Trafficking
Human Misery
By Richard Tyler
World Socialist
Web
25 October 2003
No substantial
study on the trafficking of children in Europe based on empirical research
has yet emerged.
Since this
is a clandestine activity, there is little hard statistical information...
It is especially difficult to gather statistical information on children.
End child
exploitation: Stop the traffic!, UNICEF report, July 2003
Each
year, some 1.2 million children are trafficked worldwide, according
to the United Nations. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation
in Europe estimates that 200,000 individuals are trafficked annually
from eastern Europe, a significant proportion being children. Some become
unpaid domestic servants, or work in sweatshops, but many moreboys,
girls, teenagersare forced into prostitution and crime.
A Channel Four television
documentary, Cutting Edge: The Child Sex Trade, screened
recently in Britain, showed how the authorities largely ignore the trafficking
of children from eastern Europe.
Romanian filmmaker
Liviu Tipurita returned to Bucharest, where he met up with 15-year-old
Laurentiu, who has lived on the streets for most of his life. Three
years earlier, Tipurita had filmed the boy living in a cardboard box
with only a sweatshirt to wear. Laurentiu and his friends have a precarious
existence. Of the little money they earn, mainly from begging and selling
sex, much is spent fuelling their addiction to sniffing glue.
The documentary
exposed how Western pedophiles were coming to Romania posing as tourists,
and were then procuring boys for underage sex. Tom, from
Britain, had originally come to Bucharest in the aftermath of the collapse
of the Ceausescu regime to work in an orphanage. Using hidden cameras,
Tom was shown discussing his Internet businessa web site offering
to introduce men to Romanian boys. His clients came from throughout
western EuropeBritain, Holland, Switzerland. He boasted that he
had even supplied boys to a German judge.
From Bucharest,
Tipurita travelled to Milan. In one district of Italys most prosperous
city, the film showed how Romanian boys, some as young as 10, were being
pimped for underage sex, often by their own fathers, brothers and cousins.
Posing as a potential
customer, and using a secret night-vision camera, Tipurita asked one
young boy how much it would cost for one hour. He said he would have
to ask his father. Thirty euros ($35), came the reply. Suddenly, a police
car drove by, but they were only interested in looking for illegal
immigrants, Tipurita commented.
International federation
Terre des Hommes estimates that 6,000 children between the ages of 12
and 16 are trafficked from eastern Europe each year, with more than
650 being forced to work as sex slaves in Italy. The price of a girl
trafficked to Italy can be between $2,500 and $4,000, with up to $10,000
being paid if she is a virgin. According to the French human rights
organisation, Albania is the county most involved in the sex trade,
with women and children being lured to go to the West with false promises
of marriage, jobs or education. When they get there, there is no husband,
no job and no education. Alone in a foreign land without any means of
support, violence and coercion ensure they are soon earning money for
their new owners.
A recent article
in the Guardian newspaper reported the case of a retired Italian couple
who had been arrested for buying a three-year-old Albanian boy, paying
$6,000 to the trafficking gang that specialised in underage merchandise.
The boy had allegedly been traded for a colour TV set by his father.
Detectives working
on the case say they have identified 67 other Albanian children less
than 14 years old trafficked into Italy by the same gang. One of the
arrested gang members was a member of the Albanian intelligence service.
In a follow-up article,
Guardian reporter Sophie Arie travelled to Albania to find the parents
of the little boy. His mother, Fatimira, said that four years ago her
husband had brought the Italian pensioner Angello Borelli to their home,
a former pigsty. He said he wanted to adopt a child, and chose their
son, Oracio.
Of course
I miss my child, Fatimira told the journalist, but we live
like animals. Im glad they took him. He has a chance to have better
conditions in Italy.
Italy is not the
only destination for children and young people being trafficked. An
article on the Terre des Hommes web site notes that 80 percent of the
young women and girls brought to Germany by smuggling rings come from
eastern Europe. It has also found an increase in the number of young
boys being introduced into the sex market.
In 1998, Romanian
gangs brought 250 children from Romania to Germany to be used as Klaukinder,
or juvenile thieves.
The Greek government
estimates that there are some 3,000 unaccompanied Albanian children
in the country, with more coming during the summer months. In oral evidence
about the trafficking of Albanian children to Greece, given to the Commission
on Human Rights, Terre des Hommes representative Eylay Kadjar-Hamouda
said, A child earns a minimum of €30-€50 per day and
gives all the money to his boss. A very small percentage is sent back
to his family in Albania but in a very irregular way. Generally several
children are exploited at the same time by a boss.
In the country
of destination, Greece, the children are not considered as victims but
as guilty of having illegally entered the country, Kadjar-Hamouda
noted. Terre des Hommes is particularly concerned that some of
the children placed in centres in Greece simply disappear.
This concern is
not limited to Greece ands points to the most sinister aspect of the
trade in children.
We notice
that the number of children going missing in the east does not tally
with the numbers we trace in Europe, said Marina Rini of Terre
des Hommes in Italy.
We know that
gangs offer children for sale dead or alive. We can only conclude that
the missing children die or are killed for their organs.
Thousands of eastern
European children and teenagers are being reduced to commodities in
a trade in human misery. They are bought and sold like chattels to satisfy
perverted sexual appetites, to provide slave labour, or, worst of all,
to be harvested for their organs and body parts so that
the rich and their children can live at their expense.
UNICEF put the global
value of human trafficking at over $12 billion a year, just $2 billion
less than Albanias gross domestic product.
The collapse of
the Soviet Union and its Stalinist satellites throughout eastern Europe
was hailed by the political elite in the West as heralding a new dawn
of liberty, democracy and prosperity. The thousands of children trafficked
from the former Eastern Bloc countries are testimony to
the bitter reality of poverty and social brutalisation.
The global increase
in poverty is most evident in eastern Europe, rising from 1 million
to 24 million people between 1987 and 1998defined as those forced
to live on less than $2 a day. The percentage of the population below
the poverty line is 30 percent in Albania and over 44 percent in Romania,
according to the CIA World Factbook.
The introduction
of the free market into the former state-controlled economies
in eastern and central Europe has had its most devastating impact on
family life. Millions of breadwinners have lost their jobs, Western
imports have forced out domestic production leading to rising prices,
and welfare provisions have been gutted.
According to Terre
des Hommes, Living conditions for the majority of the approximately
150 million children in the East European states and the Soviet Union
have worsened since 1989.
After decades of
suppression under the brutal Stalinist regimes that existed in Bucharest
and Tirana, the population has been plunged into shock therapythe
reintegration of these states into the global capitalist economy. The
rule of Nicolai Ceausescu and Enver Hoxha has been replaced by the IMF
and the World Bank, which have presided over restructuring (factory
closures and mass layoffs), reforms (axing spending on education, health
and pensions), and the encouragement of enterprise (the private acquisition
of the few profitable state concerns at fire sale prices or through
downright theft).
The process of European
Union (EU) integration has meant efforts to transform the East into
a reservoir of cheap labour and close to zero corporate taxation, while
at the same time making the EUs external borders even tighterclamping
down on so-called illegal immigrants, denying even basic
welfare provisions to those that often make long and hazardous journeys
to escape persecution or grinding poverty. To legitimise this policy,
the universal scapegoating of asylum seekers and refugees by all the
establishment parties turns victims into villains. Not least, led by
the US, the West has waged war and fomented civil war across the Balkans,
forcing hundreds of thousands into exile and creating conditions where
human trafficking can flourish.
The governments
of the European Union avert their gaze when it comes to trafficking
children, despite having signed on to the Protocol to the Convention
on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Trafficking
and Child Pornography. A 2002 report by Europol, the European Law Enforcement
Agency, on the trafficking of human beings into the EU, shows that most
of the 15 member states keep no relevant statistics at all. Only four
provide any concrete information, with the majority reporting that figures
are not available or not given.