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Thanks to a friend who brought this to me attention.
Think back to 2008 an the following news story hit the press, fueling the sex trafficking stories, and setting the scene for the Labour Government to bring in anti sex work laws.
The special report by award winning journalist Chris Rogers also ran on ITV’s News at 10 and on CNN in 2008, as well as in the Daily Mail Night and Day magazine – detailing how they had managed to buy a 14-year-old from sex slave traders at a petrol station in Iasi, a town in north eastern Romania.
She actually was 25 years, old and a known Romanian sex worker Monica Ghinga. I am not sure why this has hit the news, this piece of information was available back in 2008 on the Guardian Website of all places.
Recently this story has been mentioned on Melon Farmers, the Austrian Times and numerous other websites through the world.
I post this some what in puzzlement, why has this old piece of news suddenly appeared again? Seems that it has been commented on in the Romania papers recently. Monica has recently been charged with prostitution in Romania after a three year investigation, and is introduced in their papers as Prostitute CNN.
I post it as a couple of warnings.
Quote from the police interview.
PO: Did they say what kind of girl they were looking for?
GM: Yes, under age. I pretended to be 14 at the beginning, then I said I was 16.
PO: How old are you actually?
GM: I am 25.
One of the many quotes in Pisani’s book about questioning and what can go wrong.
There is one quote I must give from that book which is so revealing how rumours can start, and which could so easily turn into fact.
A couple of months later, I was back in Dili. The day after I arrived, I spoke to Tim. ‘Oh, are you still interested in trafficking?’ he asked, almost casually. ‘I’ve had a report of three Chinese girls trafficked in. They say the trafficker was a UN staffer.’ Good story! I was a bit surprised they were Chinese – in this part of the world ‘trafficking’ is a word more often associated with Vietnamese or Javanese women. But there may be a growing taste for Chinese women. Those three Chinese hookers I was chatting to at the airport yesterday, for example …
Sometimes quite good money. A sex worker usually earns quite a bit more than a woman making sports shoes or jogging outfits in a factory. Granted, it is not nice work. You sit around in dark, sweaty, airless rooms with the doof-doof background noise thudding in your ears, being leered over by some guy who has more power than you. That’s in the factory. In the brothel, it’s more or less the same, except that you take your clothes off and allow the leering to go further. The other difference, of course, is the pay packet. In the factory you earn 19 cents an hour. In the brothel your take-home pay averages about US$3.15 an hour. Two horrid jobs; one pays sixteen times more than the other
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