The route to hell

Published on Tuesday 22 August 2006 00:53

THE advert in the local paper was brief.

Less than a month later, Olga was confined inside a brothel. Alongside a group of other young Moldovan women, she had been driven over the border to Romania and through Serbia. The women all became increasingly disoriented, and anxious about what was happening to them. Eventually, after picking their way through a forest strewn with landmines, they arrived in Kosovo.

Olga, like all the other women, was immediately sold - she was bought by a local bar owner. This pimp instructed her to dance on a stage, and then rented her out to punters at night. If she resisted, he beat her. Like the vast majority of trafficked women, she learnt to become compliant in order to survive.

Olga was taken to Kosovo, but she could easily have ended up in Scotland. Recent research by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) indicates traffickers are now frequently transporting women directly to EU countries as opposed to using circuitous routes through the Balkans.

The majority of sex workers in Britain are now migrant women, although nobody knows how many have been trafficked. The Home Office recently described the British sex industry as "saturated". Traffickers often use genuine EU passports - which circulate for sale around Europe - and cheap airlines to fly women to destinations including the UK. The majority of women are flown into London then dispersed across the country, but sometimes they are flown directly to other cities, such as Glasgow.

The nature of the human trafficking trade makes it inherently difficult to gather intelligence about the situation in Scotland, but women working in Glasgow saunas have been identified as coming from 28 different countries, and the off-street sex industry is apparently "flourishing". Over the last two years an unconfirmed number of women from states which recently joined the EU, and from several African countries, have been released from brothels and given sanctuary by Glasgow social services.

Operation Pentameter recently highlighted that women and girls are being trafficked across the UK. During the operation, six trafficked women were identified in Scotland, and four people have been charged with trafficking-related offences. If convicted, these would be the first traffickers to be convicted in Scotland. There is consensus amongst the police and support staff that these figures represent the tip of the iceberg.

Police and immigration authorities in Scotland say they recognise that trafficked women often need time to feel safe enough to confide to authorities what has happened to them, and so offer them "a period of reflection". This is progressive policing, and Scotland is paving the way for the rest of the UK. But this reflection period is not enshrined in law, and women and girls are still being removed from other parts of the UK because they have no legal right to be here even if they have been trafficked against their will.

The Council of Europe's Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, which guarantees a "recovery and reflection period" of at least 30 days for people who have been trafficked, has now been signed by 32 of the 46 council members. The UK government has spent more than 15 months "considering its position" and has still not signed the convention.

When women are removed by UK authorities, they almost inevitably return to debt, and are often at risk of being re-trafficked. And no-one pays for the crimes that have been committed against them. It is currently almost impossible to prosecute a trafficker without the live testimony of a woman whom they trafficked.

But there are several practical steps that the police and government can take immediately to combat trafficking. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) could make a public statement urging the government to sign the European Convention. The police could also launch a hard-hitting zero tolerance campaign, warning men that if they pay to have sex with a trafficked woman they are committing rape. There needs to be a legal onus on punters to find out whether a sex worker has been trafficked, because these men are the reason women are being brought to the UK.

The government could appoint a national rapporteur on trafficking, who would oversee all government initiatives on human trafficking, and be a national point of contact for immigration, police and support services.

Most vitally, the Westminster government could sign up to the European Convention, which offers trafficked women and girls legal protection and physical sanctuary. Then the long-term battle against the traffickers in the UK can really begin.

Traffickers cannot operate without the complicity of at least some officials. Olga was trafficked to Kosovo via a network who relied on an entire chain of corrupt border guards, police and government officials. These criminals are bribed to be complicit in the trafficking of women across Eastern Europe, and until corruption is tackled in countries such as Moldova - which is regarded as a "major country of origin" from which at least several thousand women and girls have been trafficked - this trade cannot be eradicated. The women quickly become physically disoriented, and psychologically isolated. They swiftly learn not to trust anybody in uniform.

Reports of women and girls being trafficked into Kosovo began to emerge within months of the United Nations mission in Kosovo and the NATO peacekeepers arriving in July 1999. While writing this book I travelled to Kosovo, and found it an intimidating place to research the subject of trafficking. People were guarded with information, and it is the only place I have ever been threatened by a police officer for asking questions about human trafficking - he said that he could have me detained if he wanted to.

After the UN and NATO troops arrived in Kosovo, this disputed territory became infested with traffickers. The UN compiled an "off limits" list of more than 200 bars and nightclubs in order to prevent its staff, and the NATO troops, from visiting brothels. I spoke to the UN Trafficking and Prostitution Investigation Unit, who assured me the situation was improving, and that any foreigners identified inside a brothel would be held accountable.

The year after I visited, in 2004, Amnesty International published a report on trafficking in Kosovo. Entitled Does That Mean I Have Rights?, the report was ferociously critical of the UN and NATO, claiming that both had failed to tackle trafficking or to penalise offenders. It said: "Since the deployment of an international peacekeeping force and the establishment of the United Nations Interim Administrative Mission, Kosovo has become a major destination country for women and girls trafficked into forced prostitution."

I talked to the woman who wrote the Amnesty report. "We documented one case of a young woman who was kept in a cellar," she told me. "Men would come down to the cellar every day and rape her. But she didn't know who any of them were, because she was kept in the dark like an animal."

Though the majority of peacekeeping troops are not complicit in these crimes, traffickers in the Balkans have nevertheless thrived on money from UN and NATO soldiers, and women have been raped by peacekeepers. The UN and NATO are finally pushing through reforms that challenge trafficking and sexual abuse by their own staff. These abuses should have been addressed many years ago, but nonetheless it is vital progress. However, although the situation in Kosovo has definitely improved since my first trip, the brothels I visited when I returned there at the end of last year were still full of foreign women for rent.

Richard Danziger, who heads the counter-trafficking office at the IOM's Geneva headquarters recently told me: "We are going to have to relearn everything we thought we knew about trafficking, because this crime is constantly evolving."

Human trafficking is now considered to be the fastest-growing sector of organised crime in the world. Unemployment, poverty and acute domestic violence have all contributed to mass migration westwards, towards the EU. And this trade encapsulates the most extreme ethos of globalisation: the movement of economic units for profit regardless of human cost.

The cost for Olga was almost indescribable. She spent a long time confined inside that bar in Kosovo. While she was there, NATO soldiers came to the bar and offered to pay to have sex with her. The bar owner refused. He said he only rented her out to locals, because they were good customers and he could trust them. Olga endured almost two years of abuse. Reading a trafficking report in a newspaper is one thing: listening to a woman explaining how she has survived being raped and beaten on a daily basis is profoundly different. When I met Olga in Moldova, she told me how she finally got out of that bar.

"Sometimes one of the men who took me for the night would drop me off at another bar on the other side of town, and then I would be collected and taken back to the bar I usually worked in," she said. "But this woman who worked in the second bar knew I had to get out, and she hid me in a cupboard, and said I had not arrived. When that man who said that he owned me left to look for me, I escaped from him."

I asked why, after two years of being confined, she took this final risk.

"I had to," she replied. "He beat me so badly about the head that he damaged my eyes. If I had stayed any longer I would have been completely blind."

She now lives in Chisinau with her son, is registered disabled and receives a small state pension. Olga is one of the main reasons that I wrote Selling Olga and her story illustrates why we need to stop talking about "sex slaves" and start addressing the underlying reasons that women continue to be trafficked across Europe.

• Selling Olga by Louisa Waugh is published on Thursday by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced 16.99.