While I'm excited to be finishing this series so I can move on to filling you all in on my time in Africa, this post may be the most difficult of the three. In this part I will be talking about the two European source countries that I visited: Bulgaria and Romania. Though there are many organizations and people doing incredible work in these countries, something about the situation felt particularly hopeless to me. In transit and destination countries, of course, this is a complicated situation, but I can see a reasonable (though expensive and diffiicult) solution. Make trafficking a higher risk crime and take better care of victims once rescued.
In source countries, however, it's a little more complicated. The first stages of sexual exploitation are firmly rooted in large-scale issues like poverty, lack of education, gender discrimination, and family issues. There is no silver bullet for these issues. That's why I felt a hopelessness.
The way I see it, though, the more people hear about the problem, the more likely someone smart enough to start fixing it will come along. And so I write this difficult post with a purpose.
