Russia tackles sexual slavery racket

Many are entrapped by agents promising lucrative work abroad

Volunteers on the streets of Moscow hand out leaflets to young women on their way to school or work warning young Russians of the dangers of being lured into the sex industry abroad.

Many job adverts here promise well-paid and respectable work in the west, but the reality is often very different.

Naive youngsters arrive to find they're working in brothels and sex clubs - forced into prostitution, while their passports and earnings are confiscated by pimps.

Irina fell into that trap. From a small provincial Russian town, she says she was promised a job as a dancer abroad.

Instead, she was made to work as a prostitute - locked in a room behind barbed wire.

She didn't speak the language and the money she earned was kept by a middleman. She eventually managed to escape and return home - but now she's worried she may be HIV positive.

She just hopes no-one else will suffer the same experience.

Advice line

That message is also being taken into schools. In a Moscow suburb, two students give 16 and 17 year-old girls a telephone number to ring for advice if they need it.

However, many are already aware of the dangers.

"It happened to me once - I was approached at the tube by a man who offered me a job abroad making good money. I never rang him back because I'd heard about that kind of thing before," says one girl.

"I think some girls dream about being beautiful and famous, and succeeding abroad. Lots of them also just want to make easy money."

Behind the Iron Curtain

But the woman who's organising this public awareness campaign says most young Russians are not so clued-up, especially those from outside the big cities.

Valentina Gorchakova of the Angel coalition says the problem is partly a legacy of the former Soviet Union:

"Because we had the Iron Curtain for a long time, it meant we knew very little about the reality of the western world - about international laws, immigration regulations, and employment abroad," she says.

"For many Russians the word 'contract' is something they've only recently learned. We knew so little about life in the west, and then all of a sudden people saw the glamour and the riches - but not the other side of it."

The promise of wages of hundreds of dollars a week will always remain tempting, especially for girls living in poverty in the provinces here.

But the hope is that even if this initiative can't stop the trafficking, young Russian women will be very wary of job offers that are too good to be true.