Associate Professor Aurelijus Gutauskas, Mykolas Romeris University, Law Faculty,. Criminal Law and Criminology Department
Head of the Department

By Aurelijus Gutauskas

Human trafficking has taken a new form as some victims agree to travel to countries with higher standards of living and engage in voluntary prostitution. The women's social vulnerability (unemployment, absence of income) and absence of other information results in their allowing others to take half of their income. Human trafficking is organized and committed not only by Organized Criminal Groups (OCGs) but also, in some regions of Lithuania, by individuals with no direct connections with OCGs.

Human trafficking involves recruiting people (by deception or telling the truth), organizing transportation (by finding ways to forge documents and arrange transport), and searching for locations in which to sell and receive profit. Payment is sometimes extracted from the person's earnings.

Victims of human trafficking are usually women aged 18 to 24. They are recruited through modeling agencies, radio shows, online dating, social networks such as Facebook and other websites, and often voluntarily leave their home countries.

Cases are known in which women are offered legal jobs (as waitresses and dancers), but once transported abroad they are forced to provide sexual services. Violence is also often used to make them work and to intimidate others. Search and recruitment is conducted by low-level members of the OCGs. Women are not only recruited by procurers but also by working prostitutes who receive rewards of up to 600 euros for a new woman.

Poland is one of the main transit countries through which persons are carried, but persons were also carried through Latvia, Germany, and the Czech Republic (using land transport where there was no internal border control). The destination countries are states with higher standards of living, whose economies are more stable, and where there is a demand for cheap labor and sexual services (e.g., Germany).

Employment, dating, and modeling agencies, recreation centers, nightclubs, rented flats, and hotels are used to commit these criminal acts. The establishment of LBSs is often planned along with the criminal activity being organized. Companies are set up in the names of other, often antisocial, persons. LBSs are established not only in Lithuania but also in the countries in which criminal acts are committed.

Favorable conditions for these criminal acts are created by tolerant national legislation, scarce state control, and the demand for sexual services and cheap labor in the destination countries.

The commission of these criminal activities is conditioned by complicated economic situations and high levels of unemployment in Lithuania. The reason OCGs participate in these criminal acts may be that they offer low risk and high profits. The proceeds of this crime are invested in legal business, and so destabilize the economy of the state.