Please refresh the page and retry. But after putting down her suitcase, she was presented with a bill for every gift, restaurant dinner and holiday bought during their courtship and told to settle the debt through prostitution. A ccession to the EU in was supposed to bring Romanians passport-free travel, generous pay packets and stronger working rights. I nstead, many have ended up as sex slaves in the sordid brothels of London, Berlin and Rome, where those who try to escape risk death or torture. Over the years, trafficking gangs have launched increasingly brazen raids on the shelter to take back their captives, scaling the fences, ramming the electronic gates with black SUVs and using lasers to communicate with the survivors inside.

Many of these women, local residents say, come from Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine. Some are obviously underage. As the night falls, more and more women come out to their working stations, usually dropped off by men in old cars. The women are wary of strangers but several of them can be overheard speaking Romanian. But official statistics from Germany and some other EU member states show that Romanian nationals represent a significant portion of sex workers in these countries.

Her story is not uncommon. Due to widespread poverty in rural Romania, many young people see the sex industry as the best way to make a living. The Nightingales project, an NGO in Romania, helps young people at risk of being trafficked and supports many girls determined to have a different future.

Romania is plagued by a seedy evil: sex trafficking. At the beginning of the year , some , women were trafficked for the purposes of prostitution and sex exploitation in Europe. At that time, women were often kidnapped or convinced by force.