BHHRG

Any adult knows that it takes two for prostitution to exist. There must be a client as well as a whore. Forced prostitution requires three participants: the passive women, the man who pays, and the pimp who cashes in on his girl’s subjection to another man’s desires. Prostitution, forced or voluntary, depends as with any other product, legal or illicit, for demand to foster supply. Where is the market for sex slaves from Moldova, Ukraine or even Transnistria?
Although US, EU and OSCE mediators and monitors wax indignant about the alleged human trafficking via Transnistria, they are remarkably reticent about where the women and girls forced into prostitution are obliged to work as sex-slaves. The answer is that they are overwhelmingly deployed to satisfy the sexual needs of US, EU and OSCE personnel and soldiers in Kosovo, Macedonia and Bosnia. If the West had not intervened in the Balkans and deployed tens of thousands of mainly male personnel to control the region, the sex trade would not exist there to remotely the degree that it has boomed since 1995. Such is the poverty of most local men in the Balkans that even if they wished to exploit Moldovan or Ukrainian girls and women they could not afford to.

In April 2003 a 56-year-old Swedish woman went on trial for procuring and trafficking more than two dozen Estonian women as part of a prostitution ring operating from Stockholm. The proximity of the Scandinavian countries has exacerbated the sex trade in all the Baltic States – the short ferry journey from Finland is the means whereby much of the business is conducted. There are also growing numbers of young men from Western Europe going to cities like Tallinn for stag parties which amounts to a weekend of cheap booze and commercial sex.
There are also fears that the procurement of children for sex is widespread in the Baltics. In many poverty-stricken post-Communist countries (Ukraine is another example), people of working age have gone abroad to seek jobs, leaving their children behind to roam the streets. The same problem seems to have arisen in the Baltics. There are numerous ‘modeling agencies’ in the Baltic States with connections in Scandinavia.