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A young single mother living in Prague meets a nice-looking guy while she’s waiting tables in a bar, and eventually accepts his invitation to meet him in Vienna.

A 16-year-old girl in Kiev, bridling at her father’s strict rules, auditions for a modeling job that promises a chance at glamor, money, and travel.

A 12-year-old American girl, vacationing with her parents in Manila, wanders away from her mother while shopping at a crowded street bazaar.

Three females, each from a different part of the world, and they don’t seem to have much in common, but in a chilling Lifetime cable network miniseries called Human Trafficking, all of them are destined to become victims of a widespread but largely overlooked form of modern-day slavery — the international trafficking of women and children who are forced into prostitution.

The three victims are among the focal points of the two-night, four-hour miniseries, which premieres tomorrow night at 9 on the basic cable channel. The second two-hour installment runs the following night at the same time.

The program, Lifetime’s first original miniseries, stars Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite, Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion) and veteran actor Donald Sutherland (M*A*S*H, Ordinary People) as a pair of federal agents out to crack a sex trafficking ring operated by a brutal Russian mobster (Robert Carlyle, Trainspotting, The Full Monty).

While some of the details in the program are fictional, the stories on which they are based are all too real. According to the U.S. government, close to 1 million people — most of them women and children — are taken across international borders against their will each year. Many wind up being forced into prostitution in brothels around the world, including a surprising number in the United States.

Among the law enforcement agencies that are now devoting more resources to trying to curb human sex trafficking is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a branch of the federal Department of Homeland Security, which cooperated extensively with the series’ executive producer, Robert Halmi, Sr. (The Lion in Winter, Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven).

VIRTUAL SLAVES

In Part 1 of Human Trafficking, viewers meet Sergei Karpovich (Carlyle), a sophisticated but ruthless Russian crime boss whose legitimate international businesses of modeling and marriage brokering are elaborate fronts for his worldwide sex trafficking organization, which brings in millions of dollars every week.

Most of Karpovich’s brothels are in quiet neighborhoods, some of them residential, and neighbors have no clue that a dozen or more females are kept in the houses, where they are beaten, terrorized, and forced to engage in soulless sex acts with paying customers a dozen or more times a day. They are virtual slaves, never allowed outside the houses except when they’re being transported to different locations by their captors.

Viewers are also introduced to Helena (Isabelle Blais), the single mother from Prague who is seduced by romance; fresh-faced, 16-year-old Nadia (Laurence Leboeuf), thrilled that she has been hired for what she thinks is a glamorous modeling job abroad, and 12-year-old Annie (Sarah-Jeanne Labrosse), whose horrifying ordeal starts when she is snatched off a Manila street to fill a “special order” from one of Karpovich’s clients.

Sorvino — who in her off-screen life serves as an ambassador for Amnesty International’s Stop Violence Against Women Campaign — plays the role of a Russian-born NYPD detective named Kate Morozov, who discerns a pattern when several young eastern European prostitutes commit suicide in New York City.

She convinces ICE senior agent Bill Meehan (Sutherland) to hire her and assign her to an ongoing case involving a sex trafficking ring that’s been shipping girls into the U.S. and forcing them into prostitution.

As Sutherland’s character says at one point: "[Traffickers] bring these young women into this country and they brutalize them until they are dehumanized and destroyed. An ounce of cocaine, you can only sell it once. A woman or child, you can sell them each day, every day, over and over and over again. The markup for women and girls is immeasurable.”

A subsequent raid on a beauty shop that’s actually a brothel nets several prostitutes — among them Helena, who is enlisted to help build a case against Karpovich.

When that plan ends tragically, Sorvino’s character tries another, more dangerous approach in Part 2 of the series. She goes undercover as a Russian mail-order bride in hopes of infiltrating Karpovich’s seamy network, and things eventually come to a head in the basement of a New Jersey strip club.

PARENTAL ADVISORIES

Human Trafficking is not an easy program to watch. Some of its scenes are graphic enough to turn a viewer’s stomach, and the hopelessness, misery, fear, and desperation of the victims are almost palpable. Advisories will caution parents about letting younger children watch.

Director Christian Duguay (The Art of War, Hitler: The Rise of Evil) admits the miniseries is rough on viewers, but says it’s necessary to provide an accurate depiction of its subject.

“We know about prostitution, but when you do research, you discover that hundreds of thousands of women and children are trafficked as sex slaves,” he says. “They are forced into this devastating life under the threat of violence or death to them or their loved ones by the traffickers. It’s a difficult and dark subject.”

That’s not to say it’s not well worth watching, even if it makes you squirm. To its creators’ credit, the series manages to avoid being overly lurid, but it does take an unflinching look at an incredibly ugly and depressing subject.

The miniseries was developed as a result of an ongoing Lifetime campaign called “Stop Violence Against Women,” in which the cable network has formed partnerships with such organizations as Amnesty International USA, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline, Women’s Funding Network, and many more.

Producer Halmi says he hopes the miniseries “will bring this important issue to audiences that may not have even known of the existence of this problem.”

Human rights organizations and others are saluting Lifetime for publicizing the largely hidden trade of international sex slavery.

“We are proud to work with [Lifetime] on some of the most pressing women’s rights issues today, especially the scourge of human trafficking that they’re powerfully highlighting in their miniseries,” says Adotei Akwei of Amnesty International USA.

“Sex trafficking … is one of the most gruesome human rights violations,” adds Ohio Congressman Deborah Pryce, (R., Columbus.) “But sadly, most people aren’t aware of it; Lifetime television is helping us to change that.”

Pryce is among the sponsors of legislation such as the End Demand for Sex Trafficking Act of 2005, aimed at toughening law enforcement and assisting victims, and the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005, which addresses the abuse of foreign women by American men they meet through international marriage brokers.

The first two-hour installment of the original miniseries "Human Trafficking” premieres on the Lifetime cable network tomorrow at 9 p.m., with Part 2 running on Tuesday at 9 p.m.

Contact Mike Kelly at: mkelly@theblade or 419-724-6131.

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