From through , thousands of women and girls 1 suffered rape and other forms of sexual violence during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including abuse in rape camps and detention centers scattered throughout the country. With the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in December , violence against women and girls in Bosnia and Herzegovina did not cease.
The grim sexual slavery of the war years has been followed by the trafficking of women and girls for forced prostitution. Experts from the U. Trafficked women and girls are held in debt bondage, forced to provide sexual services to clients, falsely imprisoned, and beaten when they do not comply with demands of brothel owners who have purchased them and deprived them of their passports.
In dozens of interviews with Human Rights Watch and other NGOs, women and girls, mostly trafficked from Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine, described brutality-including physical violence and rape en route to Bosnia and Herzegovina-at the hands of traffickers.
Many of the women and girls had expected that they would travel to Italy or other Western European countries to work legally. Their ages ranged from seventeen to thirty-three years. The International Organization for Migration IOM , which arranged for temporary shelter and voluntary repatriation of trafficking victims from Bosnia and Herzegovina between August and October , has reported victims as young as thirteen. In an investigation from through , Human Rights Watch uncovered conclusive evidence of widespread trafficking of women and girls into the sex industry throughout both Bosnian entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska.
Human Rights Watch researchers interviewed five trafficking victims from Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova and reviewed thirty-one other trafficking cases obtained from NGOs, court documents, and verbatim victim statements to identify trends and common abuses along the trafficking chain. The interviews and transcripts revealed with few exceptions that traffickers, most of them local Bosnians, needed harbor little fear of criminal prosecution or punishment for their crimes: Corruption within the Bosnian police force allowed the trafficking of women and girls to flourish.
