The following are excerpts:

SAN FOCA, Italy...Traffickers are luring migrant women and girls fleeing 
poverty into forced prostitution in Europe. Italy is enlisting the victims to 
fight back against the pimps.

...Italy is leading the new approach, driven by alarm over an influx of 
Eastern European and African prostitutes since the late 1990s and by the 
coercive violence of the foreign pimps who bring them. Police say 168 foreign 
prostitutes were killed in Italy last year.

Pope John Paul II embraced a tearful former prostitute from Nigeria on 
Italian television last year. Hundreds of volunteers across the country help 
"rescue" trafficked women, aided by a 24-hour, government-run hotline that 
has fielded tens of thousands of calls.

Today, about 30,000 foreign women, 12,000 of them younger than 18, are being 
forced to work as prostitutes in Italy, according to the Roman Catholic 
relief agency Caritas.

Under a revision of Italy's immigration law that has been in force since late 
1999, more than 2,000 immigrants have obtained residency permits after 
breaking away from their pimps. Belgium and the Netherlands have extended 
such permits to a few hundred trafficking victims...

Treating them more as rape victims than criminals, Italy, Belgium and the 
Netherlands now offer shelter, protection and residency permits to trafficked 
prostitutes so they can help identify and prosecute their exploiters. Italy 
also offers schooling, job training and employment to help them start new 
lives.

The United States, also witnessing a sharp rise in sex trafficking from Asia 
and Latin America, drew on the three European countries' experiences as it 
drafted an anti-trafficking bill that passed Congress in October.... 

...In Italy, where... testimony (of prostitutes) was almost unheard of two 
years ago, the women have helped identify about 1,500 pimps and traffickers, 
the Interior Ministry says. At least 800 suspects are under arrest, facing up 
to 10 years in prison if convicted.

"Reading page after page of testimony by these girls, you begin to understand 
fully what a vile, disturbing enterprise we are up against," said Demetrio 
Missineo, an Interior Ministry official... 

Clans of violent Albanian traffickers who also smuggle cigarettes and drugs 
have been the sex trade's dominant force since 1997, when the collapse of 
Albania's pyramid investment schemes and the country's descent into anarchy 
triggered a surge of westbound migration...

With strong footholds in coastal Italy, investigators say, the Albanians have 
a reach that is rivaled only by that of the Nigerian underworld, which 
dominates Europe-bound sex traffic from Africa. Italy's home-grown 
Mafias...shun the trade...

Although immigrant traffickers from more than a dozen countries use violence 
to hold women in bondage in Western Europe, according to the study, the 
Albanians are notoriously brutal... 

...Father Cesare Lodeserto, a Catholic priest with a bodyguard's physique and 
intimidating glare...(operates) Regina Pacis refuge on the Adriatic shore. 
The fortress-like building, protected by police, harbors 80 other Eastern 
European women who are cooperating with authorities against the sex 
traffickers.

The traffickers are starting to feel the heat. Two armed Albanians cornered 
the priest at gunpoint on the beach early this year and warned him to stop 
messing with their "merchandise." He was not intimidated...

Italy and Belgium are lobbying... the 15-nation European Union (for) uniform 
laws against human trafficking... (and) protection for victims....

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The following are excerpts from an adjoining article, same subject, same 
author:

ANOTHER CHANCE WITH SISTER MARIA'S HELP
Italy: Government-funded effort allows trafficked women to rebuild lives 
so they can collaborate with investigators.

UDINE, Italy -- The 12 Eastern European women here at Sister Maria del 
Rosario Bolanos' boarding house are... part of a $5-million, 
government-funded rescue effort that is offering at least 2,000 trafficked 
women independent lives in Italy so they can help police fight the 
multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. About 200 volunteer agencies are 
involved... 

Sister Maria oversees one of 65 such homes run by Caritas, a Roman Catholic 
relief agency, and has a near-perfect record: 70 trafficked women have come 
under her care, Caritas says, and just one has returned to prostitution...