About 10,000 Bulgarian women all over the world are forced to prostitute – these are the data of various international humanitarian organizations. Nobody knows exactly how many women in Eastern Europe have been trafficked against their will into prostitution, but the estimates for Bulgaria range in the thousands. The victims of the illegal trafficking are usually sold and re-sold 5-6 times and 55 per cent are beaten or raped. One of the ways to stop or reduce such cases is increasing the information that is spread among the population. At present, awareness and discussion of these issues is relatively new. This is one of the aims of the campaign, which started several days ago – the National Campaign for the Prevention of Trafficking in Women.

 Bulgarian society in general is alarmed by the dramatic increase in recent years in trafficking in women and forced prostitution. There is a need for urgent action to fight this phenomenon.

The beginning of the national anti-trafficking campaign was marked with the opening of an unusual exhibition. One of the initiators was the Bulgarian branch of the international humanitarian organization “Care”. The exhibition is actually a “Visual project” entitled “Traffic of people” which consists of 9 short films and clips where prominent Bulgarian public figures deal with the theme in a non-standard way. They are being shown at the “Red house” in Sofia and by the end of the summer they will be shown in ten other Bulgarian towns and at the major Black Sea coast resorts and in some not so densely-populated areas. The national campaign will continue till September, and is financed by the Austrian branch of “Care” in Vienna. “The campaign is aimed towards a wide public, because the illegal traffic of women is constantly increasing and the applied methods are constantly changed," said Ivanka Georgieva, project administrator of the anti-traffic program of “Care-Bulgaria”.

Cited in BNR, by Veneta Nikolova, July 2006. The full article is available HERE