Unlike local prostitution, the trade in foreign women is relatively new to Europe. In 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union created a region of economic chaos in which criminals found it easy to dupe desperate young women into the sex trade. The estimated number of women trafficking into or within Western Europe exploded from near zero to 80,000 per year by 1995, and has continued rising steadily to 120,000 today, says the IOM. Unhindered by laws and unscrutinized by police, the traffickers have flourished, developing an increasingly specialized network of accomplices, from false-front employment agencies to passport forgers, truckers in human cargo, new-girl display rooms and “warehouses,” Internet distributors and, last, houses of prostitution in the West. “Five years ago traffickers were rare in London, but now they supply 80 percent of the women in red-light districts, says Paul Holmes, who headed the antitrafficking unit of Scotland Yard from 1997 to 2002. “It’s a very sophisticated marketing model that pairs supply and demand very well.”
Trafficking is now too big to ignore. Interpol calls it “the fastest growing type of crime” in the world; the United Nations says it has boomed into a $7 billion global business. Lobbying by women’s advocacy groups persuaded the U.S. Congress to pass the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which called for annual evaluations of foreign government efforts to combat trafficking, and economic sanctions against those who fail. Over the past two years, at least 15 European countries established or tightened antitrafficking laws, including France, Britain, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Russia and most of the nations of Eastern Europe. It took just two and a half years to get the required 40 nations to ratify a new international treaty on fighting organized crime, which will go into effect next month. Among other things, it calls for jail terms of at least eight years for “trafficking in persons.” “This is all brand new and very hot,” says Burkhardt Dammann, a trafficking expert at the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna. Until recently, he says, most countries had no criminal laws on trafficking and “very little idea what trafficking even was.”
Antitrafficking police units are sprouting up all over Europe to enforce the new laws, and are developing a much clearer picture of how the traffickers operate. There are three main routes: the Balkan –route into Italy or Greece; the Baltic route from Russia and Asia into Finland or Germany, and the Mediterranean route from northern Africa into Spain or Italy. The lead traffickers are familiar organized-crime groups–the Russian mob, the Chinese triads, the Albanian mafia–but recent raids reveal that they use an increasingly international and efficient supply chain. “I’m sure networks can fulfill an order for a woman within two days, from the Balkans to London,” says Interpol’s trafficking expert Hamish McCullough, adding that each gang may employ as many as 40 subcontractors, dealing with everything from recruiting to housing.
Trafficking bosses typically pay about $500 per head to recruiters, who are most active in the poorest Eastern countries, like Moldova, and in war zones, like Kosovo. The recruiters place ads in the paper, or set up phony employment, modeling and travel agencies. “In Moldova alone, there are hundreds of these scam agencies,” says Helga Konrad, head of a European Union task force on trafficking. The recruiters are locals, and very often women, because they can easily build trust with desperate countrywomen. A growing number of recruits are hooked by bogus mail-order bride services. Others are taken by force. “Traffickers kidnap young people at refugee camps, and they are selected by their looks,” says Marco Gramegna, head of counter-trafficking at the IOM. “The stereotype of gangsters cruising around small Eastern European villages looking for pretty young women is actually true.”
Borders in Europe are either open, or easily crossed with a phony passport or a bribe. “At the Hungary-Ukraine border, traffickers were meeting border officials in a back room of a local nightclub and paying them from 100 to 1,000 euros to stamp their passports,” says Patsy Sorenson, a Belgian member of the European Parliament. Many of the women are now moved through what Britain’s National Intelligence Service calls “nexus points,” often just seedy apartments, in Budapest, Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia or Ljubljana. There, some are “conditioned”–raped repeatedly–for the sex trade, police say. Others are simply “warehoused” and displayed for sale to buyers from the West, who typically pay $10,000 per head. Traffickers are also using Web sites that list new girls and their attributes. “There are Internet cafes in the West which showcase these Web sites,” says Sorenson. “The cafe workers are helping to sell these women.”
The bigger profits are made at the end of the chain, in Western brothels where women are forced to work off debts to the traffickers. Last year Bryan Jenkins, an active detective chief inspector with the Welsh branch of the National Crime Squad, spent nine months tracking a Bulgarian mobster who trafficked at least 10 women into Britain. The women were driven on forged Greek or Italian passports from Bulgaria through Germany to France, where a British national took them on to a massage parlor in Cardiff, Wales, run by an accomplice of the Bulgarian. “He really didn’t do much–just organized things and collected the money” that paid for luxury flats in Cardiff and London, and a new Audi A8, says Jenkins. The leader was caught and deported to Bulgaria for prosecution.
Crackdowns are now producing major roundups all over Europe. Since May, Europol has staged two major busts, including one called Operation Sunflower that spanned eight nations and led to the arrest of 80 suspects, with accomplices as varied as taxi drivers, hotel managers and bogus travel agents in Russia and Ukraine. Germany’s federal police have been chasing down increasingly large and sophisticated gangs, and are now monitoring networks of 100 members with breakthroughs expected soon, says Max Peter Ratzel, chief detective for its organized-crime unit. Even in the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal, trafficking now carries a 10-year prison term, and the number of cases has more than tripled since 1997 to 63 last year, involving testimony from 186 victims, says Rob Costa, head of the antitrafficking unit of the Dutch national police. “That’s roughly 400 traffickers caught last year.”
An arrest is not necessarily the end of the criminal enterprise. There are no statistics available yet for trafficking convictions in Europe. Konrad says police still often consider the women criminals, too, and deport them before they can testify. Nearly half of the women who are deported wind up back in the hands of the traffickers, says Konrad. In some nations, the authorities still assume trafficked women had freely chosen to be prostitutes before they left home, and do not recognize the existence of a sex slave trade.
One key to taking down traffickers will be to turn their victims against them. In 1998, Italy established a witness-protection program, a six-month-stay permit and support services for trafficked women. Since then, it has seen prosecutions shoot up fourfold. Advocates for the women would like to see similar programs across Europe. Meanwhile, there are alarming signs that the traffickers may be finding their own ways to deal with the eyewitnesses. “We’ve seen a sudden sharp increase in missing girls in the last 18 months,” says McCullough. “They’ve stopped phoning family, and have completely lost touch. Have they come to a violent end? We don’t know.” That’s yet more reason for Europe to open its eyes.
