Many victims were tricked or forced into prostitution. Some are in the sex trade in their homelands; others were trafficked abroad.
Some countries have taken steps to address sex trafficking, but no nation has put together the kind of comprehensive program that would have a major impact on the problem.
Typically, the traffickers target the most vulnerable women and children. They include naïve women from rural areas who are trying to escape grinding poverty, orphans and former orphans, homeless children, and children abused or neglected at home.
In some cases, police or government officials abet the trafficking by protecting the traffickers or even becoming involved in it.
Moldova, one of the poorest former Soviet countries, has one of the worst trafficking problems.
The government does not issue annual trafficking estimates. Its last estimate, in 2008, was that about 25,000 women and children were victimized. Officials and non-government organizations that are trying to stop trafficking say that, seven years after the 2008 estimate, the problem is as big as ever.
Most trafficking victims are taken to Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Cyprus and other countries.
About 10 percent are children as young as 12, according to the International Organization for Migration.
In 2014, Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper wrote about a Moldovan trafficking victim whose story is all too common across the former Soviet Union.
“A childhood friend told me she worked in a boutique in Dubai and could help me get a similar job,” the Mail quoted a trafficking victim, Victoria, as saying.
When Victoria got to Dubai, a Russian-speaking woman took her to an apartment where there were six other women from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The woman took her passport, told her she had been “sold,” and forced her into the sex trade.
Victoria eventually escaped. The International Organization for Migration’s office in Moldova’s capital of Chisinau has helped her try to put her life back together.
Trafficking here in Armenia, where poverty is as widespread as in Moldova, is so bad that an Armenian-American wrote a novel to call attention to it.
Vahan Zanoyan’s book, “A Place Far Away,” is about a 16-year-old Armenian who believed she was going to Greece to model but instead was trafficked in Dubai. It is based on Zanoyan’s interviews with four young Armenians who were trafficked in Dubai.
The “traffickers, pimps and madams” who force thousands of women and children a year into prostitution “are all Armenians,” Zanoyan said in an interview.
Armenian police help them ply their sordid trade by accepting pay-offs to look the other way, he said.
“Rescuing the victims can be especially challenging work since some pimps stage fake rescue attempts to fool the girl,” Zanoyan said. “The pimps then lock them up, beat them and thus deter them from considering genuine rescue attempts in the future.”
Armenia took some steps to counteract trafficking after an embarrassing book and documentary about the scourge in 2004, both called “Deserts Nights.”
Until “Desert Nights,” police refused to prosecute traffickers because they believed the victims had become prostitutes willingly.
Authorities’ about-face on prosecuting traffickers is far from a crackdown, however. Only 12 to 15 traffickers are prosecuted a year, a fraction of the actual perpetrators.
As in Armenia, Russia has taken steps to address trafficking — but its approach has amounted to nibbling around the edges rather than tackling the problem full force, critics say.
Because Russia is the region’s flagship, it should be taking the lead in anti-trafficking efforts, they say. Instead, tens of thousands of women and children from poorer countries continue to be trafficked in Russia and thousands of Russians to be trafficked abroad every year — and prosecutions are minimal.
Russia has failed to live up to promises to create an anti-trafficking action plan or appoint an anti-trafficking czar to muster resources and coordinate efforts to counter the problem.
An example of Russia’s nonchalance toward trafficking is the fact that a top police official in the Chuvash Republic who had protected a trafficking ring received no jail time when he was convicted — just suspended sentences.
Until Russia, Armenia, Moldovan and other countries in the former Soviet Union take trafficking seriously, the problem will continue. And there will be hundreds of thousands of additional victims.
Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia.
