Bulgaria declares war on adverts seeking prostitutes

Bulgaria declares war on adverts seeking prostitutes
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

Dancers needed for work in Greece no experience needed earn 3,000 dollars a month": such adverts falsely tempt Bulgarian women into the international sex trade, and the country's government has now declared war. "Recruiting waitresses for Cyprus attractive all formalities cleared". "Professional dancers Switzerland, Italy".

Since the fall of communism these adverts have been plastered across the classifieds of the daily papers. Many of the jobs are phony. "There are firms which recruit women to work abroad as models, cleaning ladies or in the tourism industry, but more often than not they become prostitutes," according to the Bulgarian minister for employment and social affairs, Ivan Neikov.

Mostly the women are sent to Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic, but also to Germany, the Netherlands and France, according to Neikov. "The very high rate of unemployment is generally what pushes these women into accepting risky propositions," he explained. The government, which had up till now turned a blind eye to the problem, decided to take the matter in hand. Following several international meetings broaching the subject of the sex trade, the minister intends to publish a list detailing the companies recruiting in Bulgaria which are legal. Every candidate will therefore be able to check if her company is legal or not before she leaves.

In fact 300 of the 345 companies which advertise do so illegally, and not one of the rest is registered as specializing in tourism or show-business, according to an inquiry by the weekly magazine Capital. Some 10,000 Bulgarian women have fallen into the sex trade, according to statistics from the International Organization for Migration and Animus, a Bulgarian organization which seeks to prevent women falling into this trap.

The women who are drawn into the trade are sometimes as young as 14 and tend to live in villages in the Bulgarian border land. They pay for their "naive confidence and ignorance," said Nadeja Stoitcheva, co-President of Animus. Others are women who speak foreign languages and dream of a life abroad, she said, and others are gipsy girls, sold by their families. Bulgaria is also a transit point for international sex traffic.