Albanian Daily News
October 5, 2000
http://www.albaniannews.com
(from the Singapore Straits Times)
 
"With the collapse of communism, not only have sexual taboos been smashed, but so have welfare systems that gave inadequate but dependable support to families and supported institutions that gave shelter to orphans and children from broken homes."

E. Europe’s Impoverished Girls Fall Prey to Sex Trade

STRASBOURG - In downtown Berlin, kids as young as 13 arrive from all over Central and Eastern Europe. Some hope to escape the poverty of their homes in Romania, Albania or Ukraine.

At check-points along the German-Czech border, otherwise known as “the kid-prostitution alley”, teenaged girls hop into cabs with long-distance truckers.

Eastern Europe has become a low-cost alternative to the Pacific Basin for Westerners looking for child-sex, and child prostitution is rife in bars, hotels and around train stations.

Moscow’s MiraMed Institute estimates that tens of thousands of women and children from the former Soviet’s Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), are trafficked into forced prostitution in more than 43 countries, as they try to flee poverty and oppression.

“A web of child exploitation extends across Europe, worst in the former communist states. Widespread poverty and a backlash against oppressive rule have caused an explosion of child prostitution,” said the institute.

“With the collapse of communism, not only have sexual taboos been smashed, but so have welfare systems that gave inadequate but dependable support to families and supported institutions that gave shelter to orphans and children from broken homes.

“These children, besides suffering from poverty, are to a great degree left without adult guidance and care.”

Organisers of child prostitution rackets in Eastern Europe are said to be feeding on the fears of Aids, which has stimulated the demand for virgins.

Alongside the spread of child prostitution, thousands of women desperate to leave their war-ravaged or impoverished countries, are being preyed upon by the sex industry and trafficked across the borders.

In Albania and south-eastern Europe trafficking networks have increased with the crisis in Kosovo, and dozens of Moldovan, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Romanian women have been rescued over the past months from brothels in or near Kosovo.

UN police officers who have interviewed many of the rescued women say many of them had responded to newspaper ads seeking “attractive women” to work in the West and, allegedly, knew they would work as prostitutes.

What they did not know was that the work would be unpaid and that they would be forced to work in hellish conditions, ending up imprisoned, penniless and morally destroyed.

“The women were stripped of their passports as soon as they left their homelands; frequently held in unheated rooms with primitive sanitary conditions in Kosovo and forced to have unprotected sex, sometimes up to 16 times a night for no payment,” said UN police officers.

Their customers include ethnic Albanians, international aid workers and peace-keeping troops.

Other victims have been kidnapped or cajoled into prostitution after applying for jobs in the West.

After scratching together all the money she could to send her daughter to Rome to take up a “waitressing job”, the mother of an Albanian girl found she had actually been sent to a whore-house, raped and forced into prostitution until the police finally raided the place.

Many of the young women trapped into this kind of work find no way out, or pay for it with their life.

Another 18-year old Albanian girl, who had been forced into prostitution in Italy, was murdered by Albanian pimps in March.

“Nadia was murdered because she no longer wanted to be a prostitute, and by rebelling against the organisation, she risked ending up this way,” a friend told the daily paper, Il Messaggero.

Another young Albanian sex-slave said: “I believed I was going to find work in Italy because in Albania I met some guys who convinced me of this. But I was forced to go on the streets once I arrived.

“I didn’t want to and so I escaped to Paris, stupidly thinking I had got away with it, but they chased me all over Europe and tracked me down in Paris.

“There they told me that if I did not return to Rome, they would kidnap my young niece from Albania and force her into prostitution as well.

“So I had to give in to them to save the little one. When I returned they raped and tortured me - I had to pay very dearly for my rebellion.” (Singapore Straits Times)