Another Chance With Sister Maria’s Help

UDINE, Italy —  The 12 Eastern European women here at Sister Maria del Rosario Bolanos’ boarding house are college age and older, but their rooms are full of dolls and stuffed animals.

They’re trying to recover a childhood, the nun says, that was cut short when sex traffickers forced them into prostitution.

The shelter is 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. They coax foreign prostitutes off the street or take them off the hands of police who have rounded them up. They give the women lodging, meals, medical care, Italian language lessons, schooling and placement in jobs such as making pizzas or assembling cellular phones.

Here’s how it works: If an immigrant says she is being coerced to remain a prostitute and her story checks out, she can qualify for an Italian residency permit. But she must then spend at least two years under close supervision in a state-approved shelter.

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.

The Spanish-born nun instructs her lodgers on how a young woman should dress and enforces a 10 p.m. curfew. She arranges house calls by a psychiatrist and tries to protect the women from themselves. (Obsessed with cleansing away their past, she explains, “it is common that they use very hot water in the shower and burn their skin.”)

The rescue effort is based on trust between police and caretaker agencies, and Sister Maria reminds her lodgers that they are expected to collaborate with investigators. Nearly all do, and the pimps are fighting back. A gift-wrapped box delivered to an Albanian teenager in care of Caritas contained a dead rat.

“In Albania, it means ‘You will return home dead,’ ” said Annarita de Nardo, the Caritas coordinator here. Shelter operators now ask police to check out suspicious gentleman callers--especially Albanians with expensive cars.