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Up to 12,000 foreign 'sex slaves' work in British brothels
Up to 12,000 foreign women are being forced to work as “sex slaves” in British brothels by criminal gangmasters running multi-million pound rackets, police have disclosed.
By Richard Edwards, Crime Correspondent
Published: 3:34PM BST 18 Aug 2010
A new report commissioned by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) revealed for the first time the true scale of immigration prostitution and trafficking. At least 2,600 women were confirmed as being trafficked into England and Wales and forced to work as prostitutes, it found.
<!-- BEFORE ACI --> A further 9,200 sex workers at brothels and other premises were considered to be "vulnerable migrants" working unwillingly in the sex trade, but whom researchers could not be certain had been trafficked. Half of the women are Chinese, police said, with the majority of others from Eastern European and other south east Asian nations. In a typical example, a woman smuggled into the UK does not know that she is going to be used as a prostitute, but is forced into selling her body to pay off a £30,000 “debt-bond”.
Often she and her family back home are threatened with violence. The victim will work in a brothel for seven days a week, sleeping with dozens of men, until she has “repaid” the loan. Police involved in the two-year study, called Project Acumen, found a total of 17,000 of the 30,000 women involved in the off-street sex trade are foreign born.
However it also found significant regional differences - from 96 per cent of prostitutes in London being migrants to only 32 per cent in Yorkshire and the Humber. The largest number of brothels was found in London (2,103), followed by Yorkshire and the Humber (534), the South East (426) and the West Midlands (342).
Police chiefs admitted they were surprised by the number of Chinese prostitutes across the country. Mohib Rahman, a Home Office official, said: “We need to step up our efforts and to do more to get a handle on why so many people are trafficked from China.” Officers admitted the findings were incomplete estimates that may miss brothels that advertised in other languages or only accepted clients by invitation.
They said although some women were subjected to kidnap, rape and imprisonment, others were effectively "self employed". Chris Eyre, the Nottinghamshire Deputy Chief Constable who is the national lead on migration crime, said: "Human trafficking for sexual exploitation involves the most extreme abuse of individuals in our communities.
"We recognise that Project Acumen focuses on only one area of trafficking, but it clearly sets out the scale of the problems that those in law enforcement, victim support, social care and border protection, collectively face. "It provides us with a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of how migrant women are involved in prostitution, how they are influenced, controlled, coerced, exploited and trafficked.”
