Down and out in Paris and London … via Kiev

Date: 08/09/05

When the International Organization for Migration (IOM) is asked to present a case study of human trafficking in Ukraine, it uses the case of Igor and Viktoria. Igor left Ukraine to find illegal work in Portugal, to escape unemployment in his hometown.

When that work ended, he was promised an $800 (EUR 638)-a-month job in a factory if he paid a contact $300 (EUR 239). His wife Viktoria joined him, believing that $800 a month would transform their lives. But they found themselves trapped, with Igor's "employers" forcing Viktoria into prostitution. Neither was paid for their work and they paid for their complaints with beatings. Eventually, they managed to escape, penniless and with their health badly affected.

For the IOM, Igor and Viktoria are classic victims of human trafficking: people who searched for work abroad in the desperate bid to improve their economic prospects, but then found themselves in a situation over which they had no control.

Kateryna Cherepakha, who works for La Strada, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) involved in the battle to stem human trafficking, says: "There are a lot of vacancies in Ukraine, but the wages offered are not enough to support a family."

Millions of Ukrainians face the same dilemma, to work at home with few prospects or to head abroad in the hope of better money. Many go on tourist visas and then overstay, only to find themselves tricked and without papers.

Asked to say who typically might end up being tricked into modern-day slavery, most Ukrainians and others in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe would say women forced into prostitution. But the message that the IOM and La Strada stress is that anyone could be trafficked.

There are "grandmothers who are forced to work in the strawberry fields and do not get paid and there are men working seven days a week in indentured servitude", says Jeffrey Labovitz, head of IOM's operation in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova (the IOM's largest counter-trafficking mission).

Ensuring that trafficking is not associated simply with the sex trade is critical to prevention, Cherepakha and Labovitz believe. Too often, the public's views about prostitution cloud how they perceive the victims of trafficking and obscure debate about trafficking generally.

"I think that the biggest barrier that must be overcome is people who characterise victims of trafficking as being prostitutes who willingly get into these situations," says Labovitz, who points out that most victims are neither naive (most are educated) nor extremely young (their average age is 26). "And somehow, even with heightened awareness, that's what people still think."

Cherepakha has noticed some progress. In 1997, when La Strada began to operate in Ukraine, she says most of the calls made to its hotline came from people who said they had been offered work in, for example, Italy or the United States and wanted to know about visas and work permits. Now, most callers phone to ask for advice about how to protect themselves and what they should consider before taking up the offer. Where once people asked about how to get over the border, they now ask about what happens after they get over the border.

This heightened concern with self-protection reflects a broader advance in anti-trafficking efforts. Labovitz observes that "when we ask now, have people heard of the phenomenon of human trafficking, almost everyone has, not only in the big cities, but in small villages too. So that initial message is out there".

The media has gradually responded to the broader anti-trafficking message. For years, most newspaper articles about trafficking focused on the sex trade, "scandalous articles with photos", says Cherepakha. Now some of the attention is shifting to other aspects of trafficking, highlighting the violations of human rights rather than lurid aspects of the trade. "There is now a recognition that trafficking of human beings does not only mean trafficking in women but also children and men," says Cherepakha. This partly reflects the efforts paid by NGOs in recent years to awareness-raising television, print and poster campaigns.

Ordinary people have adjusted their behavior as well. "In 1997, most people applied to job agencies that offered jobs in other countries," she says. "But a lot has been done so that now companies have to have a license and people know they have to ask this, this, and this."

Part of people's risk-reduction policy is now to go through people they feel they can trust, their family and friends. "Now most people agree to propositions from friends, former classmates and neighbours, people that they feel they know personally," says Cherepakha.

It is, unfortunately, frequently misplaced trust: it is often friends and family who trick victims into trafficking.

That symptom of social breakdown highlights the level at which prevention work is needed and it also underlines why Labovitz argues that "civic society is the future of info campaigns". But a concerted response is difficult. A March 2005 report on trafficking by UNICEF and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) criticised organisations operating in this field in South-Eastern Europe, many of them small NGOs with limited resources, for failing to co-ordinate their activities. That is a challenge that, in the Balkans, the IOM is trying to overcome by forging links with the Orthodox Church and the International Red Cross. It is doing the same in Ukraine and is also working with over 40 NGO partners to maximise their reach into local communities, an approach that also helps to compensate for a lack of funding.

But as the challenge of countering trafficking moves deeper into local communities to find a social response to the causes and consequences of trafficking, NGOs face a major risk: that donors may spend their money elsewhere, on projects whose results are easier to quantify. Fortunately, for the IOM and La Strada, donor fatigue is not yet a problem.

In recent years, "support for counter-trafficking initiatives and prevention has increased geometrically" in countries such as Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine, in which Labovitz operates.

The upswing is attributable largely to an increase in recent years in Western European coverage of the suffering of Eastern European victims of trafficking and public demand for governments and civil society to "do something" about this modern form of slavery.

Trafficking is not new to the region - it has been a feature of the post-communist world since the Berlin Wall came down - but at least this belated, sporadic, and usually narrow attention from the West reduces the dangers that NGOs will find themselves without support at a critical stage.

• Martin Fisher is a Budapest-based writer and co-ordinator of The Bridge, a publication of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent.

Major analysis feature on the problem of human trafficking in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.