The women in these photographs are among many I interviewed for a report on sex trafficking in Eastern Europe. Some of them were fragile; some were very strong; all were trying to leave behind a hated past while still coming to terms with profound emotional distress. Polina, a girl from Ukraine, shouted at me, 'My story, do you want to hear my story?
You have heard it β over and over again. Her new husband and mother-in-law then chased her away from home. She had not told them that she had been sold as a sex slave by a good friend. Her life was destroyed, she said. She took me round Soho and pointed to the windows of various flats: the one with a cracked window was a 'stinky' place; the one with a red light was a bit less grim.
I entered five rooms where the working girls operated. I met two Romanians. One was wearing tiny white socks and a pink robe thrown over a black Spandex costume. She was from a city two hours from my native town. Sex trafficking is one of the most profitable illegal businesses in both Eastern and Western Europe.
In Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, where female unemployment may reach 68 per cent and a third of the workforce lives and works abroad, it is estimated that since between , and , women have been sold into prostitution elsewhere β perhaps 10 per cent of the female population. The country is the main exporter of sex slaves for the continent. I wanted to know how they lived with the traumas when they reached their home countries, where even their own families might not know what they had experienced abroad; how they lived under a shadow of fear that a mother or husband might find out and throw them out.
One survey found that a majority of trafficked Moldovan women had been victims of domestic violence. Brit acquitted of sex trafficking in Bangkok. Spain breaks up male-prostitute trafficking ring. Steven Seagal accused of sex trafficking. Emma Thompson: a dirty secret laid bare. The dark side of Swedish society. I learnt that it may begin with the offer of a well-paid job in a world they have only dreamt about. Remittances from migrants, many sent through Moldova's ubiquitous Western Union offices, are estimated by the World Bank to be more than half a billion pounds a year, financing consumption that, by local standards, is stunning: a car, a bigger house, better food, better clothes.
