and their traditions because they weren’t allowed to even look up family stories. But they came back with a vengeance.

And a huge step forward was electing an Orthodox Christian president, Vladimir Putin. All the previous presidents from Stalin to Yeltsin were Khazarian Jews. They had been the Bolsheviks. They had been the NKVD and certainly a large part of the leadership of the KGB.

Since Putin was elected, he’s re-built, refurbished, thirty thousand churches, and that includes synagogues, temples, Muslim mosques. All the major religious institutions were re-built. And that forms a lot of Russian culture today.

Some say, “Oh, there aren’t that many Orthodox Russians.” Well, most of them are actually Methodists. I think something like 90 percent of the population is Christian. And that forms the basis of who they are and what they’re doing and a lot of why our media and our government doesn’t want us to see them. Because you’ve got religious people of all kinds in the United States, and you’ve got a hundred and forty million in Russia, and what a force that is if they’re combined. But people here don’t even realize that, and that’s because the information is deliberately suppressed.

Kris: You really helped bring some of their medical establishments up to date to a certain extent.

Juliette: I was actually invited there because I was a specialist in prenatal ultrasound and prenatal diagnosis. I was the first American doctor into their birthing hospitals. It was like going into a dungeon, going into these places. You couldn’t stand the smell. And the way they treated woman. If you’re going to take down a civilization, you have to beat down the women, and no better place to do it than in a birthing hospital.

They would make these women, who were in labor, climb five flights of stairs – there were no elevators – to get to the birthing rooms. And then they would take them as they came, not who’s farthest along first. So they would force some. They would hold others back, by tying their legs together. There was no anesthetic. It was worse than the Middle Ages.

Then after birth, they would separate the mothers and babies for two hours. They couldn’t touch each other, and that’s critical for bonding. You have to put the baby on the mother. And in that period, the mothers were encouraged to give the babies up and give them to the state, and a third of babies were abandoned at that point. And that was forming the basis of human trafficking and child trafficking. Eight hundred thousand children at that time were in institutions.

Kris: You tell a lot of this in your book, “Angels Over Moscow.” You started an organization in Russia to deal with sex trafficking. What did the Russian people think of that [“The Angel Coalition”]?

Juliette: They thought it was great! They’re still actively doing it. I started with a group of volunteers. We went to the villages and towns. We got a huge response. I think it’s happening here right now. People were aware of the problem. They were seeing this happening. Just like here. People know where the trafficking is occurring. You know the immigrants are coming in. But nobody knew what to do. And as an individual, you can’t really do anything. You don’t know who to contact and who to talk to.

I found out very quickly that the traffickers operate under a “roof” which includes law enforcement, politicians, educators, social workers, child protection. Everything I’m seeing right here. It’s the same thing operating. Anyone that goes to report something to the police, they get pushed aside. If they get really persistent, they get beaten up. And exactly the same thing is happening here.

So people who see trafficking going on around their church or in a parking lot or in a strip mall, as an individual, you can do nothing. But I thought what we needed to do was create our own “roof.” Most of the villages I went to didn’t have a telephone. In the whole village. They had one radio in their library and that’s how they got their news. And that’s how I talked to them, basically, through Voice of America. They were determined to do something about this problem. So we started talking about how to create trusted networks. And that’s exactly what I’m starting to do here now [in America].