Trafficking in children is a global problem affecting large numbers of children. Some estimates have as many as 1.2 million children being trafficked every year. There is a demand for trafficked children as cheap labor or for sexual exploitation. Children and their families are often unaware of the dangers of trafficking, believing that better employment and lives lie in other countries. Child trafficking is lucrative and linked with criminal activity and corruption. It is often hidden and hard to address. Trafficking always violates the child’s right to grow up in a family environment. In addition, children who have been trafficked face a range of dangers, including violence and sexual abuse. Trafficked children sometimes are arrested and detained as illegal aliens.
Essmerelda, age 14, Albania: Prostitution
In the seedy Kafe Bar Berlin, Essmerelda Seferi throws back her head and croons in a husky Edith Piaf voice. Hard-drinking men leer across the smoke-filled room. This hell in a dirt-track town in Macedonia is the end of the road and of her young life. At 14, she claims, she was sold to a man who took her virginity, prostituted her and then discarded her. That was two years ago. Now she has rotten teeth and quickly aging skin. A hard and worldly veneer barely disguises her vulnerability, and she longs to return home to her parents in Albania. “In my dreams at night, I see how my mother cries,” Seferi said, her own eyes brimming with tears. “But I know my family, I know our traditions. They would never take me back.”
Seferi is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of girls being lured from their native Albania and sold across the border in Macedonia as prostitutes, brides for elderly men or menial workers. Seferi’s fate may be typical. A woman relief teacher and the teacher’s male friend, she said, offered her a weekend in Macedonia. It promised to be a glittering adventure for the pretty, spirited schoolgirl. Until three years ago, Albania had been in Stalinist isolation for almost half a century under its paranoid and brutal dictator, Enver Hoxha, and his successor. Seferi, like most Albanians, had lived an isolated life in conditions of medieval poverty. Her parents had been declared “enemies of the people,” spent time in prison and were exiled to forbidding, mountainous Merdita, the Albanian Siberia.
The jaunt went wrong soon after Seferi arrived at the southern village of Celopeka. The teacher, according to Seferi, told her she should stay alone in a bar and wait for her escorts to take a trip to the border and return. Seferi did not mind. She had been given Coca-Cola for the first time in her life. “It was a real thrill,” she said. She was joined by two young men and a waitress. The next she knew she felt dizzy and began to hallucinate. “I woke up the next day. I was not in this village any more.
When I got up, the sheets were all bloodied. I was 14,” she said. Her new “owner,” whom she knew only by the name of “Ayat,” took her on trips to Turkey and Bulgaria as his mistress, occasionally forcing her to go with other men. She believes her parents were told she had been married.
When I met her, she said the Kafe Bar Berlin had an edge over the countless other bars she had worked in, “because here they don’t abuse me.” At the time she was animated and so desperate to return home that I agreed to see her parents in Albania, tell them what had happened, and ask if they would take her back. I went back the following week by arrangement to take photos and to obtain her parents’ exact address. But she appeared to be drugged or drunk. The bar owner and an assistant sat at the table. Looking at them constantly, she refused to have photos taken. She said it was no longer necessary to go to her parents. She was going herself two days later, she said. No, a brother was coming to get her the next month, she contradicted. She was ranting, changing her story from minute to minute. “I want to go, even if they shut me in a room and don’t allow me to see another person, man or woman, for a year,” she said. It was unclear if she was afraid of her parents or of the owners of the bar. When I suggested she come with me immediately, the men stood up menacingly. Seferi looked longingly at the car as I left. “Please come back tonight,” she said. “Just for a coffee, just to hear me sing.”
On further surreptitious visits by friends, when a blurred photograph was taken during a performance despite the danger of retaliation by local gangsters, she appeared to have been beaten, a broken young woman already mentally unhinged and heading for a breakdown. If she had stayed at home, she would still have been a schoolgirl. She sang a popular song, “Black Kurbet.” Kurbet is the word used for Albanians who go overseas to work and send money back to their families. “Oh, Black Kurbet, why are you so black? They’ve left me all alone. So far away from home—home, where I left my childhood.” Albanian girls who end up in Macedonia are trapped. As illegal residents, they cannot seek legal protection. The traditions of rural Albania make it virtually impossible to flee back home: a girl who has lost her virginity is an outcast.
Reflection: Hearing a story like this can bring up so many feelings. Anger, compassion, hopelessness, fear. Even as I type these words I sense a tsunami of conflicting thoughts and emotions building up within me. One of the great injustices of human trafficking begins with our sight. Not our eye sight. Instead our inner vission. In situations of human trafficking people are stripped of thier dignity. The grand dignity of being a human being and not a human commodity. These people are not "resources": in some global economy instead they are human beings created by God, beloved in every way. They have value, abilities and destinies. These men and women are created "in his (God's) likeness"
We must recover our sight if we are to respond as God would have us. Recovery of our inner sight. It is God who opens the eyes of the blind. Mine. Yours. Ours together.
