Sold and resold, thousands of women and children are traded each year on Central Europe’s sex markets. It is a law enforcement issue but, reports Kristen Schweizer, the humanitarian consequences make it a Red Cross one as well.
Vesna is just 14 years old, but the scars in her life are profound, deep reminders of a childhood lost when she was kidnapped from her home two years ago. Stolen from her father’s house in northwest Bosnia and trafficked south, she was forced into prostitution.
A year later she was pregnant and fled home to have an abortion. But again she was abducted, by the same trafficker. He pulled a bag over her and drove her south.
On the outside, Vesna (not her real name) looks like the average teen: painted fingernails, short black curly hair and large green eyes. She wants to be a hairdresser or gym teacher when she grows up. But the story she has to tell, of unprotected sex, of rape, and the 12-hour shifts she was obliged to work by the people who claimed to own her, is any woman’s nightmare, let alone a child’s.
Trafficking in women and children is a worldwide industry thought to be worth between $5 billion and $7 billion annually. It is a booming business, predicted to mushroom particularly in the Balkans where social, economic and political transition make fertile ground for organized crime.
Operating through well-organized networks, trafficking is a low-risk, high-return enterprise, often aided and abetted by corrupt local officials, and, as the Balkans well illustrates, a lack of legal sanctions against the trade.
But the problem extends beyond the Balkans and fans out across the European continent, where thousands of teenagers and young women are trafficked annually. From countries like Moldova, Ukraine and Romania women are tricked into leaving, lured by bogus job advertisements and employers who offer legal work abroad as a baby-sitter, a maid, a dancer.
When they arrive in their new countries, passports and documents are stolen and the girls are sold and resold to owners of restaurants, bars and brothels, kept in line by the fear of being beaten or turned over to police and jailed.
A humanitarian issue Trafficking is a law enforcement issue but also a humanitarian one, and some Red Cross National Societies are becoming involved as a consequence. Both the European Regional Red Cross and Red Crescent Conference in Berlin last year, and the annual partnership meeting of Central Europe’s societies in Warsaw, put trafficking on the agenda, and the International Federation participated in the European Conference on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Human Beings. From there came the Brussels Declaration which defines modalities for intervention. : “Our people across Europe see the shocking human suffering it brings,” says Zsolt Dudas, the International Federation’s regional population movement delegate based in Zagreb, Croatia.
“We are now beginning to structure a Red Cross response. Our entry point is vulnerability because the Red Cross sees trafficking as a humanitarian problem first and foremost. There are enormous questions of protection and assistance that our principles and values oblige us to address, and to ensure are prominent on national and international agendas. Advocacy is part of our mission.”
European policy shaped by National Societies at the Berlin Conference is guiding the response. A plan of action on migration committed them to “act against all forms of exploitation and deception” and to “develop innovative delivery mechanisms” according to circumstances. “In plain language,” says Dudas, “that means providing a wide range of services, humanitarian assistance, psychological, psycho-social and medical care.”
The Red Cross Society of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Croatian Red Cross, the Bulgarian Red Cross, and the Red Cross of Montenegro are among those leading the way. Talks are underway with governments and with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to help define clear roles for Red Cross National Societies.
IOM is a leading player in the global response to trafficking and across the region National Societies are assessing how, in collaboration, they could provide humanitarian assistance. The Croatian Red Cross has had far-reaching discussions with IOM and the Ministry of Social Welfare, and population movement coordinator Sanja Pupacic reports that locations have been studied that could provide shelters for trafficking victims.
The Red Cross of Montenegro provides ad hoc support to shelters through the NGOs which run them, and the Bulgarian Red Cross has drafted plans with IOM for health and counselling services for trafficked women in towns across the country. The National Society’s telephone help line, giving psychological support in Sofia, Plovdiv. Russe and Jambol, could be extended with services to trafficking victims. Many trafficked women come from small and medium-sized towns, live in poverty and have limited education. They travel abroad with the hope of earning a decent living for themselves and their families. Women like Slavica.
She is 22, with long blonde hair, pretty blue eyes and a serious case of hepatitis C. It is unclear whether she contracted the virus from drug use or the customers she had sex with after two women trafficked her from Serbia to southern Bosnia.
She thought one of the women was a friend when she offered her help to travel to Medjugorje where jobs were said to be plentiful and a well-known drug rehabilitation centre could help her kick her heroin habit. Instead the women fed her habit then ordered her to pay for the heroin through prostitution.
For three months she was abused and beaten before managing to escape by getting herself arrested. It is ten days now since she used heroin and the signs of withdrawal are obvious. Last week Slavica (again not her real name) met her traffickers in court and although they could face up to three years in jail she is afraid to go home for fear of being killed or kidnapped by others in the same network.
“Often the women believe they are going to Western Europe to work in the service industry,” says Federico Soda, IOM programme manager in Sarajevo. “But this quickly turns into a nightmare.”
Roads on the outskirts of Sarajevo, and those that weave through the countryside, are dotted with bars legally advertising topless girls and striptease acts. But behind many of these doors a criminal trade is in full swing, women forced to have sex with customers, often locked in rooms, beaten into submission and sometimes drugged. The business is also deep underground, in private apartments and brothels.
While local and international police have raided numerous bars and restaurants, owners are often tipped off in advance. “These traffickers are criminals, but they are smart criminals,” Soda says. Many bribe police officers and other authorities to keep the trade flourishing. Safe houses
An estimated 90 per cent of foreign sex workers in the Balkans have been trafficked, but only 35 per cent are recognized as such and only seven per cent of them receive long-term assistance and support, says a report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Underlining Zsolt Dudas’s case for Red Cross advocacy, it says trafficking in humans is generally viewed as an issue of national security and not a human rights violation.
The need for Red Cross intervention is plain, although Dudas sounds one warning note. Where safe houses, or shelters for people escaping traffickers are concerned, the security of Red Cross staff must be considered. “These shelters are often in secret locations, some protected by armed law enforcement agencies. National Societies are having to take safety into account when deciding whether to run the places or merely provide services to them on a confidential basis,” he says.
Vesna arrived at a shelter for trafficked women late last year, turned over by international police after she escaped a second and final time from her captors. She stole a car parked outside a bar where she worked both as a waitress and, in the back rooms, as a prostitute.
“When she came to us, she was in very poor physical health, and afraid she was pregnant again,” says the woman who runs the shelter for La Strada, a Netherlands-based organization that assists trafficked women across Europe. She hopes to get her back to school and eventually place her in the hands of her father. A psychologist is helping her.
“She is still a child and has no idea what has teally happened,” the carer says, putting an arm around her and pulling her close. “It will catch up with her, however, and her life will never be the same.”