BERLIN • Catholic leaders warn
the exodus of Ukrainian women and children presents a prime
opportunity for human trafficking, and they are taking steps to protect
the refugees.
Even Pope Francis hinted at the
situation in a tweet: "Let us think of these women and children who in
time, without work, separated from their husbands, will be sought out by the
'vultures' of society. Please, let us protect them."
In Germany, police have been
warning for weeks that aid workers, volunteers and refugees should be
vigilant at areas where refugees arrive.
At Munich's main train station,
hundreds of Ukrainian refugees mingle daily with aid workers,
volunteers and ordinary citizens who receive them. According to several
reports, among these "helpers" are an increasing number of men who
want to force women into prostitution.
"Here at the main station, a
lot is being done – there is a specialized counseling center 24 hours a
day," Bettina Spahn, head of the Catholic Railway Station Mission in
Munich, told ARD TV. "We are on site 24 hours a day; Caritas is here 24
hours a day. It is publicly pointed out in multilingual flyers that the women
should be careful. The police are on site. It is not a mass phenomenon, but we
have already experienced isolated cases of attempted human trafficking and
could be of help to prevent it. I am confident that we have this problem under
control here, but it does exist."
"You have to counteract this
from the beginning," Spahn said. She and her Protestant counterpart are
responsible for the ecumenical refugee reception center at the station.
At a mid-March news conference
in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, Gabriele Stark-Angermeier, a board
member of the Catholic charitable agency Caritas, said, "There is
definitely an attempt to approach these women with their children." The
goal of these men, she said, is to force women into prostitution. She sees
"a systematic narrative" and stressed, "The issue exists."
At the Berlin train station,
mostly older men have been seen holding up signs with offers of accommodation
and overnight stays for women, just like real helpers. The aid workers and
police get suspicious when the men show their signs only to certain women and,
under certain circumstances, also offer money.
A police spokesman said in the
first two weeks of March, police had banned certain men from the station
premises, but since no crime was committed, they could not act further.
A March 8 pinned tweet by
Germany's federal police – written in German, Russian and Ukrainian –
warned women and unaccompanied youths to beware of "suspicious offers of
accommodations – a contact official agencies only."
"We are aware of the danger
being posed by trafficking, and our staff are being kept up to date on the
current situation," Thomas Gleissner of Caritas Berlin told Catholic News Service
March 22. "We vet our volunteers as much as possible but, because of the
situation, we cannot request police certificates of good conduct, as we
normally do when volunteers work with underaged and vulnerable people. But we
do pay a lot of attention and, in our refugee shelter, the staff on site are
also aware of the dangers posed by human trafficking."
By March 21, about 10,000 refugees were
arriving each day in Berlin, and city officials soon expect that number to
double, since the city is only 50 miles from the Polish border.
Caritas is in the process of
setting up a center in Berlin where Ukrainian refugees can
receive aid and counseling.
On March 15, Valiant Richey,
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe special representative and
coordinator for combating human trafficking, gathered representatives of
17 European countries affected by the humanitarian crisis.
The governments of Austria,
France, Germany, Romania and Slovakia reported that some of the measures they
have put in place were monitoring online searches after a spike was noted in
searches for Ukrainian women for sex and marriage. They also
distributed leaflets translated into Ukrainian to inform people on
the move of their rights and options.
The warnings seem to reach refugees,
who then sometimes distrust innocent parties.
Crazy Tours, a Bavarian bus
company, sent buses to the Polish-Ukrainian border to transport refugees to
Nuremberg, where housing had been arranged by the city council. But the company
reported that many Ukrainian women refused to get into their buses.
"Rumors are circulating
those buses are coming and then dumping refugees in the middle of
nowhere or putting them into prostitution," owner Marco Eichhorn wrote on
Facebook. He said only 56 of the 164 seats were filled on the return trip.
An RTL TV reporter posed as
a Ukrainian refugee looking for an apartment on eBay Inc. A man then
contacted her that he would like to share a bed with her – and promptly sent
explicit photos. He arranged to meet the alleged Ukrainian woman at
Berlin's main train station, where the undercover reporter confronted him. He
denied all actions.
Contacted by the TV station, eBay
said it is currently checking offers with the keywords "neighborhood
assistance" and "Ukraine" particularly intensively and, if
necessary, blocking users' accounts.