Sex Trafficking Plagues Turkey

About 5,000 women, more than half from Moldova and Ukraine, are believed to be working as sex slaves in Turkey, an agency official said. The prostitution networks make about $150 per customer, with each woman serving up to 15 clients a day.

"If they work 340 days a year, it's a multibillion-dollar business just in Turkey alone," said the official, Marielle Lindstrom, country director for the International Organization for Migration. "And the women don't get a penny."

The release of the report was timed to coincide with an awareness campaign launched by the agency and the Turkish government. Most of the women identified last year as victims of human trafficking were between the ages of 18 and 24. One-third were mothers, and many were either divorced or married to abusive spouses. They were brought here with promises of jobs as waitresses or dancers that would help them support their children.

"The minute they set foot in Turkey, their passports are taken away and they are raped and beaten," said Allan Freedman, who coordinates counter-trafficking programs for the Ankara bureau of the International Organization for Migration.

The awareness campaign is designed in part to tap into Turks' adulation of children. In a television commercial to be aired nationwide, four children left behind in a Moldovan village ask for their mothers in broken Turkish.

"This is a country where family is the foremost value, so that is what we are appealing to," Freedman said.

It is hoped the ad will prompt more people, especially clients, to tip off authorities so the women can be rescued.

Prostitution is legal under Turkey's strictly secular system. Prostitutes issued identity cards by the authorities operate out of brothels that are guarded by metropolitan police, and the women have mandatory weekly health checks.

The influx of women from former Soviet states, known here informally as Natashas, reportedly has cut into the profits of the legal sex trade.