A "dizzying array" of trafficking victims from Eastern Europe

Woman helps to unravel Toronto trafficking in persons ring
By Jeffrey Todd

Update:
A second victim has come forward with information about an alleged international human trafficking ring busted last weekend in Toronto, leading to the arrest of a fourth suspect.

Second victim comes forward in Toronto trafficking ring

Investigators believe the people arrested - three men and three women - were ringleaders involved in luring eastern European women to Canada on false promises of a modeling career and then imprisoning them as sex slaves.

Original post:
The Toronto Star reports that on Thursday afternoon, a woman from Eastern Europe stumbled into a Toronto police station saying that she was a sex slave. The next day, police raided several addresses and arrested six suspects. Three of them now face a slew of charges in what is believed to be an international human trafficking ring involving a dizzying array of victims, suspects and countries.

The victim told police that she responded to an advertisement on the Internet that offered her work as a model in Canada. But when she arrived she was thrown into prostitution. The victims were bought into the country using fake passports, police said. Once they arrived, the victims were forcibly confined and made to work as escorts for the "ringleaders" of the operation.

In November 2007, eight people were arrested, four of whom were from Ontario, for engaging in human trafficking across the U.S. border.

In related news:
Sex trafficking: 'I was sold for £4,500'
By Diane Taylor

The Independent (UK) reports that when Lena Suriane got off the bus that had brought her from her home town of Kaunas in Lithuania to London's Victoria in the winter of 2004, it was not long before she realised she'd been sold to an Albanian pimp. Suriane, 29, who had been living with her mother and two young children in abject poverty, was one day approached by a friendly woman who sympathised with her about the lack of jobs and said she knew of some well-paid work in London. "She hinted that the work was in prostitution. I had tried so hard to find other jobs and my plan was to do it for a while then come back to Lithuania and set up a business or something like that."

She was taken to a house in north London with three other women, each of whom had also been trafficked. "Do you know," said one, another Lithuanian, "that you've just been sold for £4,500?"

The day after her arrival, Suriane was set to work on a daily 12-hour shift, from 11am until 11pm. "On average I had sex with 15 men a day," she says. On one particularly busy day, that number rose to 37. Charges started at £20 for 10 minutes, rising to £140 an hour. The takings were huge but Suriane received just £10 a day.

According to Andrejus Pavlovas, a senior police inspector working in the field of organised crime in Lithuania, most of the women who are trafficked from his country know they will be working in prostitution. What they don't know is that they are likely be held captive, treated badly and not allowed to keep their earnings. "Each trafficking gang has its own style," he says. "Some use psychological violence, some use physical violence – often the two go hand-in-hand."