Traffic

Traffic, oil on canvas painting

Today is international sex workers' day so I decided to entitle this painting "Traffic". The painting is about young girls being trafficked, raped and forced into prostitution after they've been lied about well paid jobs and they've fell  into the trap. Most of them come from poor families in the villages in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and other countries in the Eastern Europe where there are no jobs and no opportunities, have no access to education and information, are very young and can be easily tricked be cause they don't even know what is behind the beautiful stories about good jobs abroad and happy lives out of poverty. They thing they will work as model, waitress, baby sitter, dancer, massage therapist or anything else except the cruel reality of prostitution and when they get there they realiase they've become sex slaves. They are raped, beaten, not allowed to leave and even killed if they refuse to practice prostitution. They are blamed by society be cause most people don't know they are FORCED to do this, in the first stage by the poverty, them by the pimps who, pretending they will take them out of the nightmare of poverty, offering them a better life, take advantage of the situation and turn them into sex slaves. Some of them raise their kids alone, some have no family, being orphaned from the start and all of them have one thing in common: the extreme poverty and the lack of perspectives.