Victims of Trafficking
Από Greece Wiki
According to the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the UN Convention against Transnational Orgzanized Crime, the official definition of trafficking is as follows:
"Trafficking in persons' shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal or organs".
According to a recent UN report, Greece is one of the main transit countries for trafficking of sexually exploited victims. Victims mainly come from countries of the Eastern Europe, Balkans and Africa. Apart from psychological violence, these women suffer from physical violence and tortures as well.
Although Greece is a transit and destination country for victims of trafficking for more than a decade, reliable data on this clandestine activity is not available. Caritas Hellas estimates that in 2000, up to 90.000 people have been trafficked from Central and Eastern Europe to Greece. There are various forms of trafficking: trafficking with the aim of forced labor (children mainly), trafficking with the aim of sexual exploitation (women mainly), and infants' trafficking with the aim of adoption.
According to other estimates (StopNOW project) between 1990 and 1997 the number of alien women who are forced to prostitution increased from 2.100 to 21.750. Despite these large numbers, authorities only recently adopted measures to suppress trafficking. The most important development is the lay down of a legal framework for the protection of victims of trafficking.
According to the law of 2002 human trafficking is considered a crime for which up to 10 years of imprisonment are provisioned . Nevertheless, very few traffickers have been arrested and condemned. Moreover, police officers are not adequately trained to recognise victims of trafficking therefore the number of women who might have been victims of trafficking and have been deportated as "illegal" migrants or as "illegal" prostitutes is not known.
Furthermore, even if a woman is identified as a trafficking victim she has a right to protection only if she agrees to cooperate with the police. However a victim who has suffered such type of exploitation might often be too intimidated to cooperate with the authorities.
