"Women and Children for Sale" by Caroline Moorehead

Trafficking: "The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation." —The <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Palermo</st1:place></st1:City> Protocol to the UN Convention Against Transnational Crime, 2000

What Nita remembers about the day the Serb militia took her from her house in Pristina to a camp and raped her was that it was cold, and that snow was on the ground. She's forgotten whether it was just before or just after Christmas in 1996, the year when fighting broke out between Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army. Too many terrible things have happened to her in the last ten years; they have, she says, clouded her mind. In 1996 Nita was eighteen, married with an eight-month-old daughter, living close to her widowed father and her seven-year-old sister. The Serb militia who came for her took away the baby and the little girl, and led her husband, Milau, and her father off to another camp. Nita was repeatedly raped, along with seven other women, for four days, before being put into a car and thrown out near the Albanian border, joining thousands of terrified people fleeing the Serbs. In Tirana, there were people willing to give help to the refugees. During the next few weeks the man who took Nita into his apartment drove her from refugee camp to camp, so that she could search for her lost family. There was no trace of any one of them.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20654