Preying on Children.(child trafficking)

Over pasta in a Bloomsbury pizzeria, "Maria" could pass for any urbane 21-year-old Londoner. She's not. The Macedonia-born Maria was orphaned at 9, then sent to stay with a family whose 19-year-old son, "Nuri," began sleeping with her. He bought her a new dress and a doll, and then trafficked her through southern Europe to what was billed simply as "a better life" in Italy. On arrival, Nuri told Maria they needed money. "That's all right," she responded. "I can make lace." But within a day of her arrival Maria, then 10, was on the streets of Milan. For the next couple of years she was sold as a virgin. "I used to put a chicken liver inside me," she says. "Old prostitute's trick." At 15 she accompanied Nuri and eight other pimps and their child prostitutes and drove to England. She spent the next few years working the length of the British Isles, servicing clients 18 hours a day, seven days a week. "Whatever they wanted they got," she says.

Maria's story of indentured servitude is increasingly common. Over the last decade, thousands of kids from all over the world have been smuggled into Europe to do dirty work. In September police arrested a couple in the southern Italian region of Calabria for allegedly buying an Albanian boy from a Durresrun trafficking gang, one of a clutch of gangs involved in supplying Italians with Albanian kids for illegal adoptions. Eastern Europe's girls are trafficked for the sex industry, while its boys work either as male prostitutes or in petty crime. Chinese children are trafficked to work in European sweatshops or on the streets. West African kids are sneaked into Europe to work as domestic servants, or for use in benefit-fraud schemes or ritual sacrifices for tribal African religions. The 2001 discovery of a Nigerian boy's torso in the Thames led British police to arrest 21 suspected traffickers this summer.

Globalization, post-Soviet poverty and the European Union's newly porous borders have made child trafficking the world's fastest-growing branch of organized crime. Reliable statistics are scant, but the United Nations puts the worldwide number of children trafficked at 1.2 million a year. A 2001 EU study estimated that 120,000 women and children are clandestinely brought into Western Europe annually.

Police organizations take the problem seriously, but investigations are often handicapped by Europe's fragmented legal system. Laws on trafficking and migration vary enormously among the EU's 15 member countries. And with 10 new members set to join the Union--many of them, like Hungary, source countries for trafficked women and children--there are sure to be new complications. Next summer could see a huge rise in Eastern European young people heading to Western Europe, where they'll be vulnerable to exploitation, fears Lars Loof of the Children's Unit at the Council for Baltic States. "In a larger Europe, it's naturally even easier for under-18s to go across borders without authorities' knowing," he says.

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