Children trafficked in Hungary

Police in Szabolcs-Szatmár county in Hungary have arrested three men on charges of trafficking two minors into prostitution. The two girls aged 14 and 15 were forced into a car in the eastern town of Nyíregyháza and then held captive in a flat. Anna Betlen, an independent expert on human trafficking in Hungary said that there was very little data available to assess the scale of the problem in Hungary, but that she knew that there was a lot of trafficking going on;
“You only need to spend a few minutes on the internet to find sex adverts on Hungarian sites with pictures that are clearly of minors,”, all of whom have been trafficked. NGOs in the country complain that the police often do not take complaints seriously enough and that there is a lack of training in recognising the signs of human trafficking. Judit Wirth of Women for Women Against Violence said that their hotline had “ calls from minors themselves, and sometimes friends, relatives or family members call telling us about a girl they think has been trapped in a similar way,”. The hotline has received more than 40 such calls.
On June 30, the Pest county court in Hungary convicted eight men of trafficking women, some of whom were minors, into Spain to be used as prostitutes. Hungary clearly has a problem with women and children being trafficked internally and also across borders.