Women tell of being sold
to pimps by the Balkan mafia and beaten if they resist or fail to earn
enough on the streets
Angela always liked
attention, but the day she was forced to stand naked on a block for men
to poke, pinch and haggle over her worth ended that.
Now she sells herself
every night, but sometimes she hovers just beyond the streetlamp so that
motorists may whizz by without noticing her.
Six months on Via
Salaria, a motorway just north of Rome, has sharpened her memory of
walking with her boyfriend to the outskirts of Tirana, the Albanian
capital, to meet a contact. Their future had arrived, he told her.
It was a posh house with
a long drive and inside groups of men were waiting for her and a dozen
other girls. "Strip," her boyfriend whispered, and she didn't
know what else to do, so she did.
The wooden block was the
size of a railway sleeper, too low to make her visible to the whole room
but enough to give a sense of occasion. It was, after all, an auction.
Inspection was allowed before bidding.
The buyers were not
rough. Some checked her veins, rolled her tummy between forefinger and
thumb, counted her teeth, felt her breasts. Some did not bother and just
looked. The opening bid was £400. It seemed like an awful lot, but the
price went up. To be blond and 19 was to be in demand. Within minutes
she had fetched £900. Another girl was guided to the block and Angela
stumbled away.
That was in November.
Tonight she is wearing a black miniskirt, grey T-shirt, green nail
polish and brown lipstick. "This is my work outfit," she says,
gazing out of the car window and fretting about returning to her street
lamp.
Angela is a false name,
but her ordeal is becoming the reality for an increasing number of young
women from south-eastern Europe. Albanian gangs have taken over
prostitution and rewritten the rules to make it an industry that is
bigger, bolder and more brutal. Porous borders and lawlessness in former
Yugoslavia and Albania have created ideal conditions, according to the
United Nations.
Bulk orders
Such is the industry's
scale and confidence that gangs in Italy send bulk orders for the number
and type of women. Colleagues in the Balkans oblige by rounding up
women, not always against their will, and holding auctions, says Miriam
Lani, who helps former prostitutes for the charity Caritas in Rome.
"Auctions usually
take place in source countries, in areas controlled by the local mafia.
They are well protected. They are efficient ways of doing
business."
But the auctions are
moving to Italy, where about half of the estimated 50-70,000 prostitutes
are foreigners. Two years ago auctions were held only in the Balkans,
says a Rome detective, but the need to rotate prostitutes around
different cities to elude the police creates a market. Typically, the
bidders gather in motorway lay-bys or service station carparks. The
business is unchallenged, since the Italian mafia melted away in the
face of the Balkan onslaught. Last month the police in Matera, in
southern Italy, rescued two Romanians, aged 19 and 22, who were
exhibited nude to Serbian, Montenegrin and Albanian gangs.
Back in the Via Salaria
in Rome, Angela is beginning to panic. She has been away from her post
for 20 minutes - too long - and she is not supposed to talk. It is only
two hours to her midnight deadline and since 6pm she has made less than
£100, mostly from £15 sessions of oral sex. "It's not enough.
What will I tell him?"
Some nights, when she
cannot face the work, she lurks in the shadows beyond the streetlight.
Just a few years of prostitution and then they would have enough money
to marry, her boyfriend had told her, but she has not seen him since the
auction. The man in her life now is her buyer, and she must earn back
his £900 purchase money and endless costs. He pays for her food, rent,
clothes, condoms and make-up. Though she speaks good Italian, her pimp
is virtually the only person she knows in Italy. Her documents were left
in Albania.
Police cars cruise past,
but Angela refuses to seek help. Shouting and shaking, she insists on
being returned to her spot. Twelve minutes later she vanishes into a red
Audi.
Frightened
By midnight Angela is
gone from Via Salaria, but other prostitutes know of her. "She
tells clients she's 24 but she's 19. She's always frightened but there
are others a lot, lot younger," says Tanya, a 28-year-old Russian.
The auctions are churning out too many girls, she complains. "Two
years ago there were two or three of us on this stretch. Now look at it,
there's at least 30."
A Ukranian, also 28,
says the Albanians and Romanians tend to be younger and more pliable.
"They never work for themselves, they're like sheep." Escape
can be as easy as hailing a police car, but they are inhibited by fear
of retaliation against their families back home, says Miriam Lani of
Caritas. Others have told their families that they are waitresses or
dancers, and fear blackmail.
Jailed pimps have been
known, upon release, to track down the girl who betrayed them.
"These men are extremely violent, and they keep discipline by
making examples of those who step out of line," says Ms Lani.
Virtually every week two-paragraph stories in Italian newspapers report
the discovery of a streetwalker's corpse, often burned. Biba Merita, a
17-year-old Albanian, was beaten to death in Treviso after being
diagnosed with a brain tumour. She had been bought and sold many times
during her four-year career.
This new generation of
streetwalker is different, says Nicola Maria Pace, a prosecutor in
Trieste. "My personal observation is that they have neither the
look nor the mentality of prostitutes. They are often very young.
They're usually resold after being on the streets for a certain time,
and taken to a different area.
Most prostitutes are
volunteers fleeing poverty, the police say, though if arrested, the
girls tend to claim that they were coerced. What the women do not
anticipate are the beatings and auctions. Being sold to strangers must
be terrifying for those who expected to be managed by their boyfriends
or relatives, says Father Piero, who makes weekly prayer and counselling
visits to Via Salaria's prostitutes. "Knowing who they'll be
working for, that's their only real safety.