What started as a dream for 23-year-old Natalia quickly turned into a nightmare.
”I was barely earning €70 a month as a teacher back in Russia when a friend of mine told me about this employment agency which helps find work for girls abroad,” she says — fearfully looking over her shoulder into the night around one of Athens’s most luxurious hotels.
”I wanted to come to Greece, to go to the islands. They bought me and now I am doing this. They’ve told me that they’ll kill me if I try to escape,” she says, before rushing off towards the hotel where one of her clients is waiting.
After travelling three days by bus, Natalia was picked up by a man and taken to an apartment where she was told that she had been bought by him, and would have to prostitute herself to earn her keep.
The first night in Athens she was gang-raped and beaten by her owner’s friends. They insisted it was a means of ”breaking her in”.
Natalia, like thousands of other Eastern European women smuggled into Greece for prostitution, arrive believing they will work as waitresses or baby-sitters.
”They arrive as illegal immigrants and are forced to work in the sex trade and are regularly subjected to physical and psychological violence, with trafficking gangs keeping most, if not all money earned,” said Nikitas Kanakis, from Doctors of the World.
Prostitution is legal in Greece, but the traditional brothel system with regular checks and permits has been phased out over the past decade. In the wake of a tide of human trafficking, the sex business has moved into bars, nightclubs and over the telephone.
”Some regions, such as south-eastern Europe and namely Greece and Italy, have developed into a hub for trafficking in women following war and economic decline,” says Grigoris Lazos, a professor of criminology at Panteion University.
”Russia, Albania, the Republic of Moldova, Romania and the Ukraine are all important source countries of trafficked victims, and many of these women are being brought into the country via Turkey and Bulgaria,” says Lazos.
Intimidation
Over the years, the number of prostitutes in Greece has dropped from 18 000 to about 6 250 and a new form of trafficking, ironically known as ”happy trafficking”, has taken shape where the subjugation of women is no longer secured through beatings but by psychological intimidation.
”We have a reorganisation of trafficking … we are not talking about a static number, but a number that is constantly renewed with ‘new merchandise’ — with new girls who are trafficked from one country to another, who are arrested, deported from Greece, sent back to Greece by other traffickers and arrested again.”
While the number of trafficked woman in Greece has dropped in recent years, the number of trafficked children from neighbouring Albania, many under the age of 13, is on the rise.
”What we are seeing now is that there are more children, 12, 13 and 14 years of age, on the streets, but the government and the Greek population do not want to see that they have a big problem on their hands,” says Konstandis Kabourakis, a doctor with ACT UP.
Nervously adjusting her ponytail, Margarita tells how she was only 13 when she arrived in Greece on foot through the mountains bordering neighbouring Albania with her mother and stepfather more than a year ago.
Upon reaching Athens, Margarita was taken to a hotel near central Omonia Square by her mother. It was there that she was brutally initiated into the sex trade by various men until police raided the hotel one day, throwing her in jail.
”When we found her she had been locked up in jail for months, pregnant and without any papers,” said Kanakis. ”No authority even bothered to ask her age or identity.”
Legislation
In an effort to crack down on one of the country’s fastest-growing criminal businesses, the government passed legislation in 2002 on the lucrative sex slave trade.
The Bill is supposed to protect victims of trafficking who are arrested by police, detained and deported, but in reality only a small handful ever receive the aid and protection to which they are entitled.
According to figures from the ministry of public order, only 46 girls were recognised in 2004, and for the first six months of 2005, only 11 were given aid and protection.
”The question is that in many cases we do not know what happens to these girls when they are freed,” says Lazos. ”They need health care, psychological support, legal aid and a chance to stay and find legal employment — but unfortunately there is no such service available from the government.”
Doctors of the World opened Greece’s first shelter for victims of trafficking a few years ago only to close it down again in September last year, citing financial constraints.
”If a victim of human trafficking wanted to escape from her captor, there is virtually no social system set up to help her — and of course there is always the fear that, if caught, the perpetrators will be allowed back on the street again,” says Kanakis.
Of the 480 traffickers who were arrested in 2004 and 2005, only 11 were convicted.
Despite the law that calls for sentences of up to 10 years for the use of violence, threats or false promises to force an individual into prostitution, there is an unwillingness to enforce harsh penalties.
”At this point in time, pimps and bar owners know when the busts are coming and use them to unload the older women and the ones which are sick or have gone mad,” said Lazos. ”In Greece, there is no way out for these women. They can be killed by the pimps or face detention and deportation by the police.” — Sapa-dpa