After some months, she managed to escape and was sheltered for a while in the Moldovan embassy there, when she discovered she was pregnant. Katya worked first in a flat in Rimini and then on the streets of Milan. Both girls were knocked unconscious, driven to Romania, blindfolded, taken across a river in an inflatable dinghy to somewhere in Hungary, dressed in dark clothes and made to walk through the forest across the border during the night, passing through Slovenia and arriving eventually in Italy. She was living with her mother in Moldova when two older men invited her and a friend to a birthday picnic in a nearby forest. Katya has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but finds therapy sessions too painful to engage with. It also reveals the danger that these women are often exposed to when the British immigration service opts to remove them.Įxperienced staff at the Poppy Project, which provides specialist support for trafficking victims and which last week learned it was losing its government funding, described her story as among the most disturbing they have encountered. The exhaustive account that Katya has given in court documents, explaining how she was targeted, captured and intimidated, reveals the sophisticated methods employed by gangs trafficking vulnerable women from eastern Europe, Africa and the far east. Why don't you shut down saunas and brothels? Then there would be no prostitutes, no pimps." "I think the police should work better to stop this. Maybe for you it is difficult to see them, but I see them," said Katya (not her real name), in an interview in her solicitor's office. I see them every day - in tube stations, all made up, early in the morning. "Just look around you - see how many girls there are like me. She told the Guardian that British police need to do much more to protect women like her and to prevent others from being trafficked into prostitution. The Moldovan woman was first kidnapped by traffickers when she was 14, repeatedly sold on to pimps and other traffickers, and forced to work as a prostitute for seven years in Italy, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Israel and the UK. The unprecedented case also opens the possibility that other individuals who have been removed from this country and subsequently found themselves exposed to danger in their home country, could attempt to sue the Home Office for damages. The Home Office decision last week to pay her substantial damages has raised serious questions about the way Britain treats trafficked women.
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