Book Review - Selling Olga

Selling Olga: Stories of Human Trafficking by Louisa Waugh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


We read Selling Olga for my course, as an introduction to a more modern feminist and social justice issue - having spent most of the class reading older texts about the women's rights movement, this text was definitely needed to ground our course in what is going on in the now. Before leaving Seattle, we had a speaker come in to talk about human trafficking in Seattle; this text offers an interesting comparison between the two situations.

Louisa Waugh sets on a mission to research human trafficking, focusing mainly on Europe, more specifically the Balkans, Italy, and Britain. The books is a record of her trip throughout these states to discover the root causes of human trafficking, to see what is being done to aid those who have been trafficked, and to hear the testimony of these people, to see just what happened to them.

The text focuses almost exclusively on sex trafficking, which I found to be somewhat problematic. Waugh states that one of the aims of her book is to refute the claim that all people who are trafficked are victimized sex slaves, yet she seems to confirm this stereotype by focusing so heavily on sex trafficking. She briefly mentions that trafficked migrants are also forced in construction and agricultural work, yet only cites one example.

Despite this, the stories of the trafficked women that the books mainly focuses on are completely devastating. One of the major strengths of this book is their testimony of how they were trafficked, what happened to them, and how they escaped; Waugh (I assume) leaves this testimonies in the women's own words, making them extremely powerful. Ultimately, the books is an excellent introduction to the problem of human trafficking across Europe.

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