Human trafficking in Ireland

johnnyskeleton wrote: »

That's wrong. Just plain wrong.

Your "argument" criticising the law is far too general - you don't say what's wrong with it you just say you don't like it.

Hidden world of the sex traffickers

Three women who came to Ireland with the promise of good jobs say they were forced to have sex with men. Ruadhán Mac Cormaic reports from Romania and Dublin in his continuing series Migration and the reinvention of Ireland.

They were at school the morning it was first broached between them. Cristina and her friend had grown up together in the village, not far from Bacau at the foot of the Carpathian mountains in northeastern Romania, and knew each other like sisters.

So when the girl mentioned Ireland and the chance of a clean break, Cristina did what confidantes do. She listened. It was December four years ago. Cristina was 17.

"Sometimes it feels like it was yesterday, and there are other moments when I am thinking about what happened . . ." Cristina's voice trails off. She draws breath, cupping her mug of tea in both hands.

As her friend knew, Cristina was having trouble at home and didn't take much convincing once the prospect of a well-paid restaurant job in Ireland was put before her. "Her sister was in Ireland with her boyfriend. She trusted her sister. She said to me that if I go there, I will have a better life and I could earn more money than here."

By January they were gone. Accompanied by her friend and a Romanian acquaintance, they drove "like normal people" to Italy, where the girls were given false papers and were introduced to the man who would take them the rest of the way. First to Paris, then to Ireland.

"In Italy I realised that something was strange," Cristina says. "Everyone was saying: 'It's okay, don't worry. We have to give you the fake ID because it's hard to cross the border'."

When they landed at Cork airport, the girls were met by her friend's sister and her boyfriend, Radu, a Romanian in his early 30s. That evening they drove to Arbour Hill in north Dublin, where Radu was renting an apartment.

"They were happy, everything was okay - 'nice to see you', 'good that you arrived'. He was [ saying] something like: 'you can eat, you can relax now and we'll talk with you in a few days and we'll find a job'."

There was to be no job, as Cristina was to discover. "I suspected something but I didn't know for sure. After three days, I think, he came to us and told us that we had to go shopping, and he brought us to buy skirts and everything. And then he took us and told us that we had to go to speak with this Irish guy.

"I knew what was happening, but I didn't want to believe it. It was [ then] only a nightmare that could have happened. But I didn't know exactly what was happening or what I had to do."

The Irishman to whom Cristina was presented that day was a criminal with a previous conviction for brothel-keeping in Dublin. A former RUC reservist who now lives in England, he ran brothels from at least two apartments in the city at the time.

The day after this meeting Cristina was brought from Arbour Hill to an apartment in the upmarket Herbert Park complex in Ballsbridge, south Dublin. There were several other girls there when she arrived.

"He told me I was going to work with men."

On the first night Cristina was forced to have sex with five or six men: she's not sure how many, because in her mind those days and nights have become one, an uninterrupted sequence of unspeakable, unthinkable torment.

Each day she would be brought by car from Arbour Hill to Ballsbridge and each day she would see between 10 and 12 men, to whom she was offered as an "Italian girl" for about €200 an hour.

She slept for four hours in 24, though her sleep was so close to waking that it was hardly worth the name. She was never out of Radu's sight. She was never given any money. And she was beaten.

"I was crying every day, all the time. I was only sleeping three or four hours a day, and then 'work'," she says. When a client would come to the apartment, he would be invited to select one of five or six women in the room. Invariably, she would break down.

"And when I was crying, all the time they were like: [ pointing] 'I want that one'. I was crying and they wanted me to go with them in the room to have sex. They didn't care."

There was no typical client, Cristina says - they were young and old, Irish and foreign. All they had in common was their failure to offer her help. All but one, that is: one man gave Cristina his telephone number and told her to call. But before she could find a phone, Radu had rummaged through her purse and taken the slip of paper.

Cristina's incarceration ended after two months when gardaí raided the Arbour Hill flat and arrested everyone inside. Unlike the others, Cristina told gardaí everything.

She was sent to Mountjoy women's prison before being brought to court for possession of false documents.

There, the judge presented Cristina with two options: to leave the country within seven days or remain in prison until the authorities could deport her.

Radu was freed after three months, while the Irishman faced no charges. Neither could be charged with trafficking Cristina to Ireland because, uniquely among EU states, there is no such offence here. And because there are no specific laws to punish traffickers or protect their victims, it is not known how many others have come to Ireland in circumstances similar to Cristina's.

Announcing last month that Ireland had signed the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, an important symbolic step towards a formalised legal structure, Minister for Justice Michael McDowell said that "instances of trafficking have been rare to date".

Advocacy groups disagree. Ruhama, an organisation that works with women involved in prostitution, is aware of more than 200 foreign women who were trafficked into Ireland in the past seven years.

According to Gerardine Rowley, its spokeswoman, this is a fraction of the actual number, for it tells us only of those women who were told about Ruhama and could bring themselves to seek help.

As Rowley points out, trafficking is a crime that doesn't reveal itself.

One must go looking for it, and one reason for the lack of knowledge about the problem in Ireland is that so few know how to identify its tracks. In the past six weeks, The Irish Times has identified four unreported cases of recent trafficking in Ireland, two of which are detailed below.

"It's a new issue for the country and a lot of professionals don't understand the issue of trafficking. They're not able to identify women who are at risk," says Rowley.

Trends in the sex industry also make it harder to find the victims.

The universal use of the internet and mobile phones, for instance, has made the business paradoxically more accessible and less overt, and most foreign women are put to work indoors and not on the streets, making it more difficult for support groups to reach them.

For those who run the business, this remains a high-yield, low-risk crime - fewer than five people have been given custodial sentences for running brothels in the Republic.

The women helped by Ruhama span in age from 17 to early 30s, their countries of origin ranging from Russia and Romania to Mongolia, Brazil and Cameroon.

While drawing victim profiles is notoriously difficult, in most cases of trafficking for sexual exploitation the recruiter is known to the victim.

And while poverty is common, many victims come from average-income backgrounds, argues Dani Kozak of the International Organisation for Migration in Romania. "Not all the victims are poor and uneducated. I'm afraid that people are using that as an excuse not to deal with trafficking and the victims. They say: 'this only happens to people that are stupid or naïve'."

While the Government recently signed the convention on trafficking, it is not known when it will be ratified.

Last year the Department of Justice said it aimed to publish legislation by the end of 2006, but at present only the scheme of a Bill is available, and that fell with the dissolution of the Dáil.

The Department of Justice had said that the separate needs of victims - not mentioned in the scheme of the trafficking Bill - would be addressed as part of the Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill, but when that Bill was published on April 27th, it contained no such express provision for victims' rights.

The convention states that there needs to be a three-month reflection and recovery period for victims like Cristina, and the Government needs to offer a residence permit where the victim's stay in Ireland is considered necessary for an investigation or criminal proceedings.

"Until these rights are enshrined in legislation, we feel that there is little incentive for victims to bring themselves to the attention of the authorities," says Fiona Crowley of Amnesty International's Irish section, who believes the Government is in denial about the problem, despite constructive evidence of its existence.

On her return to Romania, Cristina was given extensive counselling and a place at a shelter for victims of trafficking.

Her sister knows what happened her, but she has never told her ailing mother for fear of upsetting her.

There are girls who were put in worse positions than her, Cristina remarks. Some were much younger, and others "had horrible experiences more than I had."

Cristina is bright, articulate and self-aware. In recent years she has returned to university and her life has taken on the outer shape of any 22-year-old's.

"I can move on," she says. "The memories still remain here. I can't forget it. But I think I can move on."