“Help me. I am a sex slave from Lithuania. Please call the police and protect me,” says a note which the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet got access to this week. It was a terrible view meeting the Danish police when they found the 19-year old Lithuanian girl in a lapidated Copenhagen apartment this week. The woman stayed in very miserable conditions.

“The kitchen was, in my opinion not suitable for people and there were cockroaches everywhere. Moreover, we found evidence that someone had managed to fit a padlock on the outside of the door into the woman's room,” says Trine Møller Andersen, head of the Copenhagen Police group against women trafficking.

The young Lithuanian woman lived in an inhuman nightmare in which she had been kept as a sex slave.

When she was not serving sex clients, who apparently could not feel the soggy conditions in the 'sex-nest', she lived in a spartan, unhygienic room with only a mattress on the floor and old, dirty bed linens full of cockroaches.

Outside the room the door was mounted a bracket made ready so it could put a padlock on - if the sex slave should get ideas about escaping.

But the woman had still succeeded in sending a cry for help to a friend in Lithuania over the Internet and asked her to contact the Lithuanian police to tell that she was incarcerated against her will.

And after the Copenhagen police on Monday received an official request from the Lithuanian police via Europol, they soon found the woman's 'prison'.

Help me
And it was a depressing sight that met them in the apartment where the woman lived and served men that her pimp brought to her.

The 19-year-old woman began to cry, but when she found out that it was the police, she gave a handwritten note to the female police officer who found her, which in English told that she was kept as a sex slave, that she wanted to contact the police and that she did not speak English. The woman's pimp, a Lithuanian 36-year old man, was also found on the site.

He was arrested and charged with violation of Penal Code provisions on trafficking. He was remanded in custody for four weeks in Copenhagen.

Miserable conditions
“The woman was in physically fine form. She had not been beaten. But she was shocked and scared and very influenced by the situation,” says Trine Møller Andersen, leader of the group against woman trafficking at the Copenhagen Police. She had never seen a similar case, since she started in the group in 2008.

The much older perpetrator had recruited the woman in Lithuania. Here he had got her drunk and had persuaded her to go to Denmark and work as a prostitute with the promise of good earnings as a pawn.

The man then transported her to Denmark and placed her in an apartment in a Copenhagen district, where she also served customers. The perpetrator found the customers, and the woman got only a very small payment. The woman had lived in Denmark for little over a week when the police found her.

The young woman from Lithuania is now at a women’s shelter. She will later return home to Lithuania in accordance with her own wish.

“It's the classic story of these women who do not have the longest school education and who are in desperate need of money, so they can be lured here,” tells Trine Møller Andersen to Ekstrabladet.

20% of Lithuanian victims are underage girls
Lithuania is a source, transit, and destination country for women and children trafficked for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation. One estimate concluded that approximately 20 percent of Lithuanian trafficking victims are underage girls. Lithuanian women are trafficked within the country and to the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, France, and the Czech Republic for the purpose of forced prostitution. Women from Belarus are trafficked to Lithuania for the same purpose.

- U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June, 2009 [full country report]