Horror breaks the voice of Roxana, a 19-year-old girl who prefers to remain anonymous for having suffered, when she was still a teenager, a form of modern slavery: sexual exploitation. That horror began four years ago, when she ended up in the custody of the child protection system in a center in Iasi – the third most populated city in Romania – because her mother was unable to take care of her. At that moment, she emphasizes, her “ordeal” began. Many girls from broken families end up in a public system that is supposed to protect them. However, they become easy prey for human traffickers. The attacks begin in the same orphanages in which they are found: sometimes, they are beaten and sedated by those who must take care of them. “The educators hit us, insulted us and forced us to take pills as if we were animals,” says Roxana, who remembers with vague memories, due to the effects of the medication, most of the humiliations to which they subjected her.
In the reports of the European Commission and Europol for more than a decade, Romania is at the top of all variables in statistics, is one of the countries that registers the highest number of trafficking victims, for example, and it is also Romanian women who account for the highest number of victims in proportion to the size of the population, one for every 16,781; followed by Bulgaria (one in every 25,316 inhabitants), and Hungary (one in every 59,242 inhabitants). Many do not stay in the country, and Spain is one of the great destinations: the NGO Reaching Out Romania, which has helped more than 1,200 girls, 70% of them from orphanages, claims that it is the country where the most minors They go, followed by Italy and Switzerland, although now the trend is leaning towards the Nordic countries.
Roxana believes that the absence of parents and the lack of care and empathy of those who work in these centers are related to the fact that “many minors end up recruited and become victims of trafficking abroad,” in countries like Spain. According to the latest Interior report, published this Monday and with data from 2023, last year alone, the National Police and the Civil Guard released 664 victims of sexual exploitation and trafficking networks for this purpose: 637 women, 12 girls and 15 men. And during the inspections they carried out in those places where prostitution occurs, they identified 7,049 people while they were practicing it. They are what the Spanish Security Forces and Corps call “people at risk” and they were, in their vast majority, women, most of them Colombian (1,605), Spanish (1,263) and Romanian (890), between 33 and 37 years.
The exact number of women currently in these networks is not known, however, although from institutions such as the Interior there have been estimates that reach 45,000 sexually exploited women in Spain alone. The UN and the European Union estimate that 80% of trafficking victims detected in Europe are women and girls, and of them, 95% are victims of sexual exploitation who, Roxana says, are usually captured through the method lover boy: make them fall in love with a boy with the aim of creating dependence on him.
“Men with luxury cars like BMWs or Mercedes, even some Ferraris, would approach you and ask you if you wanted to go for a drive, they would promise you that they would give you a ride.” book model in another country; but they never really brought you back to the center,” she explains. The case of this young woman—mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy and another five-month-old girl—was different.
A month after entering the orphanage, some individuals violently put her in a car without her consent, in broad daylight, when she was on her way to the institute. “They kidnapped me when I was barely 15 years old and locked me in a hidden place that I still don’t know about, for four months, to prostitute myself.” During that time she did not see sunlight again until she managed to escape. “They brought me all kinds of men, even 30 people at once, one after another or several at the same time, without rest; They raped me and beat me almost continuously, and they barely gave me a bowl of rice and a glass of water every three days,” she details. The only way for her to defend herself against her was to bite whoever she approached.
Two days before fleeing, he thought he was going to die. “A man told me that he wouldn’t live long, so he left the door open and shouted ‘go away, girl’; I ran as fast as possible,” remembers Roxana, who three weeks ago met several of the traffickers who kidnapped her at a gas station. “I hid until they left a while later.” Only two of them ended up in prison, released not long after for good behavior. Roxana returned to the juvenile center, a place that asks to be closed so that other girls do not go through what she went through. Now, she is looking for a stable job to recover her two children, who are under the protection of social services.
The management of its center rejects accusations that there is any type of recruitment by traffickers and argues that these are only fabricated scenarios to discredit the public protection system. But, “unfortunately, this situation is not unique,” explains Visinel Balan, activist for the rights of abandoned children and former Undersecretary of State for Human Trafficking. He indicates that “the practice of prostitution in the system is at an alarming level.”
Mutilated childhood
“Traffickers are aware of the attachment trauma that girls suffer; They send them photos and give them the illusion that they are in love,” explains Mirela Bornagel, a therapist at an emergency center for minors in Bucharest since 2016. She was fired in July last year for reporting numerous negligence. A month ago she regained her position after winning the lawsuit for unfair dismissal.
Bornagel also reported the disappearance of two girls, ages 12 and 14, after the eldest was recruited through that method, the lover boy. They were both entertained for two weeks. Then, they began to take advantage of each other physically. “They sold them to five men, who paid up to 500 euros each,” explains the therapist, who began the search for the girls on her own: “It seemed grotesque to me that two girls of such a young age disappeared and a month later they were not were found.”
Through Facebook, he located them a month and a half later and notified the police. The agents responded that the girls did not want to leave the house where they were being sexually exploited. “How can you leave two minors in the hands of unknown people?” she asks. And that made her suspect that these networks have a tacit agreement with some agents. In the end, she went to Visinel Balan, the former Undersecretary of State on Human Trafficking. And he was in charge of communicating to the Ministry of Family what was happening. Two days later they were rescued from their oppressors. “There are no competent people to fight this scourge, which is very common because there is hardly any information about human trafficking,” Bornagel complains.
Romania’s National Agency against Human Trafficking (ANITP) identified 451 victims in 2023 – almost half of what it was ten years ago – of which 60 came from juvenile centers. But this figure does not reflect reality, warns Larisa Butnariu, an anti-trafficking activist whose adoptive mother sold her to a trafficker whom she was forced to marry and has not yet been able to divorce.
“It is incomprehensible that the Romanian authorities only count hundreds of victims, while the rest of the European Union countries count around 3,000 young people from Romania alone. There is only one explanation: they disguise the data so that they let us enter the Schengen area,” says Butnariu. He emphasizes that the State does not have a coherent strategy to combat this phenomenon.
The Ministry of Family recognized last summer that this structural problem continues to grow in the country. As a latest development, he warned, traffickers are using TikTok to recruit their victims. The ANITP, which has launched an extensive information campaign on the Internet, assures that the existence of trafficking is closely related to growing consumer demand and that Romania has one of the toughest European legislations against traffickers.
For this reason, many resort to marriage with their victims because they know that bringing them to justice can be more difficult when it comes to spouses. The European Union, aware of this situation, had been trying for several years to classify forced marriage as trafficking; Last January, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU (the States) reached a provisional agreement to include forced marriage, in addition to surrogacy and illegal adoption, as new criminal offenses in the European directive to prevent and combat human trafficking.
Stigmatized
Two decades ago, Iana Matei experienced something that shocked her: three girls in a Romanian police station were classified as “prostitutes who testify against their traffickers.” She thought she could save them and founded Reaching Out Romania. “Now mafia networks recruit at an earlier age, from nine or ten years old,” explains the psychologist. “They are the most vulnerable, they have never heard someone tell them that they love them. They are abandoned in centers, or their parents leave several times a year to work abroad,” she adds.
From her organization, she regrets that minors are stigmatized: “Many judges accuse victims of not realizing who they are dealing with when they talk to the people who recruit them, and they do not appreciate that girls do not know how to discern between normal behavior and another.” which is not.” When young women realize that they have made a mistake, they prefer to remain silent and do not ask for help. “Romania has a patriarchal society and everyone has the tendency to accuse girls, so they are ashamed to tell their story because they feel that what has happened to them is their fault,” she elaborates.
In its center, the only one in the country that helps minor victims of trafficking, there is a 14-year-old girl who fell into the network of a trafficker through the social worker of her orphanage. The employee would photograph the girls outdoors and then upload the images to social media, where the traffickers would choose them. The worker arranged the meeting.
“It was organized in such a way that at the moment the girl came into contact with that member of the network, another girl was introduced to her and told her how she should pose in front of the camera so that the photos could be posted on adult websites. “, says Matei. She also, she says, was made to work passing drugs: “Her clients asked her for drugs and forced her to take them; “They threatened her by telling her that if she went to the police to report what they had done, she would also have committed a crime and that she would go to jail.” Matei insists that more instruments must be implemented to protect them, “so that their voices are heard, and because they are witnesses in processes against criminal groups.”
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