Journey Into Sex Slavery

SAN FOCA, Italy —  Angela Slobodchuk, 25, has a story to tell. She offers it in a low monotone, in a near-whisper, to anyone who listens.

It begins in her poor farming village in the former Soviet republic of Moldova with the promise of a job as a waitress in Italy.

It takes her on an odyssey of torment through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Albania. She is raped, beaten, forced into prostitution, smuggled across borders and sold 18 times from one pimp to the next.

It ends 11 months later when police along Italy’s Adriatic coast rescue the weeping woman with the miniskirt and bruised legs and arrest her 21-year-old Albanian captor. “I had no voice left after all the screaming,” she recalls. “I was one step away from madness.”

Angela’s story offers a frightening glimpse into how criminal gangs have lured tens of thousands of young women from poverty in the former Soviet bloc, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and sent them into a nightmarish underground of sex slavery in Europe.

As Western Europe grows richer and fewer of its women resort to street prostitution, the world’s oldest profession is being taken over by immigrant traffickers and their younger, lower-priced chattel.

The booming cross-border trade in forced prostitution and sweatshop labor earns traffickers worldwide $7 billion a year, according to the United Nations. It ranks third behind drug running and illicit arms sales in terms of lucrative criminal enterprises.

Much of the profit comes from Western Europe, where there is a high demand for prostitutes and a growing demand for younger females presumed to be free of AIDS. The International Organization for Migration estimates that 300,000 immigrant women and teenage girls work in Western Europe as prostitutes and surrender their income to traffickers holding them in bondage.

Most of them end up as prostitutes after falling for false promises of legitimate jobs or marriage abroad. Adrift in strange cities, they are stripped of their identification documents by the traffickers, on whom they become totally dependent.

Yet until recently, their stories didn’t interest European law enforcement officials, who would simply deport them along with other illegal immigrants. An ingrained fear of police and the shame of facing their families back home kept the victims of sex trafficking in fearful silence.

The merciful end to Angela’s ordeal--with a work permit in Italy--reflects a policy shift, as some governments have begun enlisting the victims in a stepped-up battle against the traffickers.

Treating them more as rape victims than criminals, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands now offer shelter, protection and residency permits to trafficked prostitutes so they can help identify and prosecute their exploiters. Italy also offers schooling, job training and employment to help them start new lives.

The United States, also witnessing a sharp rise in sex trafficking from Asia and Latin America, drew on the three European countries’ experiences as it drafted an anti-trafficking bill that passed Congress in October. The U.S. law, not yet fully implemented, will offer as many as 5,000 visas a year for women and children who are rescued from forced labor after being smuggled into the U.S.

Italy is leading the new approach, driven by alarm over an influx of Eastern European and African prostitutes since the late 1990s and by the coercive violence of the foreign pimps who bring them. Police say 168 foreign prostitutes were killed in Italy last year.

Pope John Paul II embraced a tearful former prostitute from Nigeria on Italian television last year. Hundreds of volunteers across the country help “rescue” trafficked women, aided by a 24-hour, government-run hotline that has fielded tens of thousands of calls.

Today, about 30,000 foreign women, 12,000 of them younger than 18, are being forced to work as prostitutes in Italy, according to the Roman Catholic relief agency Caritas.

Under a revision of Italy’s immigration law that has been in force since late 1999, more than 2,000 immigrants have obtained residency permits after breaking away from their pimps. Belgium and the Netherlands have extended such permits to a few hundred trafficking victims.

Police officers, prosecutors and judges are listening to their stories. In Italy, where such testimony was almost unheard of two years ago, the women have helped identify about 1,500 pimps and traffickers, the Interior Ministry says. At least 800 suspects are under arrest, facing up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

“Reading page after page of testimony by these girls, you begin to understand fully what a vile, disturbing enterprise we are up against,” said Demetrio Missineo, an Interior Ministry official who helped overcome strong police resistance to the idea of halting the expulsions of the women.

Although the arrests haven’t stopped the traffic, “we are finally breaking the omerta, the wall of silence, around it,” Missineo said.

Denisa, a petite Albanian student with a dark ponytail and three silver rings in her left ear, was only 16, she says, when she was kidnapped at a bus stop, beaten and raped by three men in her hometown, Shkodra.

“You have a choice,” the one she knew as Artan told her. “Come to Italy or we kill your little brother.”

Artan smuggled her into Italy the way most traffickers do, in darkness on the southern Adriatic coast in a speedboat. From there, Denisa says, he took her to Mestre, in northern Italy, to solicit sex on the streets. He used informers to watch her. He beat her whenever she fell short of her weekly $1,500 quota, which required two to three clients a night.

Stories like Denisa’s are helping investigators sketch a map of Europe’s flourishing sex trade:

Clans of violent Albanian traffickers who also smuggle cigarettes and drugs have been the sex trade’s dominant force since 1997, when the collapse of Albania’s pyramid investment schemes and the country’s descent into anarchy triggered a surge of westbound migration.

Today an estimated 30,000 Albanian women are sex slaves abroad, half of them in Italy, according to the international relief agency Save the Children.

Now, thanks to a larger flow of voluntary migration from Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria and other former Communist countries, the Albanian clans have been branching out.

With strong footholds in coastal Italy, investigators say, the Albanians have a reach that is rivaled only by that of the Nigerian underworld, which dominates Europe-bound sex traffic from Africa. Italy’s home-grown Mafias, which shun the trade, lease “territory” to Albanian and Nigerian clans for 40% of their prostitution income, Italian police say.

Young women trafficked from Nigeria arrive first in the Netherlands with instructions to apply for asylum as homeless minors, Dutch authorities say. The women use false passports understating their age and, in many cases, claiming to be from Liberia or Sierra Leone, war-torn countries whose refugees are rarely deported from Europe.

More than 400 of these applicants have disappeared from Dutch asylum centers since 1998, according to the International Organization for Migration. A study by the Geneva-based agency says traffickers whisk away the women and sell them to Nigerian madams across Western Europe.

Although immigrant traffickers from more than a dozen countries use violence to hold women in bondage in Western Europe, according to the study, the Albanians are notoriously brutal. They have been known to punish uncooperative victims with burning cigarettes, underwater immersion and other forms of torture usually associated with wartime paramilitary squads.

Women who suffered such treatment say they endured it out of fear of being caught and deported. Albanian culture ostracizes sexually abused women, who face rejection by their families.

Denisa, now living at a Caritas shelter in Udine, Italy, says she was equally fearful of Artan and the Italian police. She asks that her last name not be published because of the threat against her brother and the shame facing her family.

“I thought the police would send me home,” the teenager said. “That was the last place I wanted to go.”

After running away from Artan in December 1999, with no money and only the skimpy outfit she was wearing, she shivered and chain-smoked for 72 hours in a city park before throwing herself on the mercy of the police. They turned her over to Caritas, which helped her start a new life.

Two months later, a more secure Denisa went back to the police and swore out a complaint against Artan. She now works in a furniture factory.

Angelo Loconte, an Italian police detective who has interviewed dozens of trafficked women, says more and more of them come to Italy knowing that they will be prostitutes but believing that they can get rich and quit when they want to.

“What they still do not anticipate are the conditions--the heavy ‘debt’ they must repay, the violence, the coercion,” he said. “They are always deluded. They end up trapped.”

Nigerian women trafficked into Europe are obliged to pay a Nigerian madam for their freedom; the usual “debt” is $50,000, payable in biweekly installments over 18 months. The pact is enforced by threats against their families back home and a quasi-religious tribal practice that police in Europe refer to, inaccurately, as voodoo.

Typically, a madam collects a sachet of blood, hair and nail clippings from each of her prostitutes to symbolize her control over their lives. In their eyes, the ritual gives the madam terrifying power; even if the madam is arrested, Italian police say, a prostitute won’t feel free to talk unless her individual sachet is recovered.

Although Nigerian prostitutes can and do buy their freedom, those trafficked by Albanians appear to live in perpetual slavery. They are kept under closer surveillance and suffer more physical violence.

Angela Slobodchuk, the Moldovan woman, says she was seeking a way to escape a drunken, drug-addicted husband who beat her and to earn money for surgery for her 18-month-old son when a half-sister said she could help her find a job. She referred Angela to a stranger named Maria, who was to arrange work in a restaurant in Italy. Instead, Maria took her to the Turkish city of Istanbul and sold her to the first of a string of brutal Albanian pimps.

Over the next 11 months, Angela says, she was forced to have sex with as many as four men a day, who paid $100 apiece. “I had to entertain them, but I was always crying,” she said in her soft monotone. “To stop crying, I had to get drunk.

“I never saw any of their money. I never want to see that money.”

Each time she worked off her “debt” to one pimp, he would get on his mobile phone and sell her to another, usually for $3,000. She was constantly being moved.

Pimps kept her in line, she said, by “crashing beer bottles over my head.”

Violence against women being trafficked with her was worse: One fell from a speedboat, with the Albanian coast guard in pursuit, and was left to drown. Another was beaten so badly that she suffered a miscarriage.

In September 1999, a pimp named Aded managed to smuggle Angela ashore in Italy, but they were caught at a highway checkpoint and expelled. In Moldova, on her way home, she says, she was abducted near a bus station and sold again into slavery.

By the time she landed in Italy two months later, the country had amended its law. This time, police jailed her pimp and turned Angela over to Father Cesare Lodeserto, a Catholic priest with a bodyguard’s physique and intimidating glare. He sheltered her and got her to talk.

An energetic woman who now speaks fluent Italian, Angela works as a cook at Lodeserto’s Regina Pacis refuge on the Adriatic shore. The fortress-like building, protected by police, harbors 80 other Eastern European women who are cooperating with authorities against the sex traffickers.

The traffickers are starting to feel the heat. Two armed Albanians cornered the priest at gunpoint on the beach early this year and warned him to stop messing with their “merchandise.” He was not intimidated.

Their face-off was emblematic of battles to come across Europe.

The 15-nation European Union is moving toward uniform laws against human trafficking. Enforcement now is tentative and uneven, leaving gaps for highly mobile traffickers to slip through. Albania’s government is unable to deter the flow, Italian officials say, because the criminals bribe its poorly paid police.

Italy and Belgium are lobbying for uniform EU protection for victims. Bowing to widespread unease over rising immigration, most Western European governments still expel illegally trafficked prostitutes. But growing pressure to shelter them and seek their testimony is coming from humanitarian aid groups.

“We cannot even begin to speak of victory over this phenomenon, but we can speak of a new awareness,” Lodeserto said. “The girls are telling their stories. That is our victory--sounding the alarm in Europe over this new form of slavery.”

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Angela’s Odyssey

In an 11-month odyssey of torment, a young Moldovan woman, Angela Slobodchuk, was raped, beaten, forced into prostitution, smuggled across borders and sold 18 times from one pimp to the next.