Dark side of migration
As Romania prepares to deal with becoming a destination for human traffic, 'The Diplomat – Bucharest' analyses the plight of thousands of mostly young girls as their dream of a better life away from home ends in tragedy
"I kidnap
girls from traffickers. That's my biggest pleasure,” says Iana Matei, who runs
Reaching Out, a programme that shelters victims of human
traffic.
“The traffickers don't know what's hit
them. They're so used to people being afraid of them. I take the girls from
under their nose."
In Romania, Matei finds out where
a girl is being kept against her will. Then she calls up the girl on her mobile,
which the trafficked girls keep for clients, and together they work out a free
moment when the girl will not be under the supervision of the trafficker.
Then she plans the
swoop.
"I sometimes position my car outside the
disco where she is expected to work," says Matei. "We arrange that the girl will
go out to smoke a cigarette and that she knows that on that street at that time,
I will be there. Then she runs, jumps in the car and we drive off. The
traffickers often call the girl's mobile, thinking that I am the competition.
This is when I say: 'No, I'll see you in court'."
One time after kidnapping an underage girl from traffickers in a small town in
the south of Romania, Matei received a call from a
policeman.
"He called me and said that the
trafficker had complained to the police that his girl was taken away from him,"
says Matei. "That I had kidnapped a minor from a carer. I thought I was going to
have a heart attack: I said: 'Where were you when she was stolen at
13?”
After working with street children in both
Australia and Romania, Matei was approached in 1998 by police in Pitesti who
asked if she could help with some girls between 14 and 17 forced to work as
prostitutes.
She asked the local authorities for
help. "But they did not understand what I meant by children forced into
prostitution," says Matei. "No one wanted to work with them. The orphanages did
not want the girls because they thought they would set a bad example to the
other kids."
Matei started a programme, where she
rented an apartment to house the girls. Soon she ended up with 13 girls in a
three room apartment.
As well as teaching them life
skills, such as cooking and cleaning, she encouraged all the girls to go back to
school and finish their education, as well as take vocational training. So far
around 218 girls have stayed with Reaching Out's programme for an average of a
year. "After that you cannot just brush them off and send them back into
society," says Matei. "These girls have been abused as
children."
Some 86 per cent of the girls in the
shelter have been reintegrated, either going on to work or marriage. The shelter
has either lost touch with the remainder or they are back in prostitution in
Romania or abroad.
'Reaching Out' also has a
tailoring workshop where the girls can work. This is a large room with sewing
machines and piles of bed linen in plastic containers branded with the 'Reaching
Out' logo. The shelter then sells the bed linen to guest houses. This helps to
make the shelter self-sustainable.
"The girls work
in the tailoring workshop until they find another job," says Matei. "We
encourage them to do this for their wages and activity. It stops them getting
depressed."
Recruitment drive
Typically, the
victims in Matei’s shelter is abuse in a family of low or medium education. The
major problem is not poverty, but a background of living in a dysfunctional
family. The age of the abused victims has dropped since 2003. Now there are many
girls as young as 13 being trafficked. This is not necessarily to do with the
client demand. “The traffickers can scare, control and manipulate them more
easily,” says Matei.
Victims generally come from the
poorest areas of Romania, the south and the east. Giurgiu, Ialomita and Calarasi
are source cities. Bucharest is not an exception. “There are a lot of victims
from Republic of Moldova and Ukraine which are in transit in Romania,” says
Gabriel Sotirescu, deputy director general, directorate for fighting against
organised crime (DGCCO). “Romania has been a destination country in the past,
and most likely we will become more and more this type of country.”
Emigration’s downside
Two to three
million Romanians are working abroad, many, if not most, with illegal work
papers. Most in menial work which is well-paid by Romanian standards.
Encountering agents touting for jobs abroad is a part of daily life for
poverty-stricken areas, where whole towns have decamped to Spain and Italy. "So
when a guy introduces himself to a girl and says in Spain they can pick
strawberries for 800 dollars a month, they will go," says Matei. "Most of the
girls have no idea what's in store for them.”
In
eight years, of 218 girls, the shelter probably had four or five girls who
thought prostitution would be part of the deal.
Dumitru Licsandru, president of the National Agency for Combating Human Traffic,
says most of the girls going abroad are aware of the fact that there are going
to, say, dance in a night club, but do not imagine that they will become a
prostitute. “When they leave the country they leave it legally so no one can
stop them at the border,” he adds. A few are prostitutes willing to work
abroad.
“But once they are there the deal is
different and they are physically abused,” he adds “Most prostitutes are human
trafficking victims. It is very hard to establish the difference between human
trafficking and prostitution.”
Lately labour traffic
is increasing, such as the exploitation of handicapped people to beg on the
streets and children for petty crime. “In the future most probably in
terms of labour exploitation there will be victims from Asia and North Africa
coming to Romania,” says Sotirescu. In forced labor victims are often paid small
salaries and do not consider themselves as victims.
But Licsandru estimates that 70 per cent of the cases are trafficked for sex.
Western demand
The
destination for girls is all over western and central Europe. In Italy, the
Romanian and Albanian traffickers tussle for top place. Most go to Germany,
Austria, England, Belgium, the Netherlands and now to Norway. A lot of girls are
in Dubai, but this is very strict and mafia-controlled. “Now they are
orientating to Spain and Italy most probably because of the language,” says
Licsandru.
Some girls manage to run away and others
go to the police. But most of the girls are rescued by the clients. As the girls
get to know their clients better, they realise the man is not the best friend of
traffickers, so they confide in them their
situation.
"The client will find the police or
Romanian embassy's phone number, then he will buy the girl for an evening of
services, inform the authorities and she is rescued by the police," says Matei.
Often the client pays for the girl's ticket back home.
After effects
Problems after
the event include lung and stomach problems due to a bad diet and months of
confinement. Many have STDs and infections.
In
Matei's office there is a framed photograph of a girl with a black armband
around the portrait. She died in February this year of uterine cancer.
Most girls have unprotected sex. This is what the
clients and traffickers expect. Some come to the shelter with growths on their
uterus. They do not take adequate forms of contraceptives. Birth control pills
are expensive, so before the girls have sex, some traffickers force them to push
pieces of sponge into their vagina as a prevention to pregnancy.
"The kind of sponge you wash your car with," says
Matei.
After sex, the girls take out the sponge and
rinse it out before putting it back for the next client. They can have between
ten and 50 clients a day. Some girls stay on the streets for eight years. "If
the traffickers discover the girl is sick they will sell her on and get some
money for her," say Matei.
If they become too ill,
the traffickers dump the body. Many are dead or vanished. In Spain one girl was
killed and thrown onto a highway. She is now in a freezer in a Morgue. No one
knows who she is or where she comes from.
Returning home
Following the
escape from the trafficker, there is a thawing process that most girls go
through. This includes symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and sometimes
an ongoing sympathy for the trafficker. "Most girls will say it was better
with trafficker, that he was always caring for them: that he gave her lollies
after beating her up," says Matei.
Going home
is not always the best option.
"Rule number one in
psychology is that environment dictates behaviour," says Matei. "If the girl
left home to begin with something happened there that made her leave. If you
send her back to the same environment, she will react in the same way - it's a
vicious circle."
But Licsandru says that most girls
returning to Romania can hardly wait to go back to their families and to break
the connection with their experience.
“Most of the
times they reject support,” says Licsandru. “For most of them the image of the
shelter is related to a prison where they are locked up and beaten. That’s the
image that the criminal created for them.”
Breaking the cycle
Creating jobs
in poverty-stricken areas should be one way of stopping people leaving the
country and thus its more insidious side of trafficking. Reaching Out intends to
increase enterprises in the Arges county area. This means supporting small
enterprises such as cheese-making, mushroom farming and guest houses in the
Transfagarasan mountains. "Developing the community is the way to stop
trafficking and drug abuse," says Matei. "Not printing out posters and talking
about it."
Meanwhile the Ministry of Labor is
organising job fairs for women in areas where the risk of trafficking is
higher.
New destination
Experts
believe that by 2009 Romania will become a destination for human traffic.
Romania is already seeing an increase in the number of internally trafficked
girls. But many members of the police service are still not clear about how to
deal with the situation. "The police check the papers of a 15 year-old girl on
the streets, then send her back on streets,” says Matei. “If she's a prostitute,
she goes to jail and she pays a fine."
In Bucharest
many street police are corrupt. Last June Matei says the police organised a raid
on an illegal brothel which sold trafficked girls. The moment they went to pick
up the girls, the pimps received a call from the police, telling them to the
hide the girls because there would be a raid.
At
least now there is now the political will. There is an anti-trafficking squad
and Romania has now a specialised structure for fighting against human
trafficking at police level and a network of 56 attorneys who are specialists in
this area.
“We are very efficient from the point of
view of catching and sending the criminals to court,” says Sotirescu. “In the
field of fighting against human trafficking Romania is regional leader among 13
countries.”
In terms of convictions, in the first
semester of 2006, the DGCCO has arrested 618 people and the border police 183 in
relation to trafficking. As for convictions, 49 went to prison for one to five
years, 38 between five and ten years and three from 10 to 15
years.
But Matei says the authorities need to train
the prosecutors. Many of them still have the presumption that the girl is
guilty.
"We still see prosecutors asking a
trafficked girl questions; such as what colour do you prefer wearing on your
undies? Red, blue, or lace? And another question they ask: how old were you when
you started your sexual life?"
Many say girls are
asking for it by dressing in a provocative way. 14 year-old girls can still be
sentenced to six months in jail for street-walking.
"It's easier to exploit minors in Romania," says
Matei.
This country is also safer territory for the
traffickers.
"It's safer to take them on the street
here, beat them up, abuse them, send them with 100 clients a day, teach them how
to drink themselves to death in order to serve the clients, so they are already
destroyed. Then you can market them overseas. Then in three years time this 15
year-old girl will say: 'I want to be a prostitute. because there is nothing out
there for me. I was born to be a prostitute.'"
In
cases involving minors, there always has to be a lawyer present and a child
protection officer present.
In practice this does
not happen.
In one example in Bucharest, when the
police were interviewing a trafficked girl about an accusation she had made
against her captors, she was giving her statement opposite the trafficker's
lawyer. He kicked her under the table when she hesitated in giving the statement
he wanted to hear.
"I found out later that this
lawyer had sex with the girl two days previously," says Matei. "The lawyer could
come to the trafficker and pick up whichever girl he
wants."
In 2005, from 2,200 victims, 1,800 agreed to
sign a statement about what happened. “Unfortunately there are a number of
people retracting their testimony,” says Licsandru. “There is a lack in our
system here. The victims are taken by the authorities, making a statement
against the criminal, but traffickers offer money and harass the
victims.”
He says that so far four women have
entered a witness protection programme, where they change their identity and
break contact with their family, in order to help prosecute traffickers.
Most
commonly, the traffickers will give the girls cash to change their statement -
usually about 850 Euro. Sometimes they just beat the girl
up.
The cases do not always go to trial because the
girls often change their testimony and are thus exposed as being unreliable
witnesses.
"The trafficker knows where she lives and
he will come and tell her not to testify against her," says Matei. "Usually
traffickers pay them to change their testimony. Then, because there is no chance
for the girls, they take them back."
Report by Ana Maria Smadeanu and Michael Bird
(C) The Diplomat
An aristocratic title is not enough to ensure a noble behaviour. A person's greatness comes from acknowledging the mistakes and agreeing to correct them.
"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." (Jimi Hendrix)
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