5,000 child sex slaves in UK

[Doondoo]

More than 5,000 children are being forced to work as sex slaves in the UK, including thousands trafficked to this country by criminal gangs, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

An important study of global slavery exposes Britain as a major transit point for the movement of child slaves around the world. Commissioned by social research charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the report paints a shocking picture of an international web of gangmasters exploiting children as young as five, as well as vulnerable women. Many are threatened with violence, then sold into the sex trade or forced to become domestic servants, says the report, to be published tomorrow.

The human trafficking trade now generates an estimated £5bn a year worldwide, making it the second biggest international criminal industry after the drugs trade. Children's charities in Britain say there has been a "dramatic" rise in referrals of trafficked children to sexual exploitation services. An investigation by The Independent on Sunday has found that gangs, especially those from Romania and Lithuania as well as Africa, are increasingly targeting Britain because markets in other European countries such as Spain and Italy are saturated.

Tony Blair pledged in January this year that he would sign up to a European convention to "stamp out" the "evil" of slavery, which was supposedly abolished 200 years ago next month. His move was in response to fierce lobbying by MPs and human rights charities. But the report finds that the UK's response to trafficking is too biased towards law enforcement at the expense of victim protection. It also reveals that many victims are deported to their home country where they face assault from gangs and the threat of being retrafficked. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is urging ministers to draw up policies that treat those in slavery as victims, not as immigration cases.

From this month, police forces are being issued with specially adapted iPods. Officers will be able to play to women too afraid to testify against their abusers messages in their own language, reassuring them they will not be arrested.

Child protection charities also warn of the second-class status in the system of trafficked children. At least 48 children sold into slavery in Britain are missing, because of lapses in care by officials, according to a recent report by the Ecpat UK, which campaigns against the sexual exploitation of children. Ecpat's director, Christine Beddoe, said: "Child trafficking is a contemporary form of slavery but trafficked children are labelled 'undeserving' because they are seen as immigration cases."



http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article2303019.ece

[wakeme2008]

1. I had trouble with the number until I read

"forced to become domestic servants"

IMHO most of the "children" are used as domestic servants...

[WinkyDink]

6. Do you doubt that sexual abuse is part of this? Has human nature changed in the last milennium?

[wakeme2008]

9. I would bet < 300 sex slaves NOT 5,000 sex slaves

that is my guess.

[Porcupine]

2. It must be sweeps week in England.

I just can't believe that in a country with police video cameras everywhere they can't track 5,000 undocumented children working in brothels. It would be too big a secret to keep quiet. Somebody would talk or rather lots of somebodies.

A few hundered is believable. Five thousand is pure fiction.

[zbdent]

3. on an unrelated note

freeptard vacations in the UK are suddenly in demand ...

[Xenotime]

5. ain't that the truth.

[ensho]

4. I believe the amount, which is a drop in the bucket considering

the whole world's addiction to having sex with children

the world's addiction to using children as domestics

the world's addiction to using children in the military

the blackest of black women are at the bottom of the world's pile of humans. the world's children keep them company.

(I've often said that the blackest of black women should be running the world. if anyone knows, they do)


(ensho formally donsu)

[WinkyDink]

7. And for those who on another thread denigrated Ricky Martin:

http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2006&m=September&x=20060926161740bcreklaw0.1397364
Washington – Supporting children and families at risk worldwide will help them avoid exploitation by human traffickers, pop recording artist Ricky Martin told a U.S. congressional hearing on human trafficking September 26.

“Child trafficking is a global nightmare,” Martin said in testimony before the House International Relations Committee. “It is the modern day form of slavery.” Two million people are victims of trafficking yearly, Martin said, and nearly 1.2 million of these are children. “Human trafficking does not happen in isolation but rather that its roots lie in poverty and hopelessness,” Martin said....

Martin, a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, is a Grammy-award winning recording artist and president of the Ricky Martin Foundation. He was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His commitment to the issue of human trafficking began in 2002 when he witnessed three young girls trembling beneath plastic bags on a street corner in Calcutta. “I knew then that I had to do something about it,” Martin said. “I could not turn away,” he told the committee.

[ensho]

8. thanks for this info

nt

[Jonathan50]

10. Look what happened with the two boys Michael Devlin kidnapped

And they weren't jerked out of their culture into a totally alien one where they didn't even speak the language. Not to mention the boys were older than I suspect most child sex slaves are.

The urge to engage in sexual behavior is as strong as or stronger than the urge for survival sometimes and just because your sexual wiring is warped doesn't mean that strong urge goes away.

The sexually warped are going to go to any lengths necessary to obtain the object of their sexual desire and if it requires buying a child on the black market then some proportion of them are going to do just that.

I don't find the figure of 5k child sex slaves in the UK all that outrageous in a population of 60 million, that is only one in ten thousand Britons owning a child sex slave if we assume that none of the children are in brothels. Even if the figure is exaggerated by a factor of ten, that is still five hundred too many children in sexual slavery.

Given the ease with which programs like To Catch a Predator draw pedophiles out like flies after honey, even after they have watched the show in some cases, it would seem that there are a lot of potential pedophiles in the population at large.