By Trine Lynggard
During the Women and Democracy Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania in June 2001 the Nordic and Baltic Ministers responsible for questions concerning gender equality decided to run a joint information campaign against trafficking in women. Later the Ministries of Justice also joined in. Although there are differences in policy on the issue of prostitution among the eight countries, the Nordic-Baltic working group has agreed to base the campaign on the definition on trafficking in women described in article 3 of the so-called Palermo-Protocol, the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. This definition takes into consideration the actual reality of women who are trafficked for prostitution. Trafficking can take place by means of, among others, force, deception and abduction, but traffickers, who abuse their power or a victim’s vulnerability, will also be criminally liable. The definition specifically mentions that the consent of a victim is irrelevant to the prosecution of traffickers.
Stop the demand
The Nordic-Baltic working group responsible for the campaign is led by Norway, which now has the presidency in the Nordic Council of Ministers. Anne Berit Mong Haug from the Norwegian Ministry of Child and Family Welfare is chairing the working group. She refers to article 9,5 in the UN/Palermo Protocol as an important guideline for this Nordic-Baltic co-operation. This article obliges the member states to co-operate through education, social, cultural and legislative measures to stop the demand which creates all forms of exploitation of human beings, of women and children, and especially young girls, and which lies at the root of trafficking in human beings.
– In this way, the information campaign can be a first step in co-operation on concrete measures to combat the criminal activity of trafficking in women. I also want to emphasise the importance of this inter-disciplinary co-operation between gender equality units and the justice and police units. The problem of trafficking in women has a social and a gender equality dimension that must be integrated with the legislation and law enforcement measures. The impact of gender inequality, which makes women into sexual objects, must be understood by the different authorities involved, such as immigration, police and the judicial system in order for them to treat the women with respect and as victims of criminal activity, and not as means for investigating a criminal case, says Anne Berit Mong Haug.
Targeting potential buyers
The campaign’s project co-ordinator Gunilla Ekberg from Sweden is a lawyer with international NGO-experience in combating trafficking in women; she works closely with the national co-ordinators in each of the eight countries. She says that each country will carry out an information campaign adjusted to the specific situation in their country.
– As, roughly speaking, the Baltic states are ’sending’ countries or countries of origin and the Nordic countries are recipient countries, the target groups and the profiles of the campaigns will differ. In some of the Nordic countries the focus will be on the buyer of sexual services. In Sweden, for example, we will target the men who exploit women and girls sexually and men who travel to neighbouring countries and other countries to buy women and girls. The campaign will also be directed to potential buyers among younger men and teenage boys. This raising of the awareness among potential buyers is crucial to combat trafficking and prostitution, since, as long as men see it as their right to buy women, prostitution and trafficking will go on, says Gunilla Ekberg. She also underlines as an important purpose of the campaign in all countries the raising of the awareness among the general public and the increasing of the knowledge on prostitution and trafficking in order to strengthen the efforts of both governments and NGOs.
Mapping the situation
The Nordic-Baltic campaign will be launched at a seminar in Tallinn in Estonia at the end of May. The first part of the campaign in Estonia will concentrate on what co-ordinator Kristiina Luht calls ‘mapping the situation’:
– The awareness and attitudes among key groups will be investigated, such as the police, border guards and female high school students. Our overall aim is to introduce the concept of trafficking in women, its reasons and consequences. There is a widespread ignorance and lack of public debate and media coverage analysing the roots of the problem. After Estonia’s independence pornography was in a way seen as part of the freedom, since it was forbidden under the Soviet regime. So there is a certain culture of normalisation and social acceptation of pornography and prostitution. In the capital Tallinn alone, there are between 70 and 80 brothels, says Kristina Luht who is concerned with the way young people are approached in this sensitive issue.
– Because of the poverty and sometimes lack of educational opportunities it is only natural that young people dream of starting a good life somewhere else. Therefore, it is very important how we approach the young girls. We must realise that the girls want to go abroad anyway, either for the adventure or for the good money. So we will have to tell them and people who can affect them, such as teachers, youth workers and job counsellors, how to work or study abroad as safe as possible. Information about what rights they have and how to get in touch with institutions that can be of help is also important, says Kristiina Luht, herself a M.A. student in Information Science. Every day she experiences the active recruitment efforts of the traffickers.
– Daily I pick up leaflets at the university campus and at bus stops advertising for girls to highly paid, easy jobs abroad where no skills are needed, not even fluency in English. The salaries that are being promised for these "easy" jobs can be up to six times the average salary in Estonia, says Kristiina Luht. Unfortunately too many girls eagerly grasp this possibility to go abroad and earn good money.
New law criminalizing traffickers
Also the Latvian campaign co-ordinator Elina Laiveniece points to the extensive prostitution in Latvia itself as part of the problem. Latvia has an estimated number of 10 000 women in prostitution out of which 75 per cent are Russian women. Prostitution is regulated by law in Latvia and five cities have specific streets appointed for prostitution. In 2000 Latvia got a new provision to the criminal law, which criminalizes the sending of a person to a foreign country for the purpose of sexual exploitation even if the person has given her or his consent. The trafficker can be convicted to up to 4 years of imprisonment.
Elina Laiveniece points to the lack of information and experience among young girls coming for the rural areas to Riga and how easily they can be tricked into prostitution abroad.
– One typical example of women recruited by traffickers is girls from rural villages, who come to Riga hoping to find a job in the capital and start a new life. Usually the newcomers gather near the central bus station in Riga. And there the girl accidentally meets a very gentle guy who becomes her friend and spends money on her, and she starts to trust him. In most cases girls are trafficked with the help of so-called job-offering organisations. At first they ask the girls what they are expecting and would like to do. The girls speak very openly and naïvely and then the organisation, surprisingly, has the right offer for her!
6 years imprisonment for trafficking
According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), Lithuania has now taken the lead in trafficking cases in German courts over much bigger countries like Russia, the Ukraine and Poland, which are considered the main suppliers of women for prostitution in Germany. The Lithuanian co-ordinator for the Nordic-Baltic campaign Kristina Grachauskaite says that the problem with young girls being trafficked to western European countries is increasing, and that the situation in the rural regions is especially serious. Here, the high unemployment rate combined with lack of information about the problems and risks connected with travelling abroad makes the need for an information campaign acute. The government of Lithuania has newly adopted a National program on prevention and control of trafficking in human beings and prostitution. Already in 1999 the first law cases were filed against traffickers and since then the amount of cases has increased every year. The first verdict came this year when a trafficker was sentenced to six years of imprisonment for trafficking in women.
