CARITAS/ESF
Spurious travel agencies are now offering Turkish, Italian and French customers “all inclusive” sex tourism weekends in “respectable” hotels in Moldavia, at a cost of as little as 20 euros per day to have sex with women, girls and children, victims of the racket. This new trend is now replacing the trafficking of human beings from Moldavia to Western countries, since it is no longer convenient, or possible, for criminal rackets to take persons abroad. The new trend in sex tourism was described to SirEurope by Otilia Sirbu, head of Caritas Moldavia. We met her at the meeting “Campaign against the trafficking of human beings”, promoted by the European network of Caritas and by other Catholic organizations as part of the 4th European Social Forum (ESF) held in Athens from 4 to 7 May, with the participation of over 20,000 persons and the holding of some 600 seminars and round tables on such themes as peace, human rights and poverty, to promote “another possible Europe”. The cause of this new phenomenon, explains Otilia Sirbu, “is the impossibility for Moldavians to obtain visas to enable them to work abroad; so they are forced to have recourse to criminal gangs which ask them for 2,000-3,000 euros. Many families, to pay off the debt, are then forced into accepting, in exchange, that one of their members should become a prostitute. From that moment the victims are caught and unable to extricate themselves from the racket. In addition, 50% of the women involved in it are fleeing from situations of intolerable domestic violence. In the poorest villages mothers teach their daughters that the woman who is not beaten is not loved and that they should hold their tongue and put up with it”. To recruit “manpower” criminal gangs tour the country in trucks, picking up women to whom they promise honest work abroad. “But those trucks never leave Moldavia, or, if they do so, go no further than Romania or the countries of the former Yugoslavia”, says the head of Caritas in what is the poorest country in Europe, together with Albania. And the saddest thing of all, she adds, “is that the demand for young girls aged from 8 to 10 is growing in cities like Paris and St. Petersburg”. From 1993 to the present day – the year of great crisis due to the collapse of the Soviet Union – the population has been enormously impoverished and it is estimated that 1 million Moldavians (some 25% of the population) have emigrated abroad. To stem the trafficking of human beings, the only opportunity available to Caritas is that of prevention: in schools, with street children, with the provision of vocational training and the promotion of employment and development at the local level. Hence the appeal to foreign investors “not to open factories just to exploit cheap local manpower, without also feeling themselves responsible for local development”. An appeal is also made to Europe “to open its markets, because it’s pointless to produce things which we are unable to export”.
