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A leading migration expert Tuesday raised an alarm about the plight of women trapped in an underworld of trafficking and prostitution because they are shunned when they try to break out.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said the number of women being trafficked in Europe was about 150,000 to 200,000 a year, a figure that has held steady or been rising.
Yet, the number being referred for assistance in home countries, mainly in eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, was dropping.
IOM counter-trafficking chief Richard Danziger said that far from signalling a decline in the criminal trade in women, it tended to indicate that the problem was deepening.
The IOM released its findings as the world prepares to mark International Women's Day on Wednesday.
While they were often stigmatised as prostitutes in their western destination countries, the women involved also carried that stigma back home when they turned to their families or small communities.
"Trafficked women often don't have any other choice in what to do with their future, if they survive, other than to be retrafficked or, as often happens, to become traffickers themselves," Danziger told journalists.
"It is the only way they have learnt to survive, to make money, it is the only milieu they can live in without having stigma attached to them," he added.
Many women were discouraged from revealing their plight.
"Families do not want the shame that's brought on them by having a daughter who comes back that may have been involved in prostitution," he explained.
"Yet, these same families may have encouraged them in the first place to go out and earn a living, and will be happy to earn the money that daughters send back."
Danziger said training programmes for police forces, new legislation or more support systems would never tackle deeply ingrained social attitudes that fuel prostitution rings in the first place.
"Not enough is being done to address some of the core gender issues that lead to trafficking: discrimination against women and stigma attached to certain roles they're forced to assume."
"Trafficked women are often prostitutes, they hang around with criminals, they often live on the margins of society: they are not people we would want to invite home for tea," he explained.
About 40 percent of women trafficked from eastern Europe are single mothers, according to IOM.
"Many have histories of physical and sexual abuse within their families and most come from countries where women will not get equal pay for equal work if, that is, they can even find a job."
Danziger added that "traffickers play on these vulnerabilities, on the need for these women to survive and on their need, or their very strong desire, to escape from the restrictions of a rigid and often very discriminatory society."
pac/avz/boc
Women-trafficking-prostitution
AFP 072117 GMT 03 06
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