While the illicit and violent nature of the trade makes accurate monitoring impossible, a clear pattern seems to have emerged since communism's collapse. Simplistically, there is a two-step movement of women from east to west. These days, Slav women have supplanted Filipinas and Thais as the most common foreign offering in Europe's brothels. They are the ones who graduate to work for the lucrative escort agencies. But many more, seduced by false promises of a better life, are financially, physically and mentally scarred.
Recruitment follows a familiar pattern.
A young woman, say from provincial Ukraine, almost certainly under 23 and often far younger, is approached by a trafficker. She is offered employment, usually as a waitress or maid, in Central or Western Europe. Having agreed, her underground journey takes her to a squalid way-station. If she resists, she is isolated, beaten, and often raped. Thus broken, she begins her brothel career, held by means of physical abuse and debt bondage in involuntary sexual servitude.