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>But collusion can explain only part of the problem. The shocking truth is that Romania became Europe’s sex trafficking factory also because of cultural reasons. The Romanian media themselves to admit it: well-known prostitutes and escorts are VIPs, they are often invited on television programs and shows, their social media accounts are followed by tens of thousands of people, especially youth and the public morality is increasingly tolerant towards prostitution. A rising number of Romanians have started to see them as “smart girls” that have found a way to make money.
>Bucharest’s city center is now full of striptease clubs, sex shops, and underground sex houses, while prostitution and procuring are now popular themes of pop music, rap and Manele. The latter is a Roma-originated music genre which is now recognized countrywide and whose singers, mostly of Roma origin, tend to romanticize prostitution, procuring, sexual objectification, misogyny, and criminal lifestyles. The most famous Manelists, like Florin Salam and Dani Mocanu have also dedicated many songs to known and sentenced gangsters who sometimes appear in their videos and their songs are often sources of scandal.
>According to the most recent reports and studies on the prostitution phenomenon in Romania, families, close friends, and boyfriends are to be considered responsible for the majority of human trafficking cases in the country. A 2019 study has discovered that 49% of trafficked women are “sold” by the family and 9% are sold by the partner, and it’s not unusual for parents to sold their own girls to traffickers when they are still children: the Open Door Foundation (Fundaţiei Uşa Deschisă) has claimed to have even found cases of 9-year-old kids being sold.
