Crossing borders and building bridges: the Baltic Region Networking Project

Overview

16 year old Lithuanian girl found dead on a highway outside Malmö in Southern Sweden.’ She committed suicide after escaping from an apartment where she earned her living selling sexual services. ‘Czech girls kept as sex slaves at a hotel outside Stockholm calling their mothers for help.’ Headlines like this concerning the trafficking of women and girls occur in many countries of the world every day. Some trafficked women are seeking to improve their lives or feed their children, while others have been abducted and forced into ‘slave’ labour. Occurrences of violence and human rights violations are common. This article gives an overview of the reasons for, and mechanics of, trafficking. It also highlights the anti-trafficking approaches and activities undertaken by the Swedish NGO Kvinnoforum in partnership with five NGOs in the Baltic Sea and Nordic Region. These projects address trafficking through research, information, and networking to create awareness of the complexity of trafficking, and the serious human rights violations that it involves.

This article is hosted by our co-publisher Taylor & Francis. For the full table of contents for this and previous issues of this journal, please visit the Gender and Development website.