So what happened here? The women arrived back in Georgia, they’re labeled as whores. Their husbands leave them, their families are embarrased over them. They claim they were tourists, they claim they were treated poorly by Finnish officials? Did the Finnish authorities screw this up bigtime?

“I wanted to visit my sister’s family in Italy”, one of the women, Nato Portshkhidze, said to Helsingin Sanomat

Then how’d you wind up in Finland!? Did the bus miss an exit on the highway or something? Did they have the map upside maybe?

Now I haven’t seen to much other info on this situation, but here’s my guess as to what happened: The women came into “Europe” (via Finland) to work. They got busted. But the Finnish authorities didn’t think they were workers, they thought they were hookers. Word about this made it home to Georgia and now the entire family and neighborhood is ashamed, dishonored, or whatever. So the women had two options:

1) Say nothing – all your family, friends, and neighbors will think you’re prostitutes.
2) Get really pissed off and go public – this brings doubt into everyone’s mind, “maybe they’re not prostitutes afterall!”

They choose option #2 and it appears to be working out for them. As much as I’d like to think the Finnish authorities made asses of themselves, I have to question what really happened. But why did the Finnish customs authorities call the media in for this? Don’t people get turned away from the border all the time? After the recent (VERY recent) outcry over human trafficking, were the Finnish authorities trying to prove to the public that they’re actually working hard to stop this illegal activity?

Any thoughts on this? Think I’m on to something or am I completely off?

Pictured above, Pati Portshkhidze says she thought that she was going on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to Europe – she got quite upset when she was told that they arrived in Finland, and not Europe like she expected.