Elena was a naive year-old when a man started flirting with her in the market place of her home town in Moldova. She and her mother were near destitute after her father had left home and she believed the handsome stranger when he offered her a job as a waitress at a coastal resort in Montenegro. Instead, she was taken to the Serbian town of Novi Sad, where she was drugged, beaten and repeatedly raped. After a couple of weeks of relentless abuse, stupefied by drink and drugs, she was taken to northern Montenegro, where she was sold as a sex slave.
Elena is just one of countless thousands of young women, some as young as 14, who every year become victims of human trafficking.
It is big business for the gangsters who kidnap the women off the streets of impoverished towns in eastern Europe and the Balkans, or lure them with false promises of work, then beat them into becoming unpaid prostitutes. Many are taken across the Adriatic to Italy, from where they are transported to the brothels of north-western Europe, including Britain.
Some are increasingly being held as captives in brothels used by the army of foreign aid workers now working across the region. Elena was luckier than most. After three years of being sold from one owner to another, police raided the bar where she was imprisoned this summer and she grabbed her chance to escape. She was taken to a secret shelter for victims of trafficking on the outskirts of Podgorica in Montenegro.
Two men were arrested in the bar, including a policeman, Vladan Bakic, who is awaiting trial. This weekend, Elena is on her way back home to Moldova, after spending several weeks at a high-security shelter run by the International Organisation for Migration. Here the lucky few who either escape from their captors or are rescued in police raids can find counselling, medical care and help to return home.
