Today an estimated 2 million women are trafficked throughout the world each year — and many are women who are trafficked for sexual exploitation. According to some sources, there are currently between 200,000 and 500,000 women are illegally working as prostitutes within the European Union, and the majority of those sex workers are migrant women. Trafficking in women has evolved as one of the most troubling problems in contemporary global migration.

The unabated demand for migration, coupled with stricter migration controls and entry requirements, have provided criminals with a potential for huge profit with minimum risks. The number of persons attempting or desiring to enter other countries clandestinely has given rise to a market for services such as the provision of fraudulent travel documents, transportation, guided border crossing, accommodation and job brokering. Given its potential for high profit and the relatively low risks involved, trafficking has now become a highly organized, major global business. The trafficking industry has become a multi billion-dollar industry today. Criminal organizations operating across the globe have found that trafficking of people, especially women, is even more lucrative and certainly less risky than drug trafficking, and they often succeed in combining the two. As trafficking routes diversify across the globe, nearly every country in the world is effected in either a sending, transiting or receiving mode.

Since opening up to the outside world in 1991, Albania has emerged as a major source of trafficked women. During the period between 1992 and 1998, thousands of Albanian women left their country and found themselves working as a prostitute in various Western European cities. While the exact number of trafficked Albanian women is unknown, an Albanian NGO, Women in Development Association, estimates that there are around 30,000 Albanian women currently working in Western European countries as prostitutes. Many were trafficked by Albanian men who were their boyfriends, family members or relatives. Victims of trafficking are generally women who are 16 to 22 years of age. Many are teenage girls as young as 14 years old. There are also cases of divorced women who accept working abroad to support their children. These women come from all over Albania. Some of them come from large cities such as Vlora, Berati, Tirana and Fieri. More recently, others come from small rural areas. Most women and girls are trafficked for street prostitution.

Criminal organizations dealing with trafficking of women in Albania are concentrated in Vlora, Berat, Fier, Shkodra and Tirana. They provide women with false travel documents and visas, and transport these women to Italy by speedboats. Trafficking routes used for women from Albania to Italy are often the same as used for drugs, weapons and contra-banned products. Speedboats run to the Italian coast, particularly on the Otranto Channel between Puglia’s southern coast, along the Calabrian coast southwards, and the coast of Abruzzo northwards. The coast route along the northeastern Adriatic coast is sometimes used, though the "northern" routes seem to be much harder for traffickers to use than the "southern" routes. A false or stolen EU passport, a tourist visa or a forged humanitarian visa is often used to enter the EU. Albania is also one of the major transit countries for women from central and eastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Moldavia, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. Those women are brought into Albania mainly through Montenegro. Once women are brought inside the EU border, some of them are transported to other Western European countries such as Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The most common recruitment method used is a false promise of marriage or job abroad. In a few cases, actual kidnappings take place. The Interpol in Albania has dealt with 103 such kidnapping cases between 1993 and 1998, and only 44 of those women have been traced. Criminals who are involved in trafficking are often young Albanian men who are attracted by the possibility of earning easy money even at the expense of girls and women who are their family siblings, relatives, girl friends, friends, school mates or neighbors in their home town or village.

A false promise of a job abroad is always accompanied with promises to arrange everything from travel documents and visas, safe and easy traveling, a safe place to live. Women are offered a job as a baby sitter, cleaner, waitress, or caretaker for old people, which normally do not require a high level of education or language skills. A false promise of marriage is another common way to deceive women into trafficking. After a false marriage, a trafficker takes his "wife" to abroad for a honeymoon or to settle down. He then immedatelly sells his "wife" to other pimps or forces her to work as a prostitute on the street. Marriage is used as a way to keep the woman under his control.

In addition, trafficked women are faced with other risks and dangers. Violence is always present in trafficking. From threats, curtailment of freedom, beatings, rape, torture and to even murder, traffickers and their accomplices will stop at nothing to extract the maximum profit from women. Illicit drugs are often used as another means of controlling girls and women. Many prostitution clients require unprotected sex. Ample proof accumulated over the years shows that the sex industry is the environment with the highest AIDS contagion risks. Just as current are other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) which can seriously damage health of women or permanently disable them. Working in violent and promiscuous environments, living under constant fear of deportation, arrest beating and even murder by criminal groups often leads to severe psychological trauma.

There are indications that some corrupt law enforcement and other government officials are involved in trafficking and collaborating with traffickers. Traffickers often reward police and customs for letting them pass the border illegally and freely with women and providing protection for the criminals. Coupled with the wide spread corruption, a weak legal system, a lack of enforcement, a limited capacity and resources make it hard for the Albanian government to take concrete actions against trafficking in women.

As a first step in addressing the phenomenon, IOM, together with the British Department for International Development (DFID) organized a two-day workshop on trafficking in Tirana, Albania. The workshop was organized primarily for local and international NGOs working in Albania. However, it was also attended by representatives and experts from the Albanian Government, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the Research Center on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations of Leeds Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom.

The workshop was designed to achieve the following objectives:

In order to identify concrete intervention activities in support of victims of trafficking, five distinct areas were discussed: 1) social and psychological counseling; 2) shelter; 3) micro-enterprise and vocational training; 4) legal assistance and reform; 5) public and reproductive health. Prior to the workshop, all the NGOs invited were requested to state their main areas of expertise and activity. The information was used to form working groups during the workshop. The two-day workshop resulted in recommendations regarding concrete intervention projects to counter the problem of trafficking in each of the above mentioned intervention areas. Depending on local political, administrative and social conditions in a given country, some recommendations from the workshop would be best implemented regionally, while others might be better implemented nationally.

The workshop was an opportunity to start discussing what and how best various institutions, individually and/or jointly, could assist victims of trafficking. Reintegration of trafficked women is more than just a geographic movement of a woman back home from wherever they were located. Victims of trafficking were forced, deceived or bonded to work and to live in violent and abusive conditions, leaving them with permanent scars both physically and mentally. Sheltering, counseling, training and reintegrating these victims is a time-consuming and difficult undertaking. Several NGOs are currently working on a case-by-case basis to provide support for those women. However, considering the extent and invisibility of the trafficking problem, the limited resources, the time-consuming efforts that are necessary for individual reintegration, there is very limited capacity in Albania at this point to assist those women. Most of victims of trafficking are being returned without any assistance. In some cases, given the lack of assistance capacity, women are simply being returned to their family members who trafficked them or to the very same situation from which they were trafficked. This leads to simply re-trafficking of these women.

Reintegration of victims of trafficking is to a large extent dependent on the way the victim’s family and the larger social environment are able to support and cope with victims of trafficking. Yet there is a considerable gender inequality between women and men as well as discrimination against women in Albanian society, which often blames abused women themselves rather than seeing them as victims. Stigmatization can become such a dominant force of condemnation that some trafficked women are pushed back into their old situation. Moreover, stigmatization can also become an issue for those who are trying to assist those victims of trafficking.

Some participants at the workshop correctly pointed out that Albanian NGOs were underrepresented in working groups except in the working group on psycho-social counseling. Albanian participation was weakest in the working groups on shelter and micro-enterprise & vocational training. This, in turn, reveals the fact that there are currently almost no shelter and training assistance and support for victims of trafficking in Albania. It is also realized that there is effectively no assistance and support available for victims of trafficking with sever trauma or psychiatric problems. Shelter assistance for victims of trafficking remains the most difficult and controversial issue due to security risks and social stigma associated with it.

Those institutions that accepted the invitation and participated in the workshop expressed their desire and willingness to work together as a group. This was, in part, a realization from the workshop that only working together with other partners can effectively increase the capacity of local NGOs.

Article 114/a, Exploitation of prostitution with aggravated circumstances

Point 2, when exploitation is assessed for more than one person

Point 3, marriage should be added

Point 5, made a separate section of the law (114/b)