MOLDOVA: Grinding poverty, corruption and a huge flow of migrants are playing right into the hands of sex-traffickers, writes Chris Stephen in Chisinau.
Standing against the freezing eastern wind which sweeps over the empty Moldovan plains around us, Anna tells me of the day when she became a commodity in her country's fastest-growing business - sex trafficking.
She prefers to tell me the story out here rather than inside her warm farmhouse where her husband and two children are eating.
A year ago Anna, desperate for money with her small farm bankrupt and her husband out of work, joined the tide of migrants leaving Moldova for jobs abroad.
She had heard the lurid tales of young girls forced into sexual slavery abroad, but thought that as a middle-aged married woman, she would be safe from such a fate.
Anna, from an ethnic Turkish-speaking part of Moldova, went to Turkey, getting a job as a cleaner in the house of a wealthy Istanbul merchant. At first things were fine: she worked hard cleaning the house and looking after the children, and sent her €150 monthly salary home to put food on the table of her husband and children.
One day the wife and children went away and she was told to work late, serving whisky to his friends who arrived to play cards.
Their card session grew more boisterous and the players more drunk and there seemed to be no money changing hands in the frenzied game. Then her boss broke the news. She was the prize. Later that night she was raped by one of told her there would be more of the same. "He told me if I did not do as he said he would kill me," she says, her brown eyes watering. "He told me who would know? I was not registered with the police, I was not registered with anybody, I could simply disappear."
Anna had become a victim of sex trafficking, eastern Europe's most notorious growth industry.
Estimates by the US put the number of girls and women trafficked for sex as more than half a million worldwide. Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, leads the way. More than 600,000 of the three million population are out of the country at any one time, most employed illegally. This includes tens of thousands of women forced to be sexual slaves.
Belatedly, the Council of Europe is trying to stem the flow. Work began this month on an ambitious cross-border convention against trafficking, but Anna is among many here who feel that the law alone cannot stem the tide.
"Rules will not be enough, the traffickers will always find a way through," Anna tells me. "Look around you. While conditions here stay as they are, women will always run away. There is nothing here for them."
Her home village, kept secret at her request, lies in the heart of Gagauzia, a province once rich in agriculture. Eastern markets have dried up and the EU, struggling with its wine lake, is not about to start importing Moldovan wine.
The result is grinding poverty and a huge flow of migrants.
While politicians wring their hands, the traffickers are getting smarter. In the past, they would smuggle women and girls on forged documents. Now they have hit on a much better idea - bribery. Women now pass borders on legal documents, visas and permits.
"Trafficking could not exist without the complicity of Moldovan government officials at some level," says Alan Freedman, head of the Moldovan office of the International Organisation for Migration. "You cannot move this number of people across the border without corruption."
Anna endured rape and occasional beatings in Istanbul for several months, then had a mental breakdown and fled.
Her story has a happy ending. She was given a small grant by the Organisation for Migration to buy livestock; she has turned the farm into a thriving business and her husband is her bookkeeper.
She worries over whether to tell him, as he assumes that she returned from a regular cleaning job. "Some women have done this and the husbands have divorced them, and I don't want to be alone."
Moldova's government has promised to tackle corruption, but the root cause of trafficking remains poverty. "You have a Moldovan girl of 16 in a village, her prospects are of earning $25 a month in a canning factory," says Freedman. "Frankly, the migration argument is extremely persuasive."
In the West, there seems to be no shortage of men willing to pay for what amounts to rape. "Sometimes what they do is called prostitution, but what these women endure is not prostitution," says Tatiana Allamuradova of Contact, a support group for Moldovan women. "These women are enduring slavery."