Posted on 05/01/2005 6:45:50 PM PDT by -=[_Super_Secret_Agent_]=-
LONDON: The money Rosa was earning in a Turkish shoe factory was not enough to support the three children she had left behind in Ukraine.
Then her new friend in Turkey, Katerina, told her she could earn $US700 a month as a casino waitress in Bosnia and convinced Rosa to come home with her to Moldova and then make their way to Bosnia.
"I began to think of all the things I could do to change my life to help my children, my family."
As the time came to leave Moldova, Katerina said she had a problem with her passport and would join Rosa in Bosnia a week later. At the station, she introduced Rosa to a Romanian man who would accompany her.
Rosa felt something was wrong when she said good-bye and Katerina just turned away.
"I pushed my feelings aside," said Rosa, who declined to give her real name. "I don't usually trust anyone, but I told myself that sometimes you have to have faith."
Rosa paid Katerina $US300 to get her a job but a criminal gang had already paid Katerina $US700 to make Rosa their slave.
She was smuggled across Europe in cars and once in a fold-away bed on a train, was sold and resold, beaten, raped and forced to work in brothels.
She was afraid to escape because her captors had kept her passport, home address and photos of her children.
Rosa was freed months later in Britain when police raided a sauna she was working in but her captors are still at large.
Poverty, war, open borders and domestic violence are prompting increasing numbers of people from eastern Europe and beyond to seek work in the wealthy West.
With governments tightening limits on immigration, women desperate for work in bars, shops and hotels have come to rely on crooks to spirit them across borders using false identities. "The profits are huge and the money the traffickers wave in potential victims' faces would certainly outweigh the salaries they can expect by staying at home," said Richard Danziger, head of the counter-trafficking unit of the International Organization for Migration in Geneva.
On the wrong side of the law in a foreign land, some of the women find themselves forced into prostitution. They are powerless to resist their captors. Many have sex with up to 30 men a day for months on end.
OUT OF SIGHT
The trade in people for forced sex has mushroomed into a $US12 billion industry to rival drug trafficking and gun-running. Because the victims are locked in rooms or moved around in secret, it is almost impossible to trace them.
It also makes quantifying the problem virtually impossible. Five years ago the British government estimated that as few as 140 or as many as 1,400 women had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as prostitutes.
Social workers say the problem has grown alongside lurid internet sites and flyers plastered on the walls of phone booths fuelling a demand for unprotected and risky sex that few women would willingly supply.
"There is definitely too much work to deal with," said Anna Johansson of the London-based Poppy Project, which helps women trying to leave prostitution. "We're getting referrals from Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, from all across the country."
Many women contract chlamydia, syphilis and sometimes HIV because they are forced to have unprotected sex. They are often left with painful scars and some become sterile. Most suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
"Almost all those we work with have flashbacks and nightmares and cannot sleep," said Johannson. "They can be extremely frightened of strangers and find it hard to go out alone."
She said one woman had approached the Poppy Project after leaping to freedom from a second-story window, breaking bones in her foot.
Another's hopes were raised when a client promised to help her and bought her from her captor, then locked her away in an apartment and visited her at night twice a week on the way home to his wife.
FROM SOHO TO SUBURBIA
Last month, three east European men were jailed for up to 18 years under new British trafficking laws after they lured a 15-year-old Lithuanian girl to Britain on the promise of a summer job, then sold her for £4,000.
Three months later she turned up barefoot at a northern England police station after eluding her "owner" in a nightclub.
But renewed efforts to stamp out the trade may be pushing it further underground, from red-light districts such as London's Soho to houses and apartments in the suburbs, many of which are unknown to the police.
"Women here are not advertised. Access is gained by word of mouth," said Johansson. "That's quite dangerous as the authorities are not that likely to come across them."
Campaigners say anti-immigration policies could be making things worse. Sending victims straight home means they cannot testify against their owners in court, and can expose them to more danger by landing them back where they were kidnapped.
"You can't break the problem of trafficking by sending people back to where they were trafficked from," said Mary Cunneen, director of Anti-Slavery International.
Last year a woman helped put her captors behind bars for nine years. Fearing reprisals if she returned to her small village in Moldova, she applied for asylum in Britain.
"She applied in February last year but there has still been no response," said Johansson. "The chance of her being re-trafficked is high, but this has not been recognised."
I think that I'm gonna be sick.
These poor kids. Only a slimeball would want to rob a teenage girl of her innocence and chance at a happy and normal life. The peddlers and the johns are some sick, twisted freaks.
from what i have read, it's pretty common in eastern europe.
Unfortunately it happens here as well. Luckilly it doesn't happen on the same scale.
One thing I don't understand is that we know all about this and we know where these people work.
Here in the US, they work in "massage" parlors -- which are listed in the phone books.
I guess if we really wanted to stop this trade, these places wouldn't exist.
Those who hold women against their will to do such things should be treated as murderers and more--they first remove the woman's life to live as she choices (murder) THEN replace it with this sick work (the more).
Concerning massage parlors, they are obvious--they are advertised next to strip joints in newspapers!! Man, that sickens me whenever I see it. But I believe there is a more willful nature to what happens here that is lacking overseas and therefore some people don't consider it much of a problem.
I'm not surprised the government is doing little to counter it. Governmental actors are apathetic to all but the most severe crimes in violence or cost. But I am surprised that people, particularly religious groups (not the sanctimonious religious of the liberal persuasion who twist religion to fit their lifestyles), haven't taken to protesting these places and taking pictures of those who enter and making the pictures available to the public. That would be humorous.
When people stop multiplying like animals, with no thought for how they'll take of their offspring, then desperate people -- both adults and the unfortunate children they produce -- will stop being available to evil exploiters at dirt cheap prices.
"You can't break the problem of trafficking by sending people back to where they were trafficked from," said Mary Cunneen, director of Anti-Slavery International.
Funny but I don't hear Ms. Cunneen demanding tighter border control, so as to interfere with all these slaves-to-be being imported in the first place. How about strict scrutiny of anyone fitting the common profile, when they try to enter a Western European country, and the death penalty for anyone caught using illegal immigrants in a slave-brothel or other slave-labor situation. It's nice that one girl got her captor put in jail for 9 years, but it would have been a lot more effective to execute the dirtbag in a very high profile way.
All roads lead to Kossovo. If the Euros want this stopped, then they need to stop pretending that Kossovo is something other than a narco-terroristic Islamic state that makes a killing off of these poor girls.
Please explain this Kossovo connection for me.
Thanks. V's wife.
Here, LE works pretty hard to suppress the streetwalking trade. But rarely do they bust a massage parlor or the internet trade. Seems to me they just want to keep the trade underground so they don't get complaints from neighborhood groups and businesses.
If you ask me, the police are on the take (GASP!)
How else could these "establishments" go virtually untouched, aside from the occasional bust here or there for public relations?
Europe, what a prize of courage and valor. V's wife.
Well, 1F, the thought did occur to me! :-)
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