ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I am going to describe and analyze “trafficking in women” and foreign prostitution in the North of Finland. I refer overtly to trafficking in women in this chapter because foreign prostitution in Lapland is organized and operated in such a way that it fulfils the characteristics of trafficking in women. Women are transported in Russian minibuses to brothels or private homes in predetermined destinations. This is in comparison to the organized prostitution in Helsinki, where women may independently solicit their customers in sex bars and the pimps are not as evident to the public. The chapter is divided into two sections, each of which refers to the goings-on in one of two towns. The first narrative takes place in the region of Ivalo, which is a cross point in Lapland, where the road from Murmansk intersects the road to the north toward Utsjoki and Norway and to the south toward Rovaniemi and Keminmaa. For this reason, Ivalo is a town through which the Russian minibuses in which women are trafficked for purposes of prostitution must pass. In this first section, I am going to discuss the northern foreign prostitution scene in the context of global flows. The second section is written as a “fictional” narrative, in which I will be writing about one Finnish-Saami man and a Russian woman planning a marriage in Utsjoki. In this narrative, the focus is on a concrete example of sex-specific subjectivities that are the result of globalization, that is to say, the kinds of sexspecific positions of agency that globalization provides and the kinds of sex-specific necessities it entails. In the first section, also my own position of agency and subjectivity is included in the text. The second is written in a fictional form, in order to disguise at least to the larger public the identities of the people involved, even if locally these persons could still be identified. In the second narrative, I also include the responses of the local community in Utsjoki in northern Finland and Tana on the Norwegian side. This is done in order to show what kind of agencies are formed when a shadow ethnoscape collides with the local inhabitants.
