"My name is L., and I am from Elbasani. Four years ago I was in the 8th grade, and I had a very normal life, a calm girlhood, loving parents, and many friends. It happened that I was in love with somebody, a man who was 10 years older than me, and he taught me things I didn't know before. Because I loved him very much, I accepted many things he said and did.

Lena: I got sold by Bulgarians. They brought me to the Macedonian border and sold to Grigorij.

Q: How did the traffickers get you to Tetovo?

Q: How was it at your home?

Lena: I was not in school for four years now. My mother is in Turkey, my father is here, but I was with my grandmother. 1998 I ran away.

"My name is M. I was born in Korce in Albania in 1984. I lived with my family in the outskirts of Korce. Last summer when I was walking to a friend's house a car drew by and two men offered to drive me to my friend's house. One of the men was a cousin of my brother's friend. Instead of driving me to my friend's place, they took me to a house in Vlore, where a few other girls were staying. They told me that my brother wanted me to go to Italy, where I could work for an Albanian family and earn money to support my family. They also threatened me that bad things could happen to my family if I would resist them or try to run away.

"I'll call myself Maria in this story. This is a real story about my life and I am not the only one who could be named that name. There are many Marias like I am and that is the reason to bring this story to daylight - to stop 'Maria's Story' happens again. I come from a little village in Albania where my parents and my sisters still live. They probably think I am dead, and I hope so. It is easier than the truth; I have done things they never can imagine. I shall never see them again.

It was an offer she couldn’t refuse: a job as a maid in Spain for $200 a week. But when Marina Urena arrived in Madrid, she was taken to a bar and forced to become a sex slave.

Back home in the Dominican Republic, Urena tells her story to warn other young women who are recruited to work in Europe. Despite the risk, thousands go...

"I was born in 1981 in the Ukraine's Poltava region. I had never known who my father was. My grandmother told me that he had worked at the collective farm and had died there during the fire. My mother died after the Chernobyl catastrophe when I was 5 years old and my grandmother brought me up. I studied at school and worked hard at the collective farm.

"I paid a man 350 German marks (approximately U.S. $162) to go to Greece since I had no papers. Instead, he brought me to Greece and sold me to a bar. He told me he would kill me if I left. We could not leave the house. There were twelve women, all of us from fifteen to twenty years old. The place was clean. We slept with a lot of men, ten men a day.

"My name is Marsha, and I am from Southern Russia. In 1996, when I was 24, I visited St. Petersburg. I was preparing to return home to my village, waiting at the train station one day when a woman approached me. She started talking with me about life problems, encouraging me to share mine with her. We had a nice talk, and the woman suggested that she could help me to get work somewhere abroad. She told me she had an acquaintance in Germany, a woman who could connect me with a family for whom I could be a housemaid.