THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ASIEH NAMDAR, CNN ANCHOR: The widening gap between the rich and the poor has fueled one of the fastest-growing criminal industries, human trafficking. Victims of this illegal activity are often treated like slaves, forced to work in sweatshops, plantations or brothels, under horrifying conditions.
ILO Television has the story of thousands of women who go through Albanian on the way to Western Europe in search of a better life, but find themselves forced into sexual servitude.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SANJA GOHREE, ILO TELEVISION CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They are crosses for the departed, but hopefully not for the dead. When young women began disappearing from the Albanian town of Plimish (ph), a local priest planted a cross for every one that was missing.
Women no longer go missing from the town. Tales from women in shelters paint the picture of a very flexible system of trafficking, in which a woman may be sold many times before reaching her final destination.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): We went on foot. At the border, a serve took us over and we walked one or two hours. He brought us to a house where we had to lift our shirts while several men examined our bodies. Then they selected three of us.
GOHREE: Albania is one stop along an international trafficking route that generates $7 billion each year from the sale of women, men and children. Stemming the tide of trafficking is the subject of the new International Labor Organization global report on forced labor.
While traffickers know no borders, law enforcement must deal with national boundaries that limit their ability to stop the illicit trade.
In Belgium, Sergi Muyters has some of the toughest laws in Europe to help him fight trafficking in the red light district of Antwerp.
SERGI MUYTERS, ANTWERP POLICE DEPARTMENT: The major problem is that not even one single woman here is working on their own accounts. So they all work for Albanian men, and they are so afraid of them that they do not want to tell it to the police. In this area, they used to even kill women on the streets. GOHREE: Woman from Eastern Europe may be trafficked to a number of destinations into the east or west, wherever the money is. But how does one turn a woman bought and sold against her will into a working prostitute? The answer is simple, by force.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): They said, "the women will show you how to do this work." And I said, "but I do not want to do this work." So they said, "if you do not do this work, we will kill you."
GOHREE: With coordinated law enforcement and political will, the road these young women follow will be marked by promise and not by a cross.
This report was compiled by Sonja Gohree and Daniel Lionot (ph) from ILO Television for CNN WORLD REPORT.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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