Sicilian Culture: The News: Journey Into Sex Slavery

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Journey Into Sex Slavery
By Richard Bourdreaux, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Friday, August 17, 2001 - - The following are excerpts:
SAN FOCA, Italy...Traffickers are luring migrant women and girls fleeing poverty into forced prostitution in Europe. Italy is enlisting the victims to fight back against the pimps.
...Italy is leading the new approach, driven by alarm over an influx of Eastern European and African prostitutes since the late 1990s and by the coercive violence of the foreign pimps who bring them. Police say 168 foreign prostitutes were killed in Italy last year.
Pope John Paul II embraced a tearful former prostitute from Nigeria on Italian television last year. Hundreds of volunteers across the country help "rescue" trafficked women, aided by a 24-hour, government-run hotline that has fielded tens of thousands of calls.
Today, about 30,000 foreign women, 12,000 of them younger than 18, are being forced to work as prostitutes in Italy, according to the Roman Catholic relief agency Caritas.
Under a revision of Italy's immigration law that has been in force since late 1999, more than 2,000 immigrants have obtained residency permits after breaking away from their pimps. Belgium and the Netherlands have extended such permits to a few hundred trafficking victims...
Treating them more as rape victims than criminals, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands now offer shelter, protection and residency permits to trafficked prostitutes so they can help identify and prosecute their exploiters. Italy also offers schooling, job training and employment to help them start new lives.
The United States, also witnessing a sharp rise in sex trafficking from Asia and Latin America, drew on the three European countries' experiences as it drafted an anti-trafficking bill that passed Congress in October....
...In Italy, where... testimony (of prostitutes) was almost unheard of two years ago, the women have helped identify about 1,500 pimps and traffickers, the Interior Ministry says. At least 800 suspects are under arrest, facing up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
"Reading page after page of testimony by these girls, you begin to understand fully what a vile, disturbing enterprise we are up against," said Demetrio Missineo, an Interior Ministry official...
Clans of violent Albanian traffickers who also smuggle cigarettes and drugs have been the sex trade's dominant force since 1997, when the collapse of Albania's pyramid investment schemes and the country's descent into anarchy triggered a surge of westbound migration...
With strong footholds in coastal Italy, investigators say, the Albanians have a reach that is rivaled only by that of the Nigerian underworld, which dominates Europe-bound sex traffic from Africa. Italy's home-grown Mafias...shun the trade...
Although immigrant traffickers from more than a dozen countries use violence to hold women in bondage in Western Europe, according to the study, the Albanians are notoriously brutal...
...Father Cesare Lodeserto, a Catholic priest with a bodyguard's physique and intimidating glare...(operates) Regina Pacis refuge on the Adriatic shore. The fortress-like building, protected by police, harbors 80 other Eastern European women who are cooperating with authorities against the sex traffickers.
The traffickers are starting to feel the heat. Two armed Albanians cornered the priest at gunpoint on the beach early this year and warned him to stop messing with their "merchandise." He was not intimidated...
Italy and Belgium are lobbying... the 15-nation European Union (for) uniform laws against human trafficking... (and) protection for victims....
www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-000066696aug17.story
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The following are excerpts from an adjoining article, same subject, same author:
ANOTHER CHANCE WITH SISTER MARIA'S HELP
Italy: Government-funded effort allows trafficked women to rebuild lives so they can collaborate with investigators.
UDINE, Italy -- The 12 Eastern European women here at Sister Maria del Rosario Bolanos' boarding house are... part of a $5-million, government-funded rescue effort that is offering at least 2,000 trafficked women independent lives in Italy so they can help police fight the multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. About 200 volunteer agencies are involved...
Sister Maria oversees one of 65 such homes run by Caritas, a Roman Catholic relief agency, and has a near-perfect record: 70 trafficked women have come under her care, Caritas says, and just one has returned to prostitution...

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