Maria’s story of indentured servitude is increasingly common. Over the last decade, thousands of kids from all over the world have been smuggled into Europe to do dirty work. In September police arrested a couple in the southern Italian region of Calabria for allegedly buying an Albanian boy from a Durresrun trafficking gang, one of a clutch of gangs involved in supplying Italians with Albanian kids for illegal adoptions. Eastern Europe’s girls are trafficked for the sex industry, while its boys work either as male prostitutes or in petty crime. Chinese children are trafficked to work in European sweatshops or on the streets. West African kids are sneaked into Europe to work as domestic servants, or for use in benefit-fraud schemes or ritual sacrifices for tribal African religions. The 2001 discovery of a Nigerian boy’s torso in the Thames led British police to arrest 21 suspected traffickers this summer.
Globalization, post-Soviet poverty and the European Union’s newly porous borders have made child trafficking the world’s fastest-growing branch of organized crime. Reliable statistics are scant, but the United Nations puts the worldwide number of children trafficked at 1.2 million a year. A 2001 EU study estimated that 120,000 women and children are clandestinely brought into Western Europe annually.
Police organizations take the problem seriously, but investigations are often handicapped by Europe’s fragmented legal system. Laws on trafficking and migration vary enormously among the EU’s 15 member countries. And with 10 new members set to join the Union–many of them, like Hungary, source countries for trafficked women and children–there are sure to be new complications. Next summer could see a huge rise in Eastern European young people heading to Western Europe, where they’ll be vulnerable to exploitation, fears Lars Loof of the Children’s Unit at the Council for Baltic States. “In a larger Europe, it’s naturally even easier for under-18s to go across borders without authorities’ knowing,” he says.
Legal loopholes can leave victims unprotected and traffickers unpunished. Until recently the Greeks arrested child-trafficking victims. This year the U.S. State Department threatened Greece with sanctions if it didn’t improve its countertrafficking policies. The country has since promised a program of victim assistance. Italy has led Europe with progressive legislation on humanitarian visas to ensure that victims aren’t repatriated and retrafficked, and in August passed a tough law equating trafficking with slavery.
Worried that trafficking will only grow in the years ahead, Europe knows a more coordinated approach is needed. Last year’s Brussels Declaration was the EU’s first attempt to develop a comprehensive policy on trafficking that includes prevention, punishment and rehabilitation of the victims. Last week EU Justice and Home Affairs ministers agreed to grant limited-term visas to trafficked people who cooperate with police. Source countries, including Croatia and Hungary, have started countertrafficking campaigns. But success is a relative term. “If a government can say, ‘We’ve raided 150 brothels and pulled out 300 women without passports,’ they can show a concrete, measurable response to the problem,” notes Lisa Kurbiel, UNICEF’s project officer for child trafficking. “But that doesn’t address the root causes.”
Whether Albanian or Nigerian or Chinese, the traffickers prey on poverty and ignorance. “The trade has really grown recently, mainly because of the downward trend of economic development [in West Africa],” says UNICEF’s Dakar-based spokesperson Margherita Amodeo. “Families that don’t have anything are the most vulnerable.” But other regional issues–a lack of education, the low status of girls, weak legal systems–also contribute to the problem. Vidomegon, a common West African practice in which families send children to live with wealthier relatives or friends to get a better education, is one way traffickers find and acquire kids.
Last year Maria walked out on her pimp with [Pound sterling]20 in her pocket. She’s now got three years of humanitarian protection and a place at Cambridge University. Few stories finish as happily as hers. Most child victims end up dead, enslaved or on drugs. Migrant advocates say Britain’s tough stance against immigration and asylum seekers will only fuel the trafficking trade. “Every time they clamp down, they put women and children at risk,” says Diana Mills of the London-based NGO Asylum Aid. “As soon as people go underground, they fall into the hands of the traffickers. The government is playing right into their hands.” Without laws that protect trafficking victims instead of punishing them, a newly enlarged Europe won’t just bring freedom. For thousands of children like Maria, it could mean slavery.
