Trafficking

In the Balkans it is often said that ethnic harmony only exists when there is money to be made. The trafficking of women into the sex trade proves the point. Serbs, Albanians, Macedonians, Bosnians, all seem to get along just fine when it comes to this particular trade.

Girls, the majority from Moldova and Ukraine, are usually duped into making the first part of the journey themselves with promises of shengen visas and work as au pairs or waitresses in Europe. Once they reach Serbia the traffickers usually take over and the girls are brought over the border into Macedonia.

As a result of the Balkan wars, there are a large number of internationals working in Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia, so many girls will be put to work in the Balkans, being sold on from pimp to pimp, sometimes for as little as a thousand Euros.

Others will make their way either through Kosovo or Macedonia into Albania and from there into Western Europe.

These photographs were taken between 2001 and 2004 in Albania, Moldova and Macedonia on assignment for the Observer, Newsweek and the New York Times.

The trafficking we came across was at it's most bizarre and lawless in Albania where we interviewed a woman who sold her son for a tv set and a mobile phone, and a woman who arranged for her grandson to be trafficked to Greece to work as a beggar without the knowledge or permission of the child's mother, her daughter. The boy disappeared and has never been seen again.

This was at the low end of the scale though, desperately poor people scrabbling around for a way out of the poverty surrounding them. The other end of the scale is entirely different, slick, well organised operations, run by entirely ruthless people. The women we came across who had escaped from these operations were invariably scared for their lives and were either living in protected shelters or elsewhere in hiding.

 
 

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