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SAID to be the third most profitable criminal activity in the world, human trafficking now stands only behind the illegal drugs and arms trade in the threats to society.
Across Europe, it is estimated that 500,000 people are trafficked every year and most are women and children who are forced into a life of prostitution.
An estimated 1,420 women were trafficked into the UK in 2000. The exact scale of the problem is not known in 2006 but there are fears that this figure could have more than doubled.
Such women often arrive in the UK with the promise of jobs and others come after gangs pose as employment agencies.
There are accounts of these women being raped, threatened, stripped of passports and forced into underground brothels on arrival where they are made to see up to 40 clients a day.
The problem surfaced in Lancashire in March when more than 50 people were arrested in a UK-wide police operation.
Officers rescued 14 women, including a 15-year-old girl, after investigations in Greater Manchester, Hampshire, Lancashire and Northumbria.
On the Fylde coast, the ground-breaking Awaken Project have seen off one trafficker and stubbed out the threat of any more encroaching on Blackpool.
The project, a joint police and social services task force set up to tackle child exploitation, was launched at the back end of 2004 and immediately uncovered a link between Blackpool and Blackburn, where youngsters were being traded through takeaways.
That link was quickly extinguished and Awaken have kept a close eye on the situation to ensure no more emerge.
Det Insp Paul Phillpott, senior investigating officer at the project, said: "There is no problem in Blackpool now but during our initial investigations when Awaken was first launched, we found some suggestion of low-level trafficking between Blackpool and Blackburn.
"We found two such incidents, involving the same youngsters and the same takeaway premises, and the exploitation was quickly stopped.
"It is a situation we keep monitoring and is certainly an issue we are acutely aware of but it seems to be more of a national problem than anything local."
Operation Pentameter, the national crackdown on trafficking launched in February, has found trafficked women are increasingly being moved away from city centre saunas and brothels into suburban houses and flats.
The operation has also found younger victims are being sold around the UK for as much as 8,000 – higher than the previous estimates of 3,000 to 4,000.
Funded by the Home Office, the operation brings together police with the Immigration Service and the new Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).
As part of the crackdown, police have raided more than 400 brothels and massage parlours, leading to the seizures of more than 170,000 and the arrest of 165 people.
A total of 65 women so far have been discovered, with the youngest aged just 15, and another aged 17.
Most trafficked women come from countries such as Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Lithuania with others from China, Thailand African and south American states.
The campaign is encouraging men who use saunas and massage parlours to report their suspicions about trafficked women by using the anonymous Crimestoppers number.
Bernadette Marjoram, chair of Eaves Housing for Women, which includes the Home Office-funded Poppy Project, an initiative providing temporary housing and support to trafficked women, said the accounts of abuse from such women were "harrowing".
"They are very often befriended in their home country and persuaded that coming to the UK will be a better life for them and that they will be able to earn money for their families.
"The women trust the men and believe they are going to a job which is legal. The root of this obviously is poverty and they feel this is a way of improving their situation.
"When they get here, they realise they have been misled and lied to and that they have been trafficked for the purposes of prostitution."
She added: "They are effectively held hostage in rooms where they are physically and mentally abused to break them. Sometimes the physical abuse is very severe and then when they are at their lowest, they are then basically put out to prostitution."
She said the Popppy Project report Sex in the City in 2004 has estimated t Greater London had up to 8,000 trafficked women. She said they believed the problem had grown since then.
The Poppy Project has received 500 referrals since it started in 2003 and has seen a further 120 women through outreach work. More than a third of the women supported by the project were from Lithuania.
Ms Marjoram said she believed the key test of the success of Operation Pentameter would be whether the trafficking rings had been broken.
Up until the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which introduced new offences of trafficking women for sexual exploitation, prosecutions had been rare.
"Operation Pentameter is the start of a process of breaking these gangs and networks through the judicial system," she said.
ben.rossington@blackpoolgazette.co.uk
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Wednesday 30 May 2012
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