KATHRYN BOLKOVAC
While working as a human rights investigator for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, Kathryn Bolkovac discovered that her UN colleagues were involved in using and providing children for the sex trade. She was working as a Nebraska police officer when a recruitment flyer from military contractor DynCorp was posted at her police department. A mother of three, with two of her children in college, Kathy signed up to be one of 2,000 police officers from 45 countries to work as peacekeepers. During the training process at DynCorp in the United States, she became aware that at least one man in her immediate group knew about the use of young girls aged 12 to 15 for sex in Bosnia.
Upon arrival in Sarajevo in 1999, she found restaurants or dance clubs that were fronts for brothels—where young girls were forced to dance naked and have sex with customers—that catered to international clientele, including her fellow UN peacekeepers. She was appalled to find that the Bosnian police knew about the practice and turned a blind eye.
She uncovered evidence of girls who, when they refused to have sex, were beaten and raped in bars by their pimps while peacekeepers stood and watched. She discovered that one UN policeman who was supposed to be investigating the sex trade paid $700 to a bar owner for an underage girl he kept captive in his apartment.
After reporting her findings to her employers in October 2000, telling them of the UN peacekeepers' involvement in the sex trade, within days she was demoted. Six months later, she was fired and was told by fellow workers that her life was in danger.Madeleine Rees, the head of the UN Human Rights Commission office in Sarajevo, believes trafficking in little girls started with the arrival of the international peacekeepers in 1992.
A recruiter would go to Ukraine, Poland, Georgia or Russia, and offer ten students the opportunity to go on a field trip to Italy. The recruiter would usually be someone the girls knew personally. They would take the girls to a place where for a period of two to three weeks they would be "desensitized," in other words, repeatedly raped and burned behind the ear or under the feet, so the marks weren't visible. Sometimes, if the girls weren't cooperating, the recruiters would shoot a member of the group, to send a message. They were told that after working in the sex trade for two or three years, they would be able to buy back their freedom. But the only way a girl ever returned to her home town was as a recruiter, starting the cycle over again.
After a two-year battle, on August 6, 2002, an employment tribunal ruled that Bolkovac was unfairly dismissed by DynCorp. Bolkovac's book, The Whistleblower, was made into a 2011 movie starring Rachel Weisz. She lives with her husband in Holland.