Victoria avoids all eye contact. Her gaze alternates between boring into the ground and scouring the horizon out the window.
Her right foot taps nervously on the wooden floor.
She is one of the 300 female trafficking victims helped each year at the crisis intervention centre run by the International Organisation for Migration in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau.
Her story is shocking. 'A childhood friend told me she worked in a boutique in Dubai and could help me get a similar job,' she explains. 'She put me in touch with a guy who arranged my trip to Odessa [in Ukraine] and onward from Kiev to Dubai.
'In Dubai I was met by a Russian speaking woman, Oxana, who took me to a flat with six other girls from Eastern Europe.
'Oxana told me I’d been sold and took my passport away. I refused to see clients and as a result, was denied food. My cries and pleas were met with blows and kicks.'
Appalling though it is, Victoria is by no means alone. She's just one of an estimated 800,000 women and children tricked and trafficked into a life of beatings, rape and torture every year.
In Moldova, the country that she - and I - once called home, human trafficking is a huge problem, with an estimated 25,000 Moldovans trafficked abroad in 2008 according to Moldova’s national Bureau of Statistics.
Men are taken to work on building sites and farms, while women like Victoria are mostly sold into the sex trade in Turkey, Russia, Cyprus, the UAE, and elsewhere.
Victims can be as young as 12-years-old, with the International Organisation for Migration estimating that 42 per cent of the Moldovans taken are children. Source-Dailym
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