The Woman Who Rescued Romania’s Trafficked Girls—And Won’t Back Down

On a quiet March morning, 65-year-old Iana Matei sinks into her couch, a rare moment of stillness. But peace never lasts long. The moment a visitor steps inside, she’s in motion, speaking fast and urgently. For 25 years, she ran Romania’s only private shelter for underage victims of sex trafficking, fighting for girls the world preferred to forget.

Romania is a prime hub for human trafficking in Europe. Most trafficked victims are women forced into sex work, both within the country and abroad. Half are underage girls. Once rescued, they end up in foster care centers ill-equipped to handle the trauma of sexual exploitation, according to the latest U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report.

In the entire country, only one county Child Protection Agency and one NGO were licensed last year to care for trafficking victims. That NGO was Iana Matei’s Reaching Out Romania. 

In September 2024, harassment—from both traffickers and the authorities—forced Iana to close the doors of her shelter. Yet, she isn’t defeated. 

“I’ve helped over one thousand girls— many now married with children. Without my shelter, they wouldn’t be here. How is this defeat?” said Iana. Her voice is steady with unyielding strength. The strength carried her from a refugee camp in Belgrade to a life as a single mother in Australia and, eventually, back to Romania. 

Iana Matei’s story begins in the political turmoil of post-communist Romania. In 1990, at 28, she joined the Golaniad, a student-led protest demanding a ban on former Communist Party leading members from elections. However, the first free elections were won by former communist Ion Iliescu. Weeks later, police attacked protesters, including Iana, who was on a hunger strike in Bucharest’s University Square. 

“It was a blood bath,” Iana told More to Her Story. Her escape was a series of near misses: a locked hotel door, a last-minute taxi rescue, and the chilling realization she had left her ID behind. With miners invited by the newly elected president, hunting down protesters across the city, and police searching for her, she chose to flee Romania. 

Iana left in a stranger’s car towards the Yugoslavian border. Guided by a map, she followed the course of a river for two nights, hid in cornfields, and crawled through ditches until she reached a border marker—communist Romania’s flag on one side, Yugoslavia on the other. 

Then, two teenage Serbian border guards caught her. Iana pleaded her case in Serbian, but she was jailed for 10 days. Her cellmate warned that refugees were routinely sent back to Romania. A jail sentence there would cost her custody of her three-year-old son, Stefan. Desperate, she began another hunger strike, demanding to plead her case to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

It worked. She was moved to a refugee camp in Belgrade, where she received political asylum. Soon after, she reunited with her son, who was smuggled to her by a stranger for $100.

Australia wasn’t Iana’s planned destination. However, when the country accepted the resettlement of refugees from Belgrade’s overcrowded camp, her UNHCR supervisor put her on the list. In 1991, her new life started in Perth.

But years later, a 1998 trip to Romania changed everything. Friends told her about children living in Bucharest’s sewers. She returned to Australia feeling lost.

“I wasn’t working with my whole heart anymore. I kept thinking, why am I here when children suffer in my own country?”

Six months later, she moved back to Romania, planning to stay for a year.

But in 1999, a police officer’s call changed everything. He had three “prostitutes” needing clothes in his office, but when Iana arrived, she found three terrified teenagers, just 14 and 15. Iana listened to their stories of being bought and sold as cattle. She was shocked that no one else seemed disturbed. At that time, Romania had no legal definition of human trafficking—prostitutes weren’t seen as victims by the law or society. 

But Iana believed them. Within a week, while the girls received hospital care, she founded Reaching Out Romania. With $300 from an American missionary friend, she rented a small flat and moved in with them. Her 11-year-old son, Stefan, became a source of comfort. “He would say, ‘Mom, I’m lucky to have you, but they don’t have a mom. I don’t mind sharing you with them,’” Iana told More to Her Story.

Soon, underage victims trafficked from Macedonia and Albania were brought to her shelter. It quickly expanded to house 13 girls. But her fight went beyond its walls. She lobbied for legal reforms, pushing to end the practice of forcing victims to testify before their abusers. She trained local police, challenging their prejudices and teaching them to treat victims with empathy.

Over 25 years, Iana Matei’s shelter transformed the lives of over 1,000 young girls, offering them safety, education, counseling, and, above all, dignity. She saw the fight against human trafficking evolve, but also how traffickers adapted faster than Romanian authorities. The “lover boy” method, a particularly insidious form of recruitment, became a major focus of her work.

“It’s the worst form of recruitment. It’s emotional abuse, and it destroys girls,” she explained. Girls from vulnerable communities are approached by men who promise protection and love. They isolate them from their families, and soon, the girls find themselves in a foreign country, being asked to prove their love by prostituting themselves. “It’s hard for a victim of emotional manipulation to realize she’s not at fault,” Iana adds.

In September 2024, everything changed. Iana closed the shelter after her address was leaked to traffickers by a county-level Child Protection Agency. Traffickers threw rocks at her roof, banged on her door, and destroyed her car. But it wasn’t just the traffickers that led Iana to shut down the shelter. “Maybe I could fight the traffickers, but I couldn’t fight the authorities. They’re more insidious,” she said. 

Iana complains of facing constant harassment, with unannounced inspections and criminal investigation every time a girl runs away, despite the fact that victims of sex trafficking frequently escape from state-run facilities. In 2020, during the pandemic, the Labour Minister visited the shelter and interrogated the underage girls in Iana’s care. This came after Iana publicly accused some state-run foster care centers of pushing children into trafficking networks. A parliamentary investigation later revealed that 40% of missing children come from state-run centers. 

The pressure from both traffickers and authorities took a toll, but to Iana, shutting down the shelter was not a defeat—it was a turning point in the fight.

“I was caring for 12 girls, but there are 200 underage victims every year. I was carrying water with a leaky bucket,” she told More to Her Story. Now, she’s focused on finding more effective ways to fight sex trafficking. 

“Some people ask me when I’m going to retire,” said Iana. “But I think there is much work to be done until I die at age 120. Maybe I will retire at 100.”