Sex Slavery: Location, location, location? (sex, Roman, easter)

[Djamila]

Bosnia and Herzegovina forms a segment of the one of the most prolific sex slavery human smuggling routes in Europe: the Balkan Corridor, which stretches from Turkey into Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and into Western Europe.

Tens of thousands of women are smuggled along this route every year. Normally, their journey is a slow and painful one. By the time they reach Macedonia, these women are already painfully aware that the waitressing job in Rome they were promised was a lie. Their passports and other important documents are stolen and they forced into prostitution, all of the money they earn collected by their captors. This money is used to fund their journey from Eastern Europe to Western Europe and women generally work 5-6 years before they either escape or turn up dead.

An overwhelming majority of the women who pass through Bosnia and Herzegovina are Romanian nationals. It is estimated that 16,000 Romanian women are working as sex slaves in Bosnia and Herzegovina at any given time. Records collected by police, whenever these women are found, arrested, and deported, reveal that two Romanian towns in particular account for a majority of sex slaves: Brasov and Sighisoara.

BRASOV, Romania:


SIGHISOARA, Romania:

This puzzles me greatly. Brasov and Sighisoara are both, as you can clearly see, idyllic Eastern European towns. Their economies aren't bad, by Eastern European standards, and the quality of life in these towns is rather good.

I can understand women leaving these cities in search of work in Western Europe. It doesn't matter what your standard of living is in Eastern Europe, if you can earn a paycheck in Euros - it's worth the move. However, it would take an extremely naive, even stupid, women to believe they're actually going to work in Western Europe. The sex slavery industry is anything but a secret in Eastern Europe and everyone knows all these beauty pageants with prizes of trips to Berlin, all these career fairs with promises of waitresses jobs in Italy, are death traps. So I refuse to believe these women are completely unaware of, at the very least, the possibility of what might happen to them.

If their situation was extremely desperate, I can see them taking that risk. Leaving towns like Brasov and Sighisoara, though, I can't understand. It can't be that bad, that they'd be willing to risk their very lives for a waitressing job they know probably doesn't exist.

The cities these women end up in are absolutely destitute. Many are beautiful, from the outside looking in (Skopje, Macedonia, for example) but their average per family income is sometimes less than half what it is in the average Romanian town. Why, then, are these destitute cities the ones with a sex slavery industry?

Why can you get a Romanian sex slave in the most abscure town on the Kosovo border and not in the Romanian capital? Why does the sex slavery industry rely on this migration of women? The only answer I can think of is that it's dangerous for their captors to keep the women in a country where they can effectively communicate with the outside world. A Romanian sex slave in Pec, Kosovo, hasn't a hope in the world of getting a passer-by on the street to understand even the most basic sentence in the Romanian language.

But it's still all very confusing to me.

Why do the Bosnian girls kidnapped on their way home from school turn up years later in brothels in Malaysia, and not in Bosnia? Why do Ukrainian girls turn up dead in the canals of Amsterdam and not Kyiv? Why is there so much migration, when it has to be cheaper to keep the sex slaves where they are? And why is there so much migration to areas where no one has the money to pay for sex slaves?

How is it possible to make more money from a slave in Pristina, Kosovo, than it is in Bucuresti, Romania?

[Sunstone]

I think you are probably right that it is easier to control a girl if you move her to another country than it is to control her in her own country. That might explain some of the migration.