At the Different & Equal shelter, a 15-year-old trafficking victim is provided with a personal counselor, resumes her studies, and learns vocational skills to help ensure her reintegration into society.

One of D&E’s residents, Filipa, (not her real name), is considered among the more fortunate because she managed to find her way to D&E, Tirana’s only long-term shelter for trafficked victims.

D&E became an independent and local Albanian NGO with the assistance from USAID’s The Albanian Initiative: Coordinated Action Against Human Trafficking (CAAHT). Among other activities, CAAHT focuses on rehabilitation and reintegration services, like those provided by D&E, to ensure that formerly trafficked victims are not re-trafficked.

“Reintegration is very difficult. There is some re-trafficking,” said Serije Pepa, a D&E social worker who counsels the shelter’s residents. The threats of being re-trafficked are also a pervasive problem.

No one knows the exact number of victims who are re-trafficked. But stories told to counselors and police by victims reveal that those who have no support system when they return to Albania are highly vulnerable to falling prey, again, to traffickers’ ploys. The existence of a shelter such as D&E, which provides a safe haven for victims, can be a significant deterrent to incidents of re-trafficking.

D&E’s reintegration process involves three phases that lasts over a period of several years. During the initial phase, the shelter is focused on providing women with a safe environment and assessing her individual needs. When a young woman is brought to the shelter she is stabilized and undergoes intense counseling. Her psychological and emotional states and level of education and skills are assessed and a plan for her recovery developed.

“Each case is different and so we must mold our techniques to each one,” said Amarilda Nakuçi, a D&E social worker who works directly with shelter residents. “When they arrive at the shelter, they are pessimistic, they think everything is over. Most have suffered emotional and physical abuse. They have poor speech, they are very confused. They’re dependent and act on others’ decisions.”

Like many trafficking victims, Filipa was unaware of the tactics that traffickers used on girls like herself.

“I didn’t know they were traffickers,” said Filipa “We had been neighbors and I didn’t know what they did, I didn’t see them very often. They behaved politely.”

After her father’s death when she was 14, life at home with her mother and an older domineering brother became unbearable. Filipa ran away and spent a few weeks living with a friend. She then met two former neighbors who promised to take her to Greece to join a cousin who was living there. In Greece, however, she was forced to work as a prostitute.

“When asked what they want to talk about, the girls want to know why they had to live through such an experience, why it happened to them,” said Pepa. “When you listen to them, they tell horrible stories.”

Clients are referred to D&E from other shelters which lack long-term facilities or by the police. D&E employs six social workers, two teachers, a psychiatrist, a driver, administrative assistant, job facilitator and an on-call doctor. Each social worker works three day-shifts and one night shift.

In their first 24 hours at the shelter, clients are stabilized – provided with a meal and a shower. Many have spent several days being transferred from immigration officials to the border police and finally to the anti-trafficking police and have not had a proper meal nor a chance to wash themselves.

In Filipa’s case, she was first held by the Greek police and transferred to various authorities until reaching the Albanian anti-trafficking police which sent her to D&E. In general, victims are referred to D&E by the police, other temporary shelters and sometimes religious organizations who take in victims. CAAHT helped gather organizations that work in anti-trafficking so they could share their expertise but also form a network that channels trafficking victims to the appropriate social services agency in the network.

Arriving at the shelter is only the beginning of the long journey victim’s face in rebuilding new lives.

“It’s a long process to independence, clients have to learn how to manage finances, communicate, basic housekeeping,” said Pepa. “If I think of it, my daughter is 14 – she doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t cook, manage her finances, why should these girls – because they are very young also.”

On average, a client’s first phase of reintegration takes six months to a year, although minors such as Filipa can remain in the care of D&E at its shelter until they reach 18. In phase two of the reintegration process, clients are helped in finding jobs and are coached about the interviewing process and their employers’ expectations of them.

In the second phase, a client moves to D&E’s halfway apartments and lives there for a year, maintaining daily contact with shelter staff. Outsiders, even family members, are not permitted in the apartments and the young women have a curfew.

After a year in the halfway apartment, the young women must find her own apartment, subsidized by the shelter for the first three months.

Reintegrated clients sometimes maintain contact with shelter staff members who become like family.

“But we [D&E social workers] discuss how to greet clients who have left the shelter. We have decided that if we run into them, we don’t initiate contact but let them do so,” Nakuci explains. “I had a case. She is now at the Faculty of Social Work. I sometimes see her, we do not talk, she chooses not to, but I think we both feel good about her progress. She is a successful case.”

Asked what she now fears most, Filipa laughs again and answers, “I fear only God.” Filipa also says that during the period she was being trafficked in Greece, she kept herself going by thinking that if she only could call someone they would help her.

She’s very optimistic,” adds Pepa.