MOLDOVA: Despite all she's been through, she still looks as if she's just left school. "The Russians who came to the bars were the worst," she says. "They would beat me and burn my arms and legs with cigarettes, call me a prostitute and say I was a disgrace to the former Soviet Union. They were like drunken animals."
Moldova, squashed like a piece of salami between Ukraine to the east and Romania to the west, holds the unenviable position of being Europe's poorest country, with per capita incomes of not much more than US $400 a year.
Since becoming independent from the old USSR in 1991, Moldova's economy has shrunk by nearly 40 per cent. Hundreds of thousands of its 4.5 million people - mainly the young - have left to work as farm labourers, construction workers and maids in Europe, most of them illegally.
And then there is Marina, a victim of a Europe-wide network of trafficking in young girls for the sex industry. Aid agencies say that over the past decade up to 1,000 girls a year have been trafficked from Moldova into western saunas and sex bars. Many also end up in brothels in the Middle East and in Turkey.
Two months ago Marina (an assumed name) managed to escape from a brothel she was being held captive in in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. She is now back in Moldova, receiving treatment in a refuge for trafficked women run by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), a Swiss-based group founded after the second World War to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants and refugees.
Marina's hands go into frequent shaking spasms as she tells how, for the past two-and-a- half years, she was bought and sold by pimps and bar owners throughout the Balkans, traded like a modern-day slave.
She smokes constantly. "I was 17 when I left my home in the village and went to the city looking for work. Both my parents drank a lot and were always arguing. In Chisinau (Moldova's capital) I saw a newspaper advert looking for girls to work abroad and met a well-dressed lady who talked about a job in Italy as a housekeeper and babysitter with a salary of $500 per month. She said she would arrange a passport and all the travel."
Marina never made it to Italy. With another girl she was taken by car to the border and then by train to Timisoara, in the west of Romania, where she was locked in an apartment, her passport and other papers taken from her.
"A man and woman brought us meals but would not let us out. We were not allowed to even turn on the TV in case we were discovered. There were about 20 girls altogether. One night at 4 a.m. some Serb men came . . . " Her voice trails off. She struggles, shaking, to light another cigarette.
Liuba Revenko, IOM's manager in Chisinau, says a few girls might realise early on what's happening, but most are so desperate for jobs in the West they ignore the danger signs.
"Most are simple girls from the villages. We've found that in the majority of cases these girls are initially recruited by women - often people they know and trust. In Timisoara, which traffickers seem to use as a gathering point for girls from around the region, there's a market where women are literally bought and sold like tomatoes or cabbages.
"A buyer might pay up to $3,000 for a young virgin, but the average rate is about $1,000 for each girl. It's only when all this is going on the girls finally are faced with reality. They are in a foreign place. They've no papers. They don't speak the language. They can't escape."
Marina was taken first to Belgrade in Serbia and then on a long overnight bus journey south to Kosovo. Then they were given to a man who drove them to Pristina. Marina and the other girls worked in a small hotel/bar. The bar owner would charge clients $50 an hour for time with the girls. Over recent years tens of thousands of international peacekeeping troops have arrived in the Balkans, providing one of the key stimuli for the trafficking business.
Marina won't talk about the men she was forced to have sex with or the frequency of such encounters. "Most of the girls who return have great difficulty relating their experiences - it's as if it's too terrible to mention," says Dr Viorel Gorceag, a doctor at the refuge in Moldova.
"But often their treatment is so barbaric it's hard to believe. We had one case where a woman in a brothel in Italy had all her teeth broken to perform oral sex scenes in a porno movie.
"In some cases, girls are forced to have sex up to 35 times a day. There was a girl who joked that if she laid out all the men she had to go with, it would be like a railway line, stretching all the way from Moldova to Belgrade."
After four months, Marina was taken back to Belgrade and resold to a bar where she had to do striptease and was forced to drink with customers.
"We find some girls who escape are virtual alcoholics," says Dr Gorceag. "Either that or they start taking drugs. And of course most have some form of sexual disease or are malnourished and weak after being held captive for so long."
Over the following months Marina was bought and sold three times by various Belgrade bar owners. At no time was she given any money. "The owners would always say that first I had to pay them back $1,000 - what I cost them - and I was never given my papers."
After a few more months Marina was resold to a brothel owner in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. "A man who lived in Vienna but visited Sarajevo each week bought me out of that bar and put me in an apartment.
"At first he was kind and gave me nice things. But he said I must never leave and he kept my passport. Then after two months he stopped calling. The rent was due on the apartment. A girl I had met told me about an aid organisation in Sarajevo which would help. I escaped."
Within Moldova widespread corruption and weak judicial processes mean little has been done to stop the sex trade. An anti-trafficking law was finally enacted in mid 2001, but so far, out of more than 400 cases brought to court, only two have resulted in convictions.
Ala Mindicanu, an opposition politician, says the justice system in Moldova has been corrupted. "But the problem is just not here," she says. "I'm sorry to say it but it's bullshit for officials in Europe to always point the finger at us. What about those who actually buy these girls? How many of them are ever prosecuted?
"It's too easy for Europe to wring its hands and see trafficking as just a Moldovan problem. It's your problem as well."