Traffic in sex slaves could rise if Britain rejects European anti-vice strategy
- The Observer,
- Article history
Campaigners against sex trafficking call today for a major crackdown on the thousands of brothels in Britain amid accusations that government indifference to the issue is encouraging pimps to target the UK.
The demand comes 10 days after a Romanian father and son, Bogdan, 51, and Marius Nejloveanu, 23, were given jail sentences for trafficking five young women to England. Marius repeatedly raped and beat the women and received the longest sentence for trafficking offences in the UK, 21 years.
One of the women, Marinela Badea, was trafficked in 2008 aged 17 and forced to work in massage parlours and saunas in the Midlands and Manchester. In a shocking interview with the Observer, she described a life of regular rape, brutal beatings and sex with paying clients up to 12 times a day. When she tried to escape, she was savagely punished. "I got punched, a knife in my head, my hair was pulled until it came out," she said.
Europol, the EU criminal intelligence agency, confirmed to the Observer that minors were still being trafficked to Britain and warned that the issue of pan-European trafficking remained a "big" problem. Charities have criticised falling prosecution rates for trafficking.
Abigail Stepnitz, national co-ordinator for the Poppy Project support service, said police should urgently target the brothels masquerading as saunas, massage parlours and private flats. Almost 6,000 have been identified in England and Wales.
Stepnitz said: "The focus on trafficking has been to remove immigration offenders or to prosecute organised criminal networks. From our experience the focus has not neccessarily been on addressing the presence of brothels that create an environment where trafficking can thrive. That has never been the focus."
The last major crackdown, Operation Pentameter 2 in 2008, saw 822 premises visited and the arrest of more than 528 individuals.
Fears are growing among campaigners that ministers appear intent on downgrading trafficking as a priority, a charge denied by the government. In addition, they accuse ministers of attempting to sideline the issue by removing trafficking from the government's violence against women and girls strategy. Tomorrow, trafficking campaigners are due to attend the Home Office for a 90-minute consultation on a proposed new trafficking strategy.
On Wednesday, the government is expected to come under further attack from health experts and MPs at a conference focusing on trafficking issues, entitled Stopping Traffick. Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper will condemn the government's decision not to sign up to the EU Directive on Human Trafficking. Cooper believes coalition leaders David Cameron and Nick Clegg are sending the wrong signal to traffickers by not endorsing the directive on common European efforts to combat the trade in sex slaves.
Davide Ellero, senior specialist at Europol, said that minors continued to be trafficked for sex to the UK. He said: "The problem is big and it stays big. But there are no statistics at European level because every country monitors in a different way."
Source: The Observer
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