Profile of Victims

    She is young, desperate for decent work (and money) and willing to take a chance for a better life. This is the basic profile of a person at risk for trafficking. Dig deeper and the picture grows more complex. Lack of advanced education, history of violence in the home (including spousal abuse, rape and incest) and a sinking despair helps complete the picture. IOM research from Moldova (a top cource country for Turkey) indicates that fully 89 percent of trafficked individuals have suffered from some form of violence or sexual abuse in the home, including alarming rates of rape, incest and spousal violence.

    In short, the typcial trafficked individual is looking for a way out of the poverty and violence that surround her in her home country, most often Ukraine, Russia as well as Moldova. Those factors make her a ripe target for "recruitment" by the traffickers who lure her into the world of trafficking with false promises of good jobs abroad -- and with those jobs the fraudulent prospect for a better life. The trafficked women are swept along with the tide, the most vulnerable members of a mobile population looking for work but finding themselves in a trap far worse than they could have imagined.

    Strikingly, the majority of recruiters are women and friends. A network of trust is turned on its head. Equally true: The vast majority of trafficked persons are forced to provide sex to men without pay, while a smaller percentage perform forced labor. Men and young boys are at risk too, but so far women and girls dominate the target group.

    There are some bright spots in the numbers. Police and other in Turkish law enforcement have stepped up their identifications of trafficked individuals, solid evidence that a human rights approach is taking hold in Turkey. But the push factors remain, and the unsettling correlation between trafficking on the one hand the lack of economic opportunities in source countries remains stubbornly in place.