In northern Sweden, camping sites and motels serve as trading posts, mainly for Russian women. In the south, East European women are ferried into brothels and apartments while an estimated 150 Russian women a week are trafficked across the border into prostitution in northern Norway.
Almost all Eastern European countries have women in prostitution in Scandinavia. In the larger cities, Estonian, Russian and Lithuanian women are sold into what some have termed a new "slave trade". Women, including minors, are a lucrative sideline for criminals and organised gangs in the trafficking business. It is easy money with little chance of prosecution. It's open season at present for traffickers in an area without borders and difficult to patrol. Free movement between the Nordic countries and the abolition of visa requirements for Baltic countries in 1997 makes women from impoverished areas easy prey and provides easier profit for criminals. The opening of the bridge linking Sweden with Denmark and the rest of mainland Europe has seen numbers explode.
Sweden has no trafficking offence on its statute books. A law relating to procuring of women is applied. There is little or no protection for victims under the current asylum procedures. Instead, with the threat of deportation, the trade in women flourishes as fear prevails. Amnesty International Sweden has criticised the government for selectively applying the laws on asylum-seekers. Currently, Sweden demands a high burden of proof, particularly from women. At the same time as the country has been experiencing an increase in racist and xenophobic behaviour, much to the disdain of the majority, Amnesty has noted with concern that Sweden is becoming vulnerable to the "fortress Europe" mentality. A recent report by the Swedish police on trafficking estimates that between 200 and 500 women from Eastern Europe have been trafficked to Sweden for prostitution. The real figure is believed to be higher.
Det Insp Kajsa Wahlberg, national rapporteur on trafficking in women, says most of the women are between 18 and 25 years old, but cases involving women as young as 15 have been reported. Last year, a 16-year-old girl died in Malmo. Lured from one of the Baltic countries to Sweden, she had been herded and sold between Swedish men for two months, before she finally, out of despair, threw herself from an overhead bridge onto the motorway. "Women can travel voluntarily under the impression they are coming for other jobs, but once here it is another story," Wahlberg says. "Their passports are taken, they often have to serve violent customers, they are moved regularly and are totally dependent on their pimp.
"Our approach is that if we should combat trafficking, we must criminalise the source which feeds it, the customer."
Wahlberg then explains Sweden's controversial law, introduced in 1999, which criminalises the sex buyer. But Swedish police increasingly feel powerless. Lacking specialised personnel to do the necessary surveillance work, enforcing this law has proved difficult throughout the country.
Critics argue that, two years on, the law has exported the problem, driven it underground or into a new trading arena, the Internet.
