16 minute read
Streets of Despair
“Eva,” an Albanian woman who was trafficked to Italy and forced to work as a prostitute. She has been in hiding from her traffickers for over eight months and is now in a shelter for trafficked women near Tirana, the Capital of Albania.
DESPAIR Streets of
Ruthless criminal syndicates prey on the world’s most vulnerable women and children, trafficking them across borders and forcing them into lives of servitude. Ed Vulliamy examines the impact of this modern-day slavery on women trafficked into the sex trade.
Ed Vulliamy • Photographs by Andrew Testa/Panos
On the day her life changed, Majlinda was on the way to help her aunt iron clothes in preparation for her cousin’s wedding in their village in northern Albania. She was a little short of reaching the house when three strange men stopped her. They grabbed Majlinda, then 13, bundled her into a car, blindfolded, bound and gagged her. When they crossed the border with Greece and reached Corinth, they told her, “Now you are going to work.”
“At first I did not know what they were talking about,” says Majlinda. “They took me to a flat where there were other women and told me, ‘You work here now.’ When I refused, they said they knew my family, and if I made trouble they would kill them. I thought of the possibilities. I was afraid to stay, I was afraid to leave, so I started to work—they forced me to, with violence.”
Beaten and raped into submission by her traffickers, Majlinda began work, confined to a flat from 8 p.m. until 5 a.m., obliged to meet a monetary quota that meant she had to service some 20 johns a night. “Even if I made enough money, they usually found a reason to beat me when the clients had finished for the night,” she says, recalling her ordeal from the temporary safety of a shelter in Albania, where she is hiding from her traffickers. Thin scars mark Majlinda’s forehead, and her eyes stare blankly into the mid-distance. Outside the sun shines, but the room is leaden with her grief.
She was in Greece for a year, until the police started catching up with her captors. “So we came back to Albania and took a speedboat to Italy.” The traffickers sold her in Florence for a price she does not know and forced her to work the streets on the scrappy edges of the city, well hidden from the beauty of its Renaissance center. Every night, Majlinda handed over the proceeds to her traffickers, who would then violate her. “They would get high on drugs—marijuana and cocaine—and come at me. And every night they beat me—even if I made the 1,000 euros [U.S. $1,200] they insisted on, they always found an excuse.” Majlinda’s earnings supported the fast-lane lives of her traffickers, who would “compete with each other for who could buy the flashiest car or the best clothes,” she says.
Majlinda is just one of the hundreds of thousands trapped by a depraved and burgeoning crime: trafficking in young women and children for forced labor. While lurid headlines have made the sex trade one of the more visible industries supplied by this modern-day slavery, traffickers force their victims into servitude as varied as their countries of origin and destination: South Asian boys enslaved as camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates; children locked away weaving carpets and saris in India; Mexican immigrants peddling trinkets in the New York City subways; Filipina women working as maids across Asia. Trafficking of people is one of the most lucrative and fastest-growing criminal enterprises in the world, behind the drug trade and neck and neck with small arms. There is evidence that criminal syndicates are switching from drugs to human trafficking, finding it easier to transport people than cocaine or heroin. Moreover, while drugs can only be sold once, people can be resold again and again.
The scale of the crime is impossible to quantify. The U.S. State Department estimates that these shadowy syndicates move between 600,000 and 800,000 people across borders each year, with profits running into the billions of dollars. Of the hundreds of thousands of victims, a high proportion are children under 18, with the average age decreasing in some regions. In Athens, Greece, some 500 street children—most of Albanian and/or Romani origin and thought to be trafficking victims—went missing between 1998 and 2002 from one staterun children’s shelter alone; Amnesty International believes they were re-trafficked into syndicates that forced them to beg, sell trinkets, or wash car windows.
Policymakers often confuse trafficking with people-smuggling or migration—with disastrous consequences. Smuggling involves a syndicate being paid to take a group of people across borders illegally but willingly, in search of work or asylum. A 2000 U.N. convention defines trafficking as recruiting or transporting people “by means of threat or use of force, or other forms of coercion,” such as abduction, fraud or deception, or “abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability.”
Eastern Europe is a major hub for this merciless commerce, with traffickers and their victims largely coming from the countries where communism collapsed—like Albania, Moldova, Ukraine and Romania. They are nations where
Kimete Sinani (left) with her grandson Bledi at her home in Pogradec, Albania. She is accused of selling her grandson (Bledi's brother) Armandor six years ago to traffickers who took him to Greece.
In Athens, Greece, some 500 street children went missing between 1998 and 2002 from one state-run children’s shelter alone.
social structures have imploded, where criminal syndicates control large sections of the economy, and where corruption has replaced communism. The collapsed economies often create a climate in which women’s economic and social rights suffer, thus making them and their children more vulnerable to traffickers.
“All along the line,” says Steve Ashby, director of Save the Children in Albania, “there is a chain of people involved in this trade, if you can call it that: the traffickers themselves, transporters, forgers of documents, safe houses, speedboats that take them from Albania to Italy—a great network of commercial interests engaged in the business.”
Stop Trafficking in Kosovo
Since the July 1999 deployment of an international peacekeeping force to Kosovo and the establishment of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission (UNMIK), Kosovo has become a major destination country for women and girls trafficked into the thriving local sex trade. In May 2004 Amnesty International published the report Kosovo (Serbia and Montenegro) “So does it mean we have the rights?”: Protecting the Human Rights of Women and Girls in Forced Prostitution in Kosovo. Progress to combat trafficking has been made in some areas in Kosovo, including the arrests of up to 13 suspected traffickers this year and the indictment of a senior U.N. staff member for knowingly purchasing the sexual services of two trafficking victims. In May U.N. and local authorities introduced the Kosovo Action Plan to Combat Trafficking in Human Beings. While AI considers this to be a positive step, it is concerned about key aspects of the plan.
ACT Write to authorities in Kosovo urging them to: • create a separate operating procedure for trafficked minors • address the demand for sexual services by expatriates • ensure the prosecution of men who knowingly procure the services of trafficked women • secure adequate funding for crucial aspects of the plan, including covert police operations, “victim friendly” interview rooms, guidelines and procedures for better victim identification and a comprehensive witness protection program • allocate funds for reparation and redress. »
Appeals to: Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General Søren Jessen-Petersen/UNMIK Headquarters/Pristina, Kosovo. Postage $ .80. amnestyusa.org/3501 and amnestyusa.org/3502
After Majlinda spent a year in Florence, her captors moved her by car to Amsterdam. She escaped with an Afghan client, but he forced her to work for him instead even though she’d become pregnant with him. She eventually fled with the baby back to Albania, only to be told by her father: “So far as we’re concerned, you are dead.” This rejection is typical of what happens to most trafficked women and girls who have the luck or guile to escape, for the stigma of having worked in the sex industry is indelible among the poor, rural and conservative families from which many victims come.
Majlinda took refuge at a shelter in Albania’s capital, Tirana, but she had to leave her child at a place she will not discuss. After the Afghan came looking for her and his son, she moved to another shelter where she is now staying. “This place is my last chance. But I am terrified he will come. And that I will see the Albanian men before my eyes once more.”
She has every reason to be afraid. Although her four-year enslavement subjected her to unthinkable suffering, she is in grave danger of being caught again. Traffickers, who often work in collusion with police, even hang around police stations waiting to pick up their prey as soon as they are released from custody after being arrested for prostitution. According to Vera Lesko, who runs a shelter for women like Majlinda in southern Albania, “The majority are simply re-trafficked when they return. They have nothing; they are annihilated. I had a woman who had been trafficked and re-trafficked for 10 years. She did not know how to live in a different way. Something inside her had changed forever.”
There is a glaring problem in calling what happened to Majlinda, or any woman or girl trafficked into the sex trade, “prostitution,” since the word can imply a degree of consent. “In these circumstances, there is absolutely no meaningful consent at all. It is clear that if you knowingly have sex with a woman who has been trafficked, it amounts to rape,” says Sian Jones, Amnesty International’s campaigner/researcher for the Balkans. Denise Marshall, who runs the Poppy Project in London, Britain’s only shelter for trafficked women, concurs. “If a trafficked woman is forced to see 30 clients a day, so far as I am concerned, that is 30 rapes a day. The impact on the body and on the psyche is the same as rape. It is the same level of violence against that woman.”
Thousands of women are taken to thriving “markets” like Kosovo, where the brothels are full of women and girls trafficked from all over the Balkans and Eastern Europe and sold for up to $3,500. Kosovo’s local sex trade exploded in 1999 with the arrival of the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR), who were mandated by the U.N. to provide security in post-conflict Kosovo. “A small-scale, local market for prostitution was transformed into a large-scale industry based on trafficking,” according to the 2004 AI report “So does it mean that we have the rights?”: Protecting the Human Rights of Women and Girls Trafficked for Forced Prostitution in Kosovo. With the influx of international peace-keeping and police forces, as well as civilian staff and contractors, the international presence in
A 14-year-old girl walks home in a village in Moldova. Both her parents have left the country to look for work, leaving her alone to fend for herself and look after her 11-year-old brother. An estimated one- third of the population of Moldova have left the country in search of work.
“Majlinda” at a trafficked women’s refuge in the coastal city of Vlore, Albania.
Kosovo initially made up some 80 percent of the clients, although by 2005, the percentage of income and clients from among the international community had sharply declined.
The victims, invariably, come from the vulnerable and subjugated corners of Eastern European society—from desperately poor villages, from isolated mountain regions and from shanty slums. Albania—a land of dire poverty, fierce patriotism, rugged mountains in the north and olive groves in the south—is a typical example. For decades, it was cut off from the rest of Europe.
An estimated 100,000 Albanian women and girls have been trafficked over the past 10 years, according to UNICEF. The fear of abduction by traffickers is so great that the numbers of teenaged girls attending high school in rural areas of Albania has fallen dramatically. In remote regions, some 90 percent of girls no longer receive a high school education, according to Save the Children. “Even here in Tirana, they are afraid,” warns Svetlana Roko, who runs a center for trafficked and at-risk children in the capital.
Some women and girls are simply kidnapped, others lured by promises of work. “It depends,” says Vera Lesko, the woman who runs the shelter in southern Albania. “They could be promised a modeling career, work in shops, serving in bars and, more recently, they have been enticed by promises of academic scholarships.”
The unwitting migrants soon discover themselves trapped in a private hell of constant physical and psychological suffering. Ana Chirsanov, a psychologist in Chisinau, Moldova, who treats trafficking victims, says, “Most of the girls speak of their desire to die when they return. We had a case of one minor who had jumped from a sixth-floor window...she survived, after six surgical operations.”
When politicians turn their attention to trafficking, they tend to overlook those who create the unceasing demand for trafficked women: unscrupulous employers, factory bosses, and the johns who frequent the brothels that are prisons to trafficked women.
In the United States, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, first passed in 2000, offers some protection to victims and punishes traffickers. “Amnesty International USA appreciates many of the provisions in the act and other legislation designed to end trafficking,” says Maureen Greenwood, AIUSA Advocacy Director for Europe and Eurasia.
An anti-trafficking poster in Moldova. It reads, “You’re not a commodity!”
“However, the U.S. government still needs to go much further to protect trafficking survivors and to prosecute traffickers. For example, private military contractors who traffic in persons seem to be slipping through a jurisdictional loophole and need to be prosecuted.”
Congress began considering two bills on trafficking earlier this year. In October AIUSA petitioned Congressional leaders to ratify and implement United Nations protocol on trafficking, prosecute traffickers vigorously and extend the statute of limitations for trafficking crimes. The petition also urged Congress to protect trafficking survivors currently in the United States by ensuring that U.S. immigration officers ask foreigners whether they have been trafficked before removal proceedings and inform trafficking survivors that they may be able to stay in the United States under existing laws.
In Europe, Amnesty International partnered with AntiSlavery International and 170 other NGOs from 30 countries to campaign for the Council of Europe to adopt a treaty setting out the highest standards of protection for the rights of trafficked people. In May 2005, the Council of Europe adopted the Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings. “The Convention recognizes that trafficking is a human rights violation, and sets out minimum requirements that states must take to protect and respect the rights of trafficked persons,” says Jill Heine, AI’s Europe and Central Asia Legal Adviser. States that become parties to the Convention are required to implement a range of measures to prevent trafficking, prosecute those responsible and protect victims. Fifteen countries have already taken the first step to become a party to the treaty. AI is now calling on nations, including the United States, to sign and ratify the Convention, which will come into force once 10 governments ratify it.
Especially important, say advocates, are the measures to protect and assist victims. Experience has shown that victims who have received a range of assistance and protection—and who have begun to recover in a secure environment—are often more willing to participate in assisting law enforcement efforts against those responsible for their trafficking. “There is no conflict between protection and prosecution,” says Mike Kaye of Anti-Slavery International. Quite apart from respect for the human rights of a person who has had them destroyed, he says, “Protection of trafficked people has three distinct advantages: it disrupts the trafficking system, because they do not get retrafficked; it favors intelligence, because they are more likely to tell the support agency how they were trafficked; and in the
winter 2005 long or medium term, it means that the trafficked person is more likely to cooperate with the police.”
Eva, from southern Albania, fell in love with the man who took her to Naples, promising a wedding. But on arrival, her fiancé demanded that Eva work for him as a prostitute. “When I protested, he said he would kill my family and that his accomplices back home would do the same thing to my sister,” she says. Eva walked the streets of Naples, along with the other girls enslaved by the syndicate, taking up to 20 clients a night to meet her quota, and, if lucky, avoid a beating. Most nights, however, would end with her being violated and beaten by her trafficker and his henchmen.
“I could see people living their normal lives, shopping, going about their business,” she says. “They had their families and children with them, they had their lives; they had all the things I wanted but could never have. It made my heart cry to see them. I became accustomed to being a slave, crying all the time, but always afraid to leave [my captor], because he knew my family, he knew my sister. I was alone, I had no one.”
Eva’s trafficker was brother to one of Albania’s biggest dealers in drugs and women, who was killed in a car crash. When her trafficker returned to Tirana for the funeral, Eva escaped and found her brother, who was living in Venice.
Now living in hiding from reprisal, as does her sister—also a trafficking survivor—Eva is clearly the life force of the shelter where she lives. “For the moment, I have what I want. I have my sister with me, I tidy up, I plant flowers, I sew.” Eva urges her fellow victims to cooperate with the authorities and would like to tell those still caught in the hell of enslavement, “Do not be afraid to do what is right. Go to the police. Testify against those who exploit you, for they deserve to be punished.” ai
All names of trafficked women and children in this article have been changed for their own safety. Amnesty International does not publish photographs showing the faces of sex trafficking victims.
A boy in a youth center in a Moldovan village from which most adults have left in search of work.
