When I was about nineteen years old my life changed, a lot. The woman who looked after me was killed by members of a cult. I witnessed the murder and knew I could never return home again, as the cult members would try to kill me too. I did not return to the village and later I heard that they had burned down my house, and were hunting for me.

I spent days sleeping in the bushes before running to a church, where I slept for a few nights. But one of the church workers told me the cult members would find me there, and I shouldn’t stay. So I left the church and slept outside for a bit, but the worker again told me I should move on. I was desperate; I didn’t know what to do. Luckily, I was approached by a woman who said that she had heard what had happened and would help me. She said she would take me to a safe place. I was so grateful as I knew if I returned to the village I would be killed.

The lady drove me to another town and I stayed with her for a while. I was told not to leave the room or talk to anyone in case the cult found me. I was afraid, so I stayed in my room. The woman and a man friend brought me some clothes and took pictures of me. I thought that was strange but the woman was treating me well so I trusted that I was still safe. She told me that she would take me abroad, to help me escape the cult, and she gave me a fake passport. She told me I had to use a different name because of the cult; she said it was too dangerous to use my real name any more. She and her friend kept on telling me how important it was that I memorised the name and date of birth details on the new passport.

After a few weeks the woman and I went to the airport. The woman told me not to speak to her until the plane had landed and we were outside the airport. I didn’t know why.

When we arrived in the UK she took me to a house where she told me that I would have to have sex with men for money, as it had cost her a lot to bring me to the UK, and she needed to earn the money back. I did not want to do it. I never wanted to be a prostitute. But from that day I was locked in a room for months and forced to do it. The men who came to have sex with we were incredibly violent and I was terrified. They hurt me a lot, and the woman also threatened that she would kill me spiritually by using Juju.
After months I managed to escape in the middle of the night when the woman forgot to lock the door. I didn’t know what to do so I slept rough on the streets before a man asked if I needed help. I told him my story and he directed me to the Home Office, who sent me to a detention centre. Fortunately, when I told them my story they referred me to the Diogel Project.

Although I am safe I still suffer panic attacks and get pains in her my chest. I find it difficult to sleep and am still on medication from the doctor. I hope one day I will feel better.

Names have been changed to protect identity

Case Study Diogel Project (BAWSO Women’s Aid)

Sarah aged 17 had been accommodated by Social Services. She was regularly reported missing to the Police after going missing from care. On her return Sarah informed workers that she had been staying in a number of different addresses in South Wales. She describes being picked up by different males who she had been introduced to by her ‘boyfriend’ who would then transfer her to a different male in various locations across South Wales for the purpose of her performing sexual acts. Sarah also reported being taken to different address in Birmingham and Manchester by two Kurdish males.

Source: Barnardo’s Cymru, 2009

At age 15 she was told she was going to Europe to work. The family friend prepared the necessary documents. Yin was put on a train and told she would be met by a man in Moscow.

She was taken, along with a number of other young people to a house where she stayed for about 2 days. She was instructed to hand over her documents. She was moved over the next several months through different countries on trucks, goods trains and by foot. They finally stopped in France. Here she was raped before being put on another lorry aboard of ferry.

From the lorry she was handed to 2 Chinese men and forced into a car. She was taken to a house where she was told that she would have to participate in sexual activity with men who would pay for this and if she was to refuse she would be injected with a drug that would make her compliant.

During this period she was repeatedly raped and lived in fear of being injected. She often contemplated taking her own life. She managed to escape through a bathroom window on one occasion when she was allowed to go by herself.

She ran through the streets of the town until she felt far enough away. She approached a Chinese person in the street who employed her in a restaurant, giving her accommodation and food. She rarely went out and never went out unaccompanied. She was taken to Children’s Services by the restaurant owner when she fell pregnant.

Source: Barnardo’s Cymru, 2009

Then I went to children’s homes… some were far away from my own home. I got involved with older men who I thought would be my friend or love me; they gave me alcohol and drugs and I could stay with them and not go back to the unit. I had sex with them.

Social Services said I was putting myself at risk so they put me in a secure unit, but when I got out I did the same things – this happened three times.

The last time I was there I met someone from Barnardo’s Cymru. Since I got out I’ve lived in five places. I’ve tried college, but I didn’t like it. My Barnardo’s worker keeps in touch and is helping me to stay in one place and keep myself safe.”

Source: Barnardo’s Cymru, 2009

On arrival to the UK, at Heathrow, the white man, accompanying her was spooked and told her to wait in the toilets. She hid in the toilets for 3 hours, before being picked up by security and being told to make a claim for asylum.

As an ‘adult’, she was sent to UKBA initial accommodation in Cardiff. It was here that a WRC case worker realised that she had been trafficked. A referral was made to Children’s Services in Cardiff who requested further evidence that she was a child. Having no documents of her own to prove her age, D was referred for dental x rays. Although D had disclosed evidence of trafficking during her age assessment, she was not referred to safe housing. The European Convention on Trafficking states that in matters of age dispute the child should always be given the ‘benefit of the doubt’. Instead, D was dispersed to Newport by UKBA to live in shared accommodation with adult females. The dental x rays were inconclusive.

Newport and Cardiff Children’s Services were both approached again. Newport deferred to Cardiff’s decision. D was sent to London to get a medical age assessment to bring pressure on Children’s Services. This too was inconclusive.

A child protection strategy meeting was held and it was agreed that a police officer would visit and speak to D about her experiences. Despite calls from a number of voluntary sector organisations, and the Children’s Commissioners Office for Wales the relevant police force did not visit.

Instead, D was discovered at her accommodation with a Chinese man hiding in her wardrobe. D said that it was her brother and was told that she was not allowed to have male guests. There has been no sighting of D since this last incident with ‘her brother’ who several organisations believe was D’s trafficker. She is now officially recorded as a missing person.

The Children’s Commissioner for Wales wrote to the relevant police force who stated:

‘…there is no evidence that D is or ever has been in danger of traffickers…her removal from Heathrow to Wales would mean that it is highly unlikely that she would be at risk from traffickers whilst in the UK and so our assessment is that her absence is deliberate on her part to avoid deportation.’

ECPAT 2009, Bordering on Concern, Report for the Children’s Commissioner for Wales.

Serious concerns

This case highlights the fact that children who are subject to age disputes often remain unprotected and at greater risk of further exploitation. The current age assessment procedures followed by Children’s Services in Wales, focus predominantly on matters of immigration status and credibility. When, what is needed is an assessment of ‘need,’ to prevent placing vulnerable children at risk.

The London Safeguarding Trafficked Children Toolkit, 2009 states:

‘Where there is concern that a child may have been trafficked and an age dispute arises, the child should be given the benefit of the doubt as to their age until his/her age is verified. This is in accordance with the Council of Europe Convention.’

Furthermore ‘In circumstances where it is determined that a young victim of trafficking is an adult, professionals must follow their local Protection of Vulnerable Adults (POVA) procedure, and also contact the UKHTC.’

Source: Welsh Refugee Council, 2009.

Plakici was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but following the CPS referring the case to the Attorney General as an example of an ‘unduly lenient sentence’ the Court of Appeal increased the sentence to 23 years (29 April 2004).

She was then taken to Spain and then to Belfast, where she arrived in December 2008. She applied for asylum stating she had been born in 1991 and therefore was 17 year old. She also gave a false name and stated she feared prosecution back in China because she was a Christian. ‘H’ was granted temporary admission to the UK and was placed in the care of Antrim Social Services. However, she ran away and claimed asylum in Dublin in April 2009 using her own name and with her own date of birth. ‘H’ was then sent to the UK under the Dublin II Agreement and dispersed to a final location within Wales in April 2009. Her application for asylum was refused in May 2009 and she appealed against the decision.

Her daughter was born in Wales with ‘H’ stating that the father was the Chinese man that repeatedly raped her in Poland. Within a few weeks ‘H’ approached the Welsh Refugee Council stating that she wanted her child adopted as she needed to work to send money back to her family in China and that her child reminded her of being raped. ‘H’s child was accommodated by the local authority and placed with foster carers.

Source: local authority information (2010)

A coordinated operation led by SOCA and involving Gwent Police, South Wales Police, Greater Manchester Police, South Yorkshire Police, UKHTC, and Lithuanian Police led to the disruption and dismantling of the international prostitution ring involved in the trafficking of the young Lithuanian woman. In September 2008 a number of arrests were made and in June 2009, as a result of the evidence provided by the victim, four gang members Lithuanian Edita Tavoraite, and Albanians Tafil Kadria, Xhevdet Cikaj, and Lavdrim Cikaj were together successfully convicted of “trafficking persons within the UK for sexual exploitation and control of prostitution for gain”, and sentenced to a total of 31 and a half years in prison. It was disclosed in court that the young woman will never be able to return home because of the shame she feels from her ordeal.

When they assessed her case, British immigration officials knew that Katya, a vulnerable 18-year-old from Moldova, had been trafficked and forced into prostitution, but ruled that she would face no real danger if she was sent back.

Days after her removal from the UK, her traffickers tracked her down to the Moldovan village where she had grown up. She was gang-raped, strung up by a rope from a tree, and forced to dig her own grave. One of her front teeth was pulled out with a pair of pliers. Shortly afterwards she was re-trafficked, first to Israel and later back to the UK.

The Home Office decision last week to pay her substantial damages has raised serious questions about the way Britain treats trafficked women. The unprecedented case also opens the possibility that other individuals who have been removed from this country and subsequently found themselves exposed to danger in their home country, could attempt to sue the Home Office for damages. The Moldovan woman was first kidnapped by traffickers when she was 14, repeatedly sold on to pimps and other traffickers, and forced to work as a prostitute for seven years in Italy, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Israel and the UK. She told the Guardian that British police need to do much more to protect women like her and to prevent others from being trafficked into prostitution.

“Just look around you – see how many girls there are like me. They are coming all the time. I see them every day – in tube stations, all made up, early in the morning. Maybe for you it is difficult to see them, but I see them,” said Katya (not her real name), in an interview in her solicitor’s office. “I think the police should work better to stop this. Why don’t you shut down saunas and brothels? Then there would be no prostitutes, no pimps.”

The exhaustive account that Katya has given in court documents, explaining how she was targeted, captured and intimidated, reveals the sophisticated methods employed by gangs trafficking vulnerable women from eastern Europe, Africa and the far east. It also reveals the danger that these women are often exposed to when the British immigration service opts to remove them.

Experienced staff at the Poppy Project, which provides specialist support for trafficking victims and which last week learned it was losing its government funding, described her story as among the most disturbing they have encountered. Katya has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but finds therapy sessions too painful to engage with.

She was living with her mother in Moldova when two older men invited her and a friend to a birthday picnic in a nearby forest. Both girls were knocked unconscious, driven to Romania, blindfolded, taken across a river in an inflatable dinghy to somewhere in Hungary, dressed in dark clothes and made to walk through the forest across the border during the night, passing through Slovenia and arriving eventually in Italy.

They were sold on to two separate men. Katya worked first in a flat in Rimini and then on the streets of Milan. After some months, she managed to escape and was sheltered for a while in the Moldovan embassy there, when she discovered she was pregnant.

She chose to return to her family in Moldova to have the child, but her traffickers found her, beat and raped her brother and killed the family dog as punishment for her decision to tell Italian police what happened to her. She discovered that the friend she had been kidnapped with had been murdered by traffickers in Israel who had drugged her and thrown her off a seven-storey building. These experiences terrified her so much that for years she avoided doing anything that might upset her traffickers in case they acted on their threats to hurt her family.

After she gave birth, and sent her daughter to live in relative safety with an aunt, Katya was sent to Turkey to work in a nightclub. She was later smuggled in a lorry to work in a London brothel. During her time working as a prostitute, she was given no money for her work and was not allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied in case she tried to escape. Her clients in London rarely asked about the conditions in which she was working. “The clients, they’re drunk, and just come and say, ‘Give me this, that’. No one asks: ‘How are you?’. Some of them asked, ‘Why do you do this job?’, but I wouldn’t answer,” she said, explaining that she was afraid that if she appealed to them for help, they might turn out to be friends with the trafficker.

She and the other women – mainly eastern European, none of them British – never talked of their circumstances among themselves. “I didn’t know if the other girls were friends of the trafficker. It was dangerous to speak to the clients or the other girls. There were speakers in the flat where we lived. We didn’t talk about anything. Sometimes we were locked up for weeks and weeks, not going out.”

The brothel, in Harrow, north-west London, was raided a few weeks after she arrived. She was arrested, but she did not reveal the full details of her enslavement to the police because the Kosovan Albanian man who had bought her told her that her family would be in danger if she said anything.

Because officials did not realise Katya had been intimidated by her trafficker, they allowed him to visit her nine times when she was in detention, visits he used to intimidate her further. Although they recognised that she had been trafficked, immigration officials decided to remove her to Moldova, judging that there was no real risk to her safety. A few days after she returned home, her traffickers found her.

“They took me to a forest and I was beaten and raped. Then they made a noose out of rope and told me to dig my own grave as I was going to be killed,” Katya’s court statement reads. “They tied the noose around my neck and let me hang before cutting the branch off the tree. I really believed I was going to die. They then drove me to a house where many men were staying. They were all very drunk and took turns to rape me. When I tried to resist, one man physically restrained me and pulled my front tooth out using pliers.”

The attack ended only when her trafficker told the men they needed to stop as Katya was to be sold in Israel. “I think maybe they did not kill me because I was more valuable alive,” her statement reads. Katya, now 26, is thin and pale, but dentists have replaced her tooth, and her other scars are well hidden. “I didn’t have too many scars or injuries as the traffickers wanted to keep me looking pretty,” she said. After working in Tel Aviv for a while, Katya again escaped before being trafficked to work in a central London flat, where her pimps sold her for £150 an hour; again, she received no money. In 2007 she was detained for a second time by immigration officials, who considered returning her to Moldova, before finally granting her refugee status.

Katya has been interviewed by medical and trafficking experts in preparation for the trial, all of whom found her account credible. Her legal team argued immigration solicitors should have investigated evidence that she was a victim of trafficking and that their decision to return her to Moldova, where she ran the risk of retribution and retrafficking, was a violation of her rights under article 3 (the right to freedom from torture and inhumane and degrading treatment) and article 4 (the right to freedom from slavery and servitude) of the European convention on human rights. Paul Holmes, the now retired former head of the Metropolitan police’s vice unit, CO14, said in a pre-trial statement that there was already much evidence by 2003 that should have led immigration officials to identify her as a trafficking victim. He said there was “friction” at that time between the immigration service’s desire to remove “illegal entrants” to the country, and his department’s desire to interview potential victims and get them to testify against traffickers.

“Our doubt about the effectiveness of prompt removal was exacerbated by the fact that our intelligence-gathering and operational activities had highlighted the fact that in some cases, victims that had been removed were subjected to retrafficking and were being discovered for a second time in London brothels or elsewhere within weeks of their original removal,” he said.

Katya’s case was due to open last week at the high court in London, but Home Office lawyers agreed to pay substantial, undisclosed damages the day before the scheduled start of the case.

Her solicitor Harriet Wistrich, of legal firm Birnberg Peirce, said she hoped the case would highlight the dangers of unlawful removal and could prompt other claims. Wistrich said she believed the case, which has been two years in preparation, might also educate people about the reality of trafficking of women from eastern Europe. “People don’t believe it’s happening on this scale. People don’t want to believe it,” she said.

There is no clear data to indicate how many trafficked women may be in England and Wales, but research for the Association of Chief Police Officers last year found clear evidence of 2,600 trafficked victims and of another 9,600 “vulnerable migrants” who might have been trafficked.

The Home Office says there have been improvements in the way immigration officials deal with trafficked women since 2003, and minister Damian Green said: “The UK has become a world leader in fighting trafficking and has a strong international reputation in this field.”

But Sally Montier, of the Poppy Project, said the charity was still regularly helping women who were wrongly sent home and retrafficked. She warned that 21% of the women who came to the charity seeking help had already been sent home and retrafficked at least once.

“Worryingly, we are seeing an increase in women who have been identified as victims of trafficking but who are in the process of being removed,” she said.

Last week’s decision to award the Salvation Army the government contract to provide support to trafficked women would lead to the loss of the expertise built up by the Poppy Project over the last eight years, she said. “We are very worried that we will see more women who are not identified as having been trafficked, and who are consequently removed, so that they fall back into the cycle of trafficking and abuse.”

Katya’s traffickers have not been arrested and she is concerned they could now target her younger sister in Moldova. She plans to stay in the UK, has signed up for computer courses and English language classes, and is doing voluntary work. Recently she succeeded in bringing her daughter to live with her, but is troubled by the possibility that she could run into the people who forced her into prostitution in London.

She is sceptical about the likelihood that the Home Office decision could force officials to treat trafficking victims with more sensitivity: “If the government cared it would not be closing the Poppy Project. They don’t care.”

But she adds: “I’m not angry with the government. How can you be angry with the government? I’m angry with my life, the things that have happened.”

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/apr/19/sex-trafficking-uk-legal-reform

When police turned up at the Shangri-La, it was quiet. Marinela Badea was catching up on sleep and was awoken by the commotion. Minutes later, on a grey Manchester morning, she and half a dozen other women were handcuffed and marched out of the red-brick massage parlour in Openshaw in the east of the city.

Marinela, 17, was terrified. Trafficked from Romania, she had been coerced into prostitution by a pimp who beat her with numbing regularity. Now there was something new to fear. “I didn’t even know where I was going,” she says now. “I couldn’t trust anyone, I had no idea of the law. I was so scared.”

The sex crimes unit of Greater Manchester police arrested her for prostitution-related offences, but at least Marinela was safe behind bars. Her first day in custody was the first since her arrival in England six months earlier that she had not been forced to have sex. She had been raped by different men 50 times a week on average, often violent, drunken strangers. And if she was released from prison, Marinela was convinced she would be murdered by the gang who trafficked her.

Eventually police would discover that Marinela was an innocent victim of Bogdan Nejloveanu, 51, and his son Marius, 23, a Romanian trafficking team who last month received the longest sentence for trafficking in UK history. Her extraordinary story, revealed here for the first time, offers a troubling insight into Britain’s vast “off-street” prostitution trade. It also raises questions about the apparent indifference of the authorities to tackling trafficking and protecting vulnerable women imported into Britain as sex slaves.

Victims are notoriously reluctant to describe their experience because of the shame, fear and stress. It is even rarer for such women to agree to be identified. Motivated by a courageous desire to expose this sordid, violent world, Marinela has revealed the full horror of her ordeal in an account that should reopen the debate about how Britain deals with its sex industry.

As far as her friends and family were concerned, Marinela vanished. One moment she was on the way home from school in the provincial town of Alexandria, two hours drive from Bucharest, then she was gone. Later they learnt that, just after 5pm one afternoon in mid-March 2008, as she was settling down to her homework in the flat she shared with a female friend, there was a knock on the door. Outside stood two men. One, Cornel, had a reputation for prostituting local girls. The other she had never met. He was called Marius Nejloveanu.

They invited her to a barbecue. “I said no because I had homework,” said Marinela. “When Cornel heard that he just banged my head on the wardrobe and said, ‘Put your coat on.’

“Marius saw my ID card on the table near the TV and took it and my phone. I asked him: ‘Why are you taking my passport?’ and he just stared at me.” From the barbecue, Marinela was taken to a relative of Nejloveanu’s, near Alexandria. There, hours after being abducted, she was raped. “I said, ‘I want to go home’ – so they beat me up. After half an hour they brought his friend in and they forced me to sleep with him. From that day they kept me prisoner. They wouldn’t even let me go outside in case somebody saw me.”

In the days that followed, friends and family tried to find her, but there were no clues. Her teachers were baffled. She was in the third year of a course on food hygiene and considered a rising star.

The search intensifed but a new identity was being forced on Marinela. She was given a fake passport that transformed her into a 21-year-old adult, then taken to Bucharest and forced on to the 4am coach to England. Nejloveanu promised a job cleaning hotels. Two days later – on 3 April 2008 – Marinela arrived at Birmingham’s central bus station.

A woman claiming to be a girlfriend of Nejloveanu took her to a large suburban house in Edgbaston where another two Romanian girls lived. “Then it dawned on me. I was asked: ‘Do you know how to put a condom on?’ ‘What are you talking about?’ I said.” Marinela refused to accompany the girls to a nearby brothel and as a consequence received her first death threat. Unless she co-operated Nejloveanu would kill her, she was told, when he returned from Romania.

Desperate and hardly eating, Marinela began to waste away. Diminuitive to begin with, her frame became skeletal. She recalls watching her ribcage protrude when exhaling.

Nejloveanu eventually arrived and she took her first ferocious beating for refusing to have sex with men. “He beat me up and forced me to sleep with him – anal sex. It really hurt. He was pulling my hair and hurting my back. Sometimes he would bang my head right on the corner of the door. That really hurt.”

Weeks into her ordeal, Marinela relented. Nejloveanu presented her with a lurid set of garish underwear and she was taken to a nearby brothel masquerading as a sauna. She could not speak a word of English. When the first “client” booked her she wanted to say “no” but could not. She wanted to explain her predicament, tell the man that she was trafficked. Instead she cried, hoping that the man would take pity on her. He did not. None of them did.

On her first day she made £300, enough to support her family in Romania for six weeks, but was forced to surrender every penny. “After that I was making £400, £500. After a month I was making £500 a day, but if I wanted a cigarette or bar of chocolate I had to ask.”

Daily shifts lasted 12 hours, 10pm to 10am, seven days a week. Sometimes she would be obliged to have sex 12 times with different men. She says it was normal for her trafficked peers to have sex with 10 men a day.

Punters paid £40 a session, of which half went to Nejloveanu and half to the sauna or massage parlour where she was imprisoned. Most of the men were white or Asian, a number were repeat clients, but most were strangers. Some were drunk, a few violent.

“There was one guy and I didn’t want to do what he asked me. So he beat me up because he was drunk, pulled my hair and slapped me like this.” She pretends to wallop the side of her face so hard her head jerks back and her tongue lolls out. “But they just take the violent men outside. Nothing ever happens to them even if I am really hurt.”

She said the trauma of having to undress for often stinking men she detested never went away. “Even if they stink, and have come straight from work, you have to sleep with them – it was so horrible. Can you imagine how I was feeling taking my clothes off, exposing the horrible underwear that Marius had bought? I was supposed to be in high school, not in England sleeping with men and making money for criminals.”

Those who ran the saunas were instructed not to let Marinela go outside, often for days at a time. She made one escape bid. That precipitated one of her most brutal beatings by Nejloveanu: “I got punched, a knife in my head, my hair was pulled until it came out.”

Marinela soon picked up enough English to decipher the ease with which Britain’s covert sex industry operates. Nejloveanu’s girlfriend would simply plough through the local papers’ classified section and ring up massage parlours and saunas asking if they required girls. “She was ringing to see if they had any ‘jobs’ there. Are there any jobs available? Jobs meant brothels.” Marinela, along with the two other Romanian girls, was transferred around the West Midlands, to places such as Lisa’s Sauna in east Birmingham, where “a lot of girls worked,” according to Marinela, and which remains open.

As the months passed, two more trafficked Romanian girls arrived in Edgbaston. Both had severe mental problems and one, aged 23, was later found to have a mental age of 10. The pair made little money for their pimps and one was quickly sold off.

Marinela’s family assumed their daughter was dead. Her parents imagined that at 17 she was too young to travel abroad. At their smallholding in Silistea, a farming hamlet 70km north of Alexandria, they despaired and discussed giving up their search.

In England, Marinela was being prepared for her next stage of exploitation. In October 2008 she was taken to Manchester, first to the Belle Air massage parlour and then to Shangri-La, where up to 15 girls a day worked. In the brothels she was forced to inhabit, Marinela estimates she met more than 100 Romanians working as prostitutes in Birmingham alone, many of whom she says had been coerced. Her accounts provide a rare glimpse of the scale of off-street prostitution in Britain, which is notoriously problematic to quantify.

Charities say Marinela’s experience supports their belief that sex trafficking into the UK is significantly greater than officially recognised. An investigation by senior police officers last year identified almost 5,890 brothels – saunas, massage parlours and venues used illegally for paid sex – in England and Wales.

The investigation, by the Association of Chief Police Officers, found 342 brothels in the West Midlands. Judging by their statistics, Marinela was among 1,535 east European women working in establishments that featured an average of 6.6 beds. In north-west England, 760 businesses were identified, employing 1,242 sex workers from eastern Europe. In the UK, police found evidence that at least 400 women from eastern Europe have been trafficked, suffering a similar ordeal to Marinela’s. But campaigners say the true number runs into the thousands.

Women’s groups also lament the lack of police action against venues known to be selling sex illegally. Despite identifying huge numbers of brothels and sex trafficked victims, there is little evidence of a concerted police crackdown to close premises.

When David Greenwood, 43, was jailed last year for running the Belle Air and Shangri-La as brothels, the court heard that both had been known to police for years. Shangri-La has since “closed” but closer inspection indictates it has merely reopened under the name Infinity, with an identical telephone number. Its website lists 36 girls, divided into categories from “busty” to “blonde”. The shift structure looks familiar: 12 hours per girl, 10pm to 10am. When asked if 30 minutes for £40 included sex, a female receptionist said: “I can’t say on the phone because it’s against the law, but it does include a massage and full personal service.”

Last week, the Observer took Marinela back to the frozen south of Romania, to be reunited with her family in Silistea. When he learned what had happened to his daughter, Marin, her father, had to be stopped from burning down the house nearby Marius Nejloveanu built with his trafficking proceeds. Her mother, Adriana, wept as she held her daughter.

In Alexandria, returning for the first time since she was snatched from its streets, she seemed uncharacteristically nervous. “I don’t like it here. Marius’s people might want me dead.”

She visited the town’s police station where three years earlier her mother had reported her missing. In the early hours of a May morning in 2009, its officers raced to the nearby town of Mavrodin to arrest Nejloveanu following a tip-off from Greater Manchester police. The chief commissioner, Florea Stefan, said: “Marinela is lucky to be alive: many girls are beaten very, very badly.” He said Nejloveanu exported five girls to the UK but another seven had vanished in Romania.

Trafficked girls are sometimes killed by their pimps. “Everyone knows that,” said Marinela. Police in Alexandria are sensitive about trafficking, but senior officer Voicu Sanbu says between 50 and 100 people disappear each year, male and female. Marinela says she knows at least one girl from Silistea forced to work as a prostitute in England.

Thousands of the region’s young women work in the pan-European sex trade, the vast majority in Spain. Stefan said: “Prostitution is legal in Spain. Some are forced, some want to work, but many, many go to Spain. It is a big problem.”

When Marinela arrived at the police station Stefan was interviewing a trafficking victim from Spain. Nejloveanu’s father, Bogdan, was extradited from Spain to face trial in Manchester. Both were convicted 10 days ago of 34 separate offences. Bogdan was jailed for six years and Marius sentenced to 21 years.

The sentences meant closure for Marinela. Now she is helping at the safe house in Sheffield for vulnerable women, where she was cared for after police released her. With remarkable generosity towards a country where she was so horribly abused, she has grown to love Yorkshire and the city she lives in, and plans to make it her home. She has begun training as a hairdresser while helping to raise awareness of trafficking. She calls herself a survivor, not a victim.

“I will be so happy if I can help other girls,” she said. Her outlook is positive, her company characterised by mischievious humour. In many ways Marinela’s story is about the human spirit’s capacity to regenerate. “And I haven’t even got a mental health problem, which is phenomenal,” she grinned. Her father laughed, raising a glass of home-brewed brandy. Her mother managed a faint smile before wiping away another tear.

SEX TRAFFICKING AND BRITAIN
The most comprehensive inquiry into sex trafficking and off-street prostitution in the UK identified 17,000 migrants working in brothels.

Of these, about half – 9,000 – were from eastern Europe, of which police believe 400 had been trafficked.

The report, completed last year by the Association of Chief Police Officers after an investigation named Operation Acumen, found a further 4,128 women from eastern Europe, which they categorised as “vulnerable”. The classification included women whose experience the police concluded fell below the threshold of trafficking but were vulnerable to sexual exploitation in that they spoke little English, were overly reliant on their “controllers” and faced other barriers preventing them from exiting prostitution.

The police investigation detected another 5,000 women from eastern Europe working in brothels who were willing to work as prostitutes and could not be considered trafficked or vulnerable.

Campaigners, however, say the police’s definition of “vulnerable” included many victims of trafficking and that their inquiry significantly underestimates the problem. The Poppy Project argues that many women find it difficult to disclose issues such as rape and that the police’s methodology, which involved officers entering brothels and asking women if they had been trafficked, was unlikely to glean accurate information.

The definition of trafficking has long been controversial. The most favoured defines it as involving the use of force, fraud, deception or coercion to transport a victim into an exploitative context.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/06/sex-traffick-romania-britain