Trafficked persons, many of them women, go to recruiting agencies or answer classified ads that seem to promise legitimate jobs abroad with good pay and working conditions. Marjan Wijers a project manager for the Netherlands-based Foundation Against Trafficking in Women, was in Vienna last week to lobby the commission. She says those promises are deceptive. She spoke to our correspondent in Vienna on the sidelines of the commission meetings. A lot of women are recruited in their home countries with promises of either work in a restaurant or a factory with a decent salary and good conditions, or they are promised work in the Dutch sex industry with the same good conditions and good pay, and when they arrive, they end up in conditions that you could compare with slavery-like conditions.
Many trafficked workers come from Central and Eastern Europe.
Ukraine in particular supplies a large number of trafficked workers to world markets. Oksana works with La Strada Ukraine, an organization dedicated to helping trafficked women regain their freedom. She said the high rate of unemployment in Ukraine, particularly among women, is a major factor in why so many Ukrainian women get caught in trafficking. Their passports are taken away, and they are often locked up, beaten, or sexually abused. Marjan Wijers says that if a person wishes to escape from an abusive situation, they often don't feel they can turn to local authorities for help.