Women sold as 'fresh meat'

BUCHAREST -- In a back street in central Bucharest at 3 a.m., a surly Romanian orders a young woman to open her coat and twirl around. "You see, she is beautiful," he says in a cold monotone. "Health good, skin good -- no marks. We get doctor's papers. You want see body?"

She is slim, dark-haired and attractive but is cowed and passive in front of her dead-eyed controllers -- two men in their twenties wearing designer jackets. The next day in a smoky cafe, we agree on a price. "Okay, you have for 2,000 euros," says the negotiator opposite me -- about $2,800 Cdn. "We get passport and you can take."

This is no ordinary business deal. I have just agreed to buy Ileana Petrescu, a 19-year-old Romanian woman. Ileana was forced into prostitution two years ago. I am to be her third "owner" and the first to take her out of her home country.

I had made contact with the young woman's controllers through an intermediary two days before we struck the deal. I had entered the murky underworld of human traffickers by posing as a British "businessman" looking to purchase Eastern European girls to "work" in a club in London.

Ileana had no say in the sale. When the pimps were there she spoke only once, to assure me, with sad, pleading eyes: "You will not need to beat me."

Reaching a deal to buy Ileana and take her to England was disturbingly easy and will come as a shock for Tony Blair and his ministers, who are losing the battle against the gangs trafficking women from countries such as Romania, Ukraine, Lithuania and Albania.

The victims -- most of whom are duped into believing that they are going to "normal" jobs as dancers, au pairs and housekeepers -- are coerced into prostitution all over Western Europe. Britain is a prime destination, as demand is constant, prices high and immigration controls are perceived to be lax.

According to the Home Office, up to 6,000 girls a year are brought into Britain and sold into the vice industry, many by illegal immigrants and failed asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe.

Last year, police arrested 1,456 people for human trafficking offences and seized #4.5 million. It is a relentless tide and officers admit that they are struggling against it. "We stop one gang and another one moves in straight away," said one detective at Scotland Yard.

The criminals are becoming more brazen. Last month, two men and a woman were convicted in Sheffield of auctioning two Lithuanian girls, aged 18 and 19, at a Gatwick Airport coffee shop for #3,000 each. The girls, who believed that they were being taken on holiday to stay with a friend's father, were made to work as prostitutes in London and Sheffield under threat of torture and death, until they escaped. One was raped repeatedly by her Serbian-born pimp, Tasim Axhami, 19, who was jailed for 21 years. His accomplice, Emiljan Beqirat, was sentenced to 16 years and Beqirat's girlfriend, Vilma Kizlaite, was given 11 years.

Last week, two failed asylum-seekers from Moldova were jailed for bringing almost 600 women into Britain illegally. Gavril Dulghieru, 36, who was sentenced to nine years, and his wife Tamara, jailed for five, used cloned credit cards, and stolen and bogus passports in one of Britain's biggest trafficking operations.

The girls were forced to work as prostitutes to pay the couple #300 a day rent and repay the alleged #20,000 cost of getting them to Britain.

Back in Bucharest, the translator and I take Ileana away for what her pimps assume is a "test-drive" to check her suitability for "entertaining" clients at the mythical bar in London. In fact, we head to a cafe and listen to her shocking but not unusual story. At 16, Ileana, an ill-educated girl from a poor family, was gang-raped at the back of a disco in her home town near Bucharest. It was not just a random act by violent thugs, but a deliberate tactic, the first stage of her "breaking in." Soon afterwards, she was befriended by a young man who, unbeknown to her, was an accomplice of -- possibly even one of -- the rapists. He became her boyfriend and "behaved like a gentleman," she says.

As a traumatized, vulnerable teenager she was thrilled to meet someone so kind. But, in reality, she was a victim of the "lover-boy" pimp trap, a ploy used by traffickers to ensnare young women suspicious of ads offering jobs as "dancers" abroad.

After six weeks, Ileana's "boyfriend" took her to a Black Sea resort town for the weekend. As soon as they arrived, she was sold to a pimp for 200 euros, locked in a darkened room and forced to service clients day and night.

That ordeal lasted for a year before she was returned to Bucharest and sold to her present owners. For the past two years, she has been forced to have sex with an average of four customers a night. Yet her parents, who she still visits at Christmas, believe her story that she is working in a shop.

She shows no emotion about going to London and accepts that she will work as a prostitute: she knows or expects nothing else. But as she puffs on a cigarette and drinks Coke from a bottle there is a sign that her spirit is not completely crushed. "I don't want this to happen to my younger sister. If she does this I will cut off her hair," she blurts out.

During the negotiations for Ileana, the senior pimp gives her a good reference. "She works hard and has many clients," he says. "She will give no trouble."

Ileana has a passport but I have to obtain the visa if she is to enter Britain legally -- "no problem because you are British," the pimp says. "You write letter saying she will work for you in London. Or we have other ways."

He eyes me carefully and asks about my bar, where it is and whether I have any Romanian connections. Eventually, satisfied with my answers, he comes up with the figure of 2,000 euros. Pleased with the prospect of a fast buck -- and confident that he will quickly replace Ileana with what he calls "fresh meat" -- he assures me casually that I will get my money back by taking all of Ileana's earnings until she has paid off the 2,000 euros. "After that, you take the money for rent," he says.

Ileana was one of three women offered to me for sale in Bucharest last week. The first trafficker changed his mind when his boss ruled that Ioana, another slender brunette -- who was also priced at 2,000 euros and seemed excited at the prospect of going to London -- was making him so much money that he did not want to lose her. The second girl, Elena, was offered to me by a baseball cap-wearing pimp in his forties called Gianni. We arranged to meet Elena, Gianni and Elena's "owners" in the city's Uniril Square the following night. Gianni arrived first and then a car with tinted windows and two heavies sitting in the front screeched to a halt before us. A nervous, pretty, sparrow-like blond climbed out of the back seat.

She looked terrified and, in an incongruously polite touch, proffered her hand to shake. Gianni explained that Elena was "quite new but very good." The two thugs asked me about my business and how I planned to take Elena back to England. She didn't have a passport but they could help with that, they said. I spent 20 uncomfortable minutes with them and arranged to meet again the next day when they would give me a price. But by then I had agreed to buy Ileana.

The day before striking the deal for Ileana, I drive to the 1,400-inmate high-security prison in Giurgiu, near the Bulgarian border, 65 kilometres south of Bucharest. Among its prisoners are 26 convicted people-traffickers. With sentences ranging from four to nine years, the traffickers all protest their innocence before going on to reveal the secrets of their sordid but lucrative business. They paint a depressing picture and say that the same could be said of many other ex-Soviet bloc countries.

Most of the girls targeted by the recruiters are vulnerable teenagers, in the optimum age bracket of 15 to 19. They invariably come from poor, troubled families in the towns and villages of southern Romania, including Calarashi, Slobozia and Constanta. The initial recruiters are usually women, sometimes even the girls' own mothers. Some are taken to work in Bucharest and other cities, before being moved on, often to Western Europe, many via "girl markets" in Albania and Macedonia.

They are promised good jobs but when they arrive, their passports are seized and many are imprisoned in dingy rooms and they are forced to sell their bodies. Almost all their profits must be handed over to the pimps. Resistance is punished with gang-rape and beatings.

One inmate, Niculina Nicu, a tough-looking 29-year-old from Bucharest serving eight years for selling a woman for 200 euros, says girls are often sold several times in Romania before being trafficked abroad to satisfy the seemingly endless demand. Trafficking is carried out by people along the routes, he says, from village women who encourage girls to apply for "dancing jobs" abroad, to corrupt border guards.

Nicu insists that the girls would be worse off if they did not have pimps to "protect" them. "A lot of girls do it because they want a nice life," he says by way of justification.

Another trafficker, Caldararu Dumitru, 44, also serving eight years for trafficking, admits that many girls are given bogus contracts and forced into prostitution. "But many girls like it, because at least they have money in their pockets."

At the Bucharest headquarters of the National Office for the Prevention of Human Trafficking, Silvio Erusencu, the Police Commissioner, is scathing of the traffickers' attempts to defend their actions. "It is exploitation," he says. "We have had girls telling us that traffickers have killed another girl in front of them to terrify them and break their spirit."

The Romanian authorities are doing what they can but they depend on charities to fund prevention measures such as official employment agencies for jobs abroad, poster campaigns to warn young women, and shelters for victims. Critics say the police do not do enough to catch traffickers and accuse officers of taking bribes from pimps.

One-hundred-and-thirty kilometres northwest of the capital, in the town of Pitesti, Iana Matei, who runs a refuge for women who have escaped forced prostitution, is angered by the suggestion that women enjoy being raped, beaten and forced to have sex with dozens of strangers. "These girls are slaves but they are dismissed as prostitutes and illegal immigrants. The British police deport them but the traffickers meet them at the airport and they are back in England within three weeks. Governments should co-operate so the girls can be helped back to their families or to shelters and the police can catch the traffickers."

Matei introduces me to Alina, who escaped from her captors earlier this year. Slowly, bravely, Alina, who left school at 14, tells me how she was pushed into prostitution by her own mother, a violent, hard-drinking divorcee from Slobozia, a small town 15 kilometres southeast of the capital. "She planned it with a neighbour who was a trafficker, someone I'd known all my life and thought I could trust," she said. They told her there was a housekeeper's job in Rome and her mother pressured her to go to make money for Alina's young son.

Alina and two other girls were taken in a minibus on a two-day journey through Hungary and Austria to a hut on the outskirts of Rome where she was raped and beaten by her neighbour and two other men. She was given a "patch" at a bus-stop and ordered to charge men 50 euros for five minutes of sex in a car park guarded by the pimps. She resisted and was punched in the face, before being sold weeks later to three Romanians who hit and raped her. They kept her and five other girls in a disused, windowless freight train carriage with only a blanket to sleep on -- and forced her to do more 50-euro sex sessions.

Alina escaped one night and went to the police and gave evidence in court to help convict the traffickers. She was taken back to Romania in August and now lives at the shelter, trying to rebuild her life with her son, Robert, five. "I will never forget what I have been through," she said. "But I am lucky to be alive and I have to keep going for my son's sake."

As for Ileana, there is hope that she may, too, be freed from a life of sexual slavery. Following our investigation, details of her controllers have been passed on to the Romanian police who have launched an investigation. A police spokesman said: "We take reports of trafficking very seriously and will be looking into this case."

Slavery was not okay with many of the founding fathers, including many who owned slaves.

Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to Thomas Cooper, 1814):

There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity.

Further, even among those who supported the institution of slavery, sexual abuse of slaves was regarded as wrongful. That’s not to say it never happened; any barrel contains bad apples; but it was widely regarded as moral turpitude.

And of course, we've all heard of Sally Hemings. She was even an issue in Jefferson's election as president.

Sally Hemmings was not sexually abused to my knowledge nor have I ever seen anyone make that claim. She is said to have enjoyed her proximity and good relations with Jefferson according to records.

Do you consider every (possibly) master-slave sexual relationship throughout history to have been abuse?

Even most modern day afrocentric studies professors don't find much fault with Jefferson's alleged dalliance. He is recorded as a decent master.

"It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour
of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion,
loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people.
To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to
others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused." --John Jay

"[Y]our late purchase of an estate in the colony of Cayenne, with
a view to emancipating the slaves on it, is a generous and noble
proof of your humanity. Would to God a like spirit would diffuse
itself generally into the minds of the people of this country;
but I despair of seeing it." --George Washington

I'll ping this out tomorrow. It particularly broke my heart, not only thinking of the incredible suffering of these young women, but the subhuman consciousness of their tormentors, and the flippant and hardhearted comments on the thread. And I haven't even read all the comments.

The legal permitting of X has no logical connection with whether or not people are treated involuntarily as chattel by others in order to do X. All that's required is that X be sufficiently lucrative that it's worth the hassle to the masters of keeping the slaves.

Moral Absolutes Ping.

Very disturbing article. And some of the comments on the thread are, as well. Keep in mind that much of Europe, according to comments on the thread, has legalized prostitution. Does that eliminate coerced sexual slavery? Increased demand - what does that mean? It means that a culture that sexualizes entertainment, education, dress, "literature", legalizes pornography, every manner of sexual deviancy, and more - produces more and more people who are obsessed with sexual gratification at any cost.

Sex desire is like fire. Fire can cook food, keep you warm, make things. It can also burn, kill, and burn down houses and forests. It must be kept under control or it becomes an uncontrollable destructive force. Same thing with sex desire. That is why every religion has basically the same moral restrictions on sexual behavior.

When those restrictions are rejected as old fashioned, repressive, illiberal, and so on, the conflagration burns up lives, and spreads. What will stop the forest fire?

Freepmail me if you want on/off this pinglist.

Note: God has given mankind rules for living. The rule about sex is: Sex within marriage. Not before, not outside, not with children, not with animals, not with hired prostitutes, not with blood relatives, not with members of the same sex.

Simple. And He gave us these rules so we could be happy.

expat...many of these girls have chosen this life - and in many cases know exactly what they are getting in to?

Your reasoning is based on "new morals," (man-created) ie...."choice, consent, moral autonomy (in place of unchanging transcendant absolutes), and privacy. All of these "new morals" are founded on the notion of "self ownership" and man as the highest authority.

Now, if it's morally ok (per the preceding 'new morality") to "rent" one's body (engage in prostitution), then it follows logically that one can "choose" to become a slave to another person.
Hence, slavery is ok whenever it can be 'claimed' that all parties are in agreement. Likewise, one can 'choose' to become the 'dinner' of a cannibal in the 'privacy' of one's home (remember the fairly recent German cannibal case?). But yet all of the proponents of "new morality" find themselves feeling somewhat squeamish about their 'new morality' in affairs of this nature. They suddenly 'discover' the usefulness of 'old' moral absolutes.

A worldview is only as good as the 'walls' it keeps you from running into. The Libertarian 'worldview' is flawed, as it causes one to run into very discomitting walls at every turn.

My uncle is involved in a few orphanages in Romania through his church. The picures he brings home from there make you want to cry.

As a society, they treat their children terribly there. If a baby is dropped accidentally, they assume that it's damaged or something. Child abandonment is common, and prostitution is often the destiny of girls.

To my knowledge, the only society that rivals Romania like this is India, where the concept of Karma (the preordained cycle of a person's fate based on repayment of past sins of previous lives) devalues humanity. Many babies are abandoned in the jungles and woods to the animals if there's any kind of birth defect.

To my knowledge, the only society that rivals Romania like this is India, where the concept of Karma (the preordained cycle of a person's fate based on repayment of past sins of previous lives) devalues humanity. Many babies are abandoned in the jungles and woods to the animals if there's any kind of birth defect.

You don't see many kids born here today with birth defects either because their parents kill them before they're born.

I expect you and Mullah Omar are ready to get right on that project.

Since I would propose death to murderers and proselytizing potential criminals while Mullah Omar proposes death to non-Muslim proselytizers and forced conversion, yours is a studied exercise in moral equivalence, general anti-religious bigotry and gross ignorance unbecoming someone who styles himself after the answerman.

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