Please refresh the page and retry. Some are still in their teens. Human trafficking and modern slavery are supposed to be what they are fighting against. Yet here it is happening at scale right under their noses. Although trafficking is illegal, the fuel for it - prostitution - is not. Until , it was perfectly legal here to pay for sex with year-old girls. O ne who, aged 20, was taken from her home in Romania into a brothel in Basel and who now volunteers for an NGO in Zurich said she had been regularly beaten.
They abuse us and think they can because they pay. A retired British police officer who until recently worked as a consultant for an anti-trafficking organisation, knows Geneva well and has led a number of operations to disrupt international trafficking in Europe. It would be a mistake to think the men paying for sexual services are confined to an underclass.
I meet a contact who, for several years, has worked for one of the major human rights organisations in Geneva. They would lose their job if exposed as a whistleblower and likely be vilified by colleagues and informally blacklisted from other jobs within the sector. One of the roles in the team is to raise awareness about trafficking and irregular migration, but these guys go out and abuse them without any thought. There was another incident when several colleagues visited a brothel en masse.
When they were leaving, the woman was crying. One of the men said, without any self-awareness whatsoever, that she was probably upset because she wanted one of us to take her home. It is not just Geneva that provides a marketplace in Switzerland for trafficked women and girls.
A taxi driver takes me to the fenced off area which is about the size of a football pitch. Drivers are checked at an entrance gate and then proceed in their cars to a row of 10 wooden sheds, like British beach huts, each one with one with a woman in front. S ome seem intoxicated, and many appear frail. One survey of prostituted women in Zurich found that more than 50 per cent suffered psychiatric ailments such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders and psychosis.
