SAN FOCA, Italy — Angela Slobodchuk, 25, has a story to tell. She offers it in a low monotone, in a near-whisper, to anyone who listens.
It begins in her poor farming village in the former Soviet republic of Moldova with the promise of a job as a waitress in Italy.
It takes her on an odyssey of torment through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Albania. She is raped, beaten, forced into prostitution, smuggled across borders and sold 18 times from one pimp to the next.
It ends 11 months later when police along Italy's Adriatic coast rescue the weeping woman with the miniskirt and bruised legs and arrest her 21-year-old Albanian captor. "I had no voice left after all the screaming," she recalls. "I was one step away from madness."
Angela's story offers a frightening glimpse into how criminal gangs have lured tens of thousands of young women from poverty in the former Soviet bloc, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and sent them into a nightmarish underground of sex slavery in Europe.
As Western Europe grows richer and fewer of its women resort to street prostitution, the world's oldest profession is being taken over by immigrant traffickers and their younger, lower-priced chattel.
The booming cross-border trade in forced prostitution and sweatshop labor earns traffickers worldwide $7 billion a year, according to the United Nations. It ranks third behind drug running and illicit arms sales in terms of lucrative criminal enterprises.
Much of the profit comes from Western Europe, where there is a high demand for prostitutes and a growing demand for younger females presumed to be free of AIDS. The International Organization for Migration estimates that 300,000 immigrant women and teenage girls work in Western Europe as prostitutes and surrender their income to traffickers holding them in bondage.
Most of them end up as prostitutes after falling for false promises of legitimate jobs or marriage abroad. Adrift in strange cities, they are stripped of their identification documents by the traffickers, on whom they become totally dependent.
Yet until recently, their stories didn't interest European law enforcement officials, who would simply deport them along with other illegal immigrants. An ingrained fear of police and the shame of facing their families back home kept the victims of sex trafficking in fearful silence.
