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boann
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ice queen colorado
Sep 2000
time: 22:18
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LONDON (Reuters) - 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 $700 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 $300 to get her a job but a criminal gang had already paid Katerina $700 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 $12 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 fueling 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 pounds ($7,586).
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 recognized."
__________________
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Pekka
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em seu burro dos pais!
Feb 2002
time: 07:18
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yep, that's not really anything new. Happens everyday. What can you do though.. except of course fight the organized crime that is behind this, try to educate the folks (customers, men) what happens to these women and how to spot this situation if you go to prossies anyway (for example if foreigner, bigger chance of being trafficked etc), Ummm... TOUGHER PUNISHMENTS for pimps and people smugglers, it's time to end the 'i need to feed my kids too' truck drivers, if they load people in them, then they face prison time and long one too, period.
What else.. hmm.. legalizing prostitution would beat this problem but then again I'm not sure if that's what we want to do. If it was up to me, then sure, but everyone has to be wanting to do what they do.
One thing people need to remember when they go on a holiday and screw that girl who says is 19 years old and you give them 20 euros is that a) they don't get **** from that money b) NO they might not be doing it anyway because they might have been tricked into it, telling it's another job and then boom it's not c) they're in the hands of organized crime so escaping is not that simple and d) it could be your daughter next time.
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Pekka
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em seu burro dos pais!
Feb 2002
time: 07:18
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q cubed, yeah there will be these problems anyway if legalized, but they would be reduced to minimum.
Like Ned said, demand and supply, and it's like drugs, you don't need the demand to supply, because the demand WILL be there after supplying. And that demand is something we can never fight, even if we would want to for moral reasons. It just won't go away, or even considerably be any less.
It's not the sex part that is the only part these women are forced to. Some of them are treated like slaves, true sex slaves, kept in the apartment with no way out, sometimes even drugged, and they do n't get **** from the money either. If nothing else, they pay 'the upkeep' also, the make belief rent and food and all that, and the cut is really small for them. They are in foreign country, prolly illegally, or illegally by then with no visa or what ever, who can they go to, safe houses maybe, but they'll just get deported anyway and that's not a good option either, basically they don't have any options that are good. It's an ugly site.. one of the most cruel sites there is in modern society, and in western society.
But the reality of the situation is, there will be customers forever, there will be organized crime and there will be these fates. The only REAL way to gain any results is legalizing. To say we can actually fight this is .. kidding ourselves. Or at least I would like to know how can we fight it.
Check out south east asia.. they are tough on crime when it comes to drugs.. DEATH to traffickers, no questions asked. And boy do they execute them too. What has happened? Nothing. Business as usual. Except that the smugglers are pretty hardcore these days. But the business is ever flourishing and it's the hot spot for smugglers.
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Jon Miller
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it's already underground
and is greatest in those areas with legal prostituion (Germany and Netherlands...)
Jon Miller
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Jon Miller
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quote:
Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
if you legalized it, the girls wouldnt be in any dire straits at all. everything would be outin the open. |
the legal prostitution is out in the open
the sex slavery is not
you are totally ignoring the point that the problem is biggest (in europe) in countries which have legal prostitution
JM
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Jon Miller
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if they are illegal immegrants who don't know the rules
if they are kept locked up
if they don't know the language
there are lots of ways that they can still be ****ed
and I beleive that Netherlands and Germany have some of the biggest trouble and ahve legal prostitution'
JM
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our_man
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Glasgow, Scotland
Oct 2000
time: 05:18
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Hey, interesting information...
It's a problem in Europe definitely, even in Ireland. The abuse of women sickens me, even more than the singling out of a particular continents, or country (e.g. Britain). 
Why is it worth singling out Europe in particular boann, when some of the top destinations for trafficked women (Russian, at least) are Qatar and Bahrain... I guess in your view it's acceptable to abuse women if you're an Arab then, huh? What about the sex industry in Bangkok? If you abuse women in Asia, that's all good too? What's your agenda? 
Why do you hate Europe, singling it out, when this is a worldwide problem?
quote:
if you legalized it, the girls wouldnt be in any dire straits at all. everything would be outin the open. |
Dire Straits (the band) 
Prostitution 
Pimps etc. 
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JohnT
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Capitalist
Mar 1999
time: 00:18
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quote:
Why is it worth singling out Europe in particular boann, when some of the top destinations for trafficked women (Russian, at least) are Qatar and Bahrain... I guess in your view it's acceptable to abuse women if you're an Arab then, huh? What about the sex industry in Bangkok? If you abuse women in Asia, that's all good too? What's your agenda?
Why do you hate Europe, singling it out, when this is a worldwide problem? |
Yanks do the same dumb **** that people do the world over, but it's seemingly only the Yanks that get mentioned. If you don't think so, read the boards.
Waaah. Grow a pair, willya, and toughen up a bit.
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29-04-2005 01:40
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