Sex traffic

Danielle was excited at the prospect of leaving her home in Lithuania for a summer job in Britain at the age of 15. The work had been arranged through a friend who was unable to join Danielle until later and so put her in touch with a man who would take her to London.

Danielle suspected nothing until the stranger took her passport once they passed through customs and left her with two Albanians and a Lithuanian woman. It turned out that she had been sold for [pound]3,500. The "holiday job" was working in a brothel in Birmingham.

"I was terrified but didn't know how I could escape. I spoke no English and knew no one," says Danielle who did eventually flee back home to Vilnius but is still terrified of the traffickers. She is now 18. Thousands of children have been sold into sexual slavery in Britain according to human rights organisations, and many, like Danielle, have been trafficked from abroad. Until now, exact figures on the scale of this abuse have not been available. But a report published by social research charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) tomorrow says the figure is 5,000 and most are girls. The study reveals that, 200 years after the slave trade was officially abolished, trafficking for sexual exploitation, domestic servitude and enforced labour is destroying young lives.

Police and human rights or-ganisations warn that coercing vulnerable people into degrading or low-paid work and holding them against their will has increased massively over the past nine years. Cheap travel, the lure of easy profits and increased demand for sex services are all factors that have turned the modern slave industry into a [pound]5bn-a-year business, second only to the illegal drugs trade.

Nearly half of those trafficked end up being sold for sex; these are overwhelmingly women and children. The typical age of a trafficked woman is between 18 and 23 but many are passed off as 18- year-olds when they are actually younger. More than three-quarters of women working in off-street massage parlours have been trafficked into prostitution. The men who control them will make them have sex with 10 clients a day then pass them on over and over again to other slavemasters. Threats of violence against their families guarantee their silence.

Trafficking gangs have a firm foothold in the poorest countries, including parts of Africa and Eastern Europe, where people can be ensnared by the promise of a better life.

Italy and Spain have always been the popular destinations for Romanian traffickers. But the UK is fast emerging as a new market. Exploiting women for sex is big business in Romania where the average wage is [pound]100 a month. Here pimps are known as "fish",re especially in the small town of Cernavoda, tucked away in the country's poor south-eastern corner, where many of the town's single male inhabitants, and even married ones, have turned to pimping. The main legitimate source of employment is working at the nuclear plant whose reactors dominate the town's skyline. But jobs here are scarce and only for those who pass school exams.

On the street the pimps wear gold jewellery, designer biker jackets and drive top-of-the-range Audis and BMWs, which attract instant attention in a town where the traditional forms of transport are the horse-and-cart and patched-up Ladas.

For the women of Cernavoda who end up in the sex industry, there are no similar material rewards. Many of the young girls are from large Romany families and grow up in desperate poverty. Few can afford to attend school. As soon as they reach their teens, they become easy targets for men who reel them in with outings in their smart cars and promise them a glamorous future. All you have to do, say the Romeos of Cernavoda, is go abroad and make money for me then we can live happily ever after in a nice apartment.

Except there is no "happy ever after". The girls here are not nave - poverty and deprivation have made them prematurely streetwise. But few expect to be beaten with electric cables, abused by the men who buy their services or forced to hand over their earnings to a middle-man.

Often theirfamilies do not object to this sex trade if it means that hungry stomachs are filled back home. But on their return, attitudes can shift;everyone knows that they have been selling themselves to any stranger who will pay [euro]50 an hour.

Home for 20-year-old Beatrice is a ramshackle house shared with her mother and eight young siblings. Two years ago, she worked in a brothel in Spain.

"I can never have a loving relationship now with a man because he would know about my past," she explains through an interpreter. "Even if I wanted to forget about what happened, I never could. I'd do anything to stop my children doing what I did but I may have to go back if my family needs money."

Beatrice's tale is depressingly familiar to David Savage who gave up a well-paid job in Britain to run the Nightingales children's charity. When he first came to Cernavoda, Mr Savage organ-ised classes for children whose families could not afford school. But out of a class of 10 teenage girls, only one finished her education - all the rest ended up in prostitution. His concern is that trafficking is getting worse and there are few alternatives for these girls or for the men, including their own brothers and husbands, who sell them.