As much as 30 per cent of victims of trafficking of human beings are children in Moldova - study

Chisinau, 18 October /MOLDPRES/ -About 1,300 victims of the trafficking of human beings have been identified nationally in the last five years, of whom over 30 per cent are children. The data is part of a report made public by the La Strada International Centre today, at a news conference held in the contest of the EU Anti-Trafficking Day.

The executive director of La Strada Centre, Elena Botezatu, said that the researchers showed that the real number of the trafficking’s victims would be 20-fold higher.

“The difference between these figures has more reasons at the basis. In the last 3-4 years, a string of serious cases of minors’ sexual exploitation took place, as no proper measures were taken at the fit time, in order to be able to protect children at risk. Besides the tendencies showing the registration of an ever higher number of victims men of the labour exploitation, particularly serious is the fact that 30 per cent of the identified victims are children, which have got to be sexually exploited. In most cases, children are sexually exploited in Moldova through involvement in prostitution. We have cases of children getting to be sexually exploited years in a row, before reaching in the focus of authorities or situations in which the community’s members notice such cases, but do not report them, passing the responsibility and blame to the child,’;’ Botezatu noted.

The chief prosecutor at the anti-trafficking section of the Prosecutor General’s Office (PG), Sergiu Russu, said that the overwhelming majority of the offences of this kind were committed with the use of information technology. Besides technologies, Russu mentioned among the factors triggering the survival of the human trafficking in Moldova the migration tendencies in the region, COVID-19 pandemic, enhancement of the social inequality, as well as the high level of corruption in Moldova.

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