Perilous Times and Decaying Morality *
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UK Sex trade moves its modern-day slaves into the suburbs*
By David Harrison, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:25am GMT 18/02/2007
Criminal gangs are moving sex slaves out of brothels and into private
houses in an attempt to take the trade "underground" and avoid discovery
by the police.
Senior officers are finding an "alarming" number of young women, mostly
east Europeans aged 18 to 25, held captive in privately owned flats and
houses and forced to have sex with up to 30 "clients" a day.
The gangs are moving hundreds of women out of the "overt" sex industry -
massage parlours and other brothels - and into the "covert" industry,
because it is more lucrative, to increase their control over the
victims, and to make it more difficult for police to find them.
Graeme Maxwell, Yorkshire police's deputy chief constable and programme
director for the UK Human Trafficking Centre, said: "The traffickers and
pimps are taking the girls to rented flats and houses in areas all over
the UK where there is a transient population and neighbours don't really
notice when people move in and out."
Mr Maxwell said the gangs were "ruthless criminals determined to protect
their income from exploiting and abusing young women".
The key to finding the criminals and rescuing the women was "local
intelligence", he said. Beat officers were working to win the trust of
communities and give people the confidence to inform police if they
suspected girls were being held against their will. The trafficked
women, most of whom are lured to Britain with false promises of jobs as
waitresses or au pairs and are routinely beaten and raped, had been
found in rented homes in city centres, including Birmingham, London and
Sheffield, but also in "leafy suburbs".
D S Steve Titterton, the trafficking centre's tactical adviser, said:
"We are finding girls being kept in 'studentland' and other 'bedsit'
areas but also in buy-to-let accommodation in smart residential areas
where the neighbours are used to a high turnover of tenants."
One Ukrainian woman told The Sunday Telegraph last week that she was
duped into coming to Britain on the promise of a job selling ice cream
in London. Instead Tatanya, 25, was taken to a flat in a north London
suburb where she was forced to work as a prostitute from 10am to 10pm
every day and to hand over all of the money to two Albanians, a man and
a woman, towards the £20,000 "cost" of bringing her to England.
Tatanya escaped by jumping from a second-floor window. She went to the
police and, despite death threats to her family in Ukraine, gave
evidence that helped to convict her captors who were jailed for a total
of 25 years.
Police believe the traffickers are going "underground", in part as a
response to Operation Pentameter, a three-month police crackdown last
year in which 232 suspected traffickers were arrested and 84 women
rescued in nationwide raids on brothels.
Pentameter II, a joint operation with several other European countries,
is to be launched later this year.
Thousands of young women - mostly from eastern Europe - are trafficked
to Britain every year and forced into prostitution, a phenomenon blamed
on European Union expansion, lax immigration controls and the UK's
growing sex industry.
Concern over the traffickers' changing tactics comes before a
photographic exhibition on human trafficking which opens at St Paul's
Cathedral in London this week. The exhibition highlights 21st century
slavery to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.
Last month the Government pledged to sign the European Convention
against Human Trafficking, which allows victims to stay in the UK for
six months to recover from their ordeal and prepare to testify against
the traffickers.
Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister, said that the Government would
launch an anti-trafficking "action plan" next month.
2007-02-18
03:31:20
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