Eastern European women being sold into sex business 8/8/01

SUE LLOYD-ROBERTS:
It's not unusual in any church today to find that it's the women who take the burden of responsibility for a community's religious life. What is unusual in the village of Skoren is that there are only children and old women at prayer. Nearly all the women in the village between the ages of 18 and 30 are gone.

UNNAMED WOMAN:
(TRANSLATION)
They go to Italy, Portugal, Turkey, even Moscow. They can't stay here. There's no work and no money. I can't tell you how many, but they've all gone.

LLOYD-ROBERTS:
In the Soviet era, it was the norm for women to work. In Moldova today, over two-thirds of them are unemployed.

UNNAMED WOMAN 2:
(TRANSLATION)
It's very hard nowadays. All the businesses have closed. Before, there were state enterprises, plants, factories. You could get prosecuted for not having a job.

LLOYD-ROBERTS:
I met a family who admitted that they were pleased when a woman called Tanya came to the village and offered their 18-year-old daughter a job abroad. Elena promised to phone, but never did. The family later learned that Tanya sells girls to a pimp in Istanbul.

VERA MIRON:
(TRANSLATION)
My husband died because of it. Before he died all he would say was, "How could this happen to her?" That woman took our little girl and sold her. Where did she sell her? Where did she take her? I went to the police. They said they couldn't help me. Please, please help me. Help find her for us. From the bottom of my heart, I beg you to help me.

LLOYD-ROBERTS:
An estimated 50 or 60 girls a month are being shipped out of Moldova. Many of them can be found here in the nightclubs of Istanbul where the floor shows involve Moldovan and Russian girls dancing zombie-like for their audience. The bar owner charges $100 an hour for time spent in a girl's company. With pimps and customers around I was unlikely to get help looking for one missing Moldovan village girl here. I tried again in daylight and was referred to the bus depot where Moldovans tend to collect.

UNNAMED MAN:
(TRANSLATION)
I saw her a month ago. She was after a job.

LLOYD-ROBERTS:
People here said they'd seen her a few weeks ago and that she was looking for work. The women told me that she had most likely escaped from whoever had been holding her in a bar or brothel but was now too scared to go home. I was told to fill out a petition and take it to the "Missing Persons Bureau". Official typists sit outside government buildings here, preparing the necessary documents. This one told me that he had done dozens of petitions for the parents of Moldovan girls. At the Government office, they probably only gave me time because I was a foreign journalist making inquiries. They said they had thousands of missing girls on their books and that my search was hopeless. If Elena did escape from her kidnappers, there's a chance she might already be back in Moldova. The anti-trafficking unit of the migration organisation are rescuing hundreds of girls from bars and brothels and sending them back to their countries of origin. However, the girls seldom go home. After all, they had promised their families that they would bring them wealth. Instead, they return with their few belongings in plastic bags. These girls have been repatriated from Kosovo, where thousands of international troops are now based. They and the ones who have returned before them don't want their families to recognise them.

"ANNA":
(TRANSLATION)
I don't want them to know. They'll be angry with me. The truth is that I don't want them to find out what really happened. They wouldn't understand.

LLOYD-ROBERTS:
They prefer to rely on charity workers and enrol on training programmes in the capital, Chisinau, rather than go back to their villages where they'd be branded prostitutes. Monica believes her parents would probably reject her.

"MONICA":
I just couldn't tell them anything. That's the problem. My parents are strict people and I'm scared. They simply wouldn't understand how it all happened. This man offered me work as a teacher in Italy. Then he took me and three other girls to Belgrade and put us in a flat where there were dozens of other girls. He took our passports and sold me for £600 to a man who owns a bar in Kosovo. They threatened us saying, "We've bought you now and we can do what we like with you."

LLOYD-ROBERTS:
We have heard that girls who are being trafficked are being used by the international peacekeeping forces, is this true?

"MONICA":
I don't know myself that they are being used or not because I wasn't used as a prostitute, so I don't know. But I know from others that the soldiers stationed there do use girls like us. They go to the bars to do it.

LLOYD-ROBERTS:
Of course, if she wouldn't tell her own mother how she was abused, she was unlikely to tell me. Mariana Petersel is the director of the charity who looks after these girls, along with hundreds of street children who emerged in Moldova after the collapse of the USSR. She says there was no-one else around to help the abused and traumatised young women when they began arriving back. She was told a different story about the girls I interviewed, by the international military police who rescued them in Kosovo.

MARIANA PETERSEL:
DIRECTOR, SAVE THE CHILDREN MOLDOVA
(TRANSLATION)
The two girls who you were talking to are denying that they were sexually abused because they're ashamed. I know for a fact that they were gang-raped. It was in their original statements. These men use violent rape to intimidate these girls. If we look at these files, we see that in three years more than 500 victims have been repatriated. When I say victims I mean girls and women between the ages of 12 and 40. Unfortunately, the traffickers don't bother to take young age into consideration. The younger the girls are, the more profitable they are for them. They recruit under-age girls and destroy them by forcing them into prostitution. It's our womanhood, the future of our country that's being destroyed. This is a catastrophe.

LLOYD-ROBERTS:
For as long as the money from the charity lasts, the girls who return live together in safe houses. Girls have been known to be kidnapped off the streets and so they spend most of the time inside to escape potential abusers, but not their nightmares.

"ALINA":
(TRANSLATION)
The last one to buy me was a very cruel man. He was violent and aggressive. He said he had already killed eight men, and he told me, "I can shoot you any time I want if you don't do what I say." Then he would abuse me. If you were a weak person, you'd go mad. If you make trouble when they move you from place to place they kill you. Human life means nothing to them. They take you away and shoot you.

LLOYD-ROBERTS:
Back in the village, I told Elena's mother that I had failed to find her daughter. She assumed that she must be dead. She regretted that there'll never be a conventional village funeral like this for her to mourn Elena. The tragedy is that parents are believing they have lost daughters who may be alive and who are simply afraid to go home. Little news about the scale of the sex trade gets back here. Aid agencies working in the area are bringing out alarming reports with increasing regularity about the trafficking of women from Eastern Europe. They recommend new legislation, more police awareness, better support for women who return. Above all, they say the solution lies back here in the villages. Alleviate poverty, they say, bring economic development to women in rural areas to stop them leaving in the first place. Next month, international anti-trafficking units are moving into the villages of Moldova to start programmes to educate young women about the dangers of sex slavery. The fear is, for as long as Moldova remains the poorest country in Europe, unable to feed its people, girls will take risks and try their luck abroad.