The Yard cracks down on slave auctions

LONDON: International trafficking gangs have been holding “slave auctions” of women at British airports as soon as they land from various parts of the globe, including the Indian subcontinent, before they are led into prostitution in Britain.

The problem has assumed such alarming proportions that Scotland Yard has now set up a special sex trafficking squad to tackle the smuggling of foreign prostitutes into Britain. Several such gangs were busted earlier this year.

Most of such “slave auctions” involve women from east European countries. But there have been instances of women from the Indian subcontinent being lured into Britain on the promise of jobs and then being forced into prostitution in Asian-dominated towns.

Official sources say that such ‘slave auctions’ are reportedly held in concourses in British airports, besides coffee shops in arrival halls at Gatwick, Heathrow and Stansted airports.

Many foreign women who work in brothels come to Britain specifically to work in the sex industry. The women reportedly buy forged documents from the traffickers and some are smuggled into the country, while others come as tourists but do not leave.

In February, 13 people hailing from the Indian subcontinent, China and Thailand were arrested in a swoop on a suspected brothel in north England. Detective chief inspector Dena Fleming, the officer in charge, had said after the raids, “This is an investigation into the trafficking of Asian females into the UK for the purpose of sexual exploitation.” She described the women involved as “little more than slaves.”

In most raids conducted this year, the women were being used as ‘sex slaves’, after being knowingly or unknowingly led into the prostitution circuit. The women involved in raids conducted this year have so far been of Lithuanian, South Asian and Southeast Asian origin.

The scale of the problem is only now beginning to be comprehended by law enforcement agencies, reports say. The decision to set up a 30-member special squad is a step to prevent such activities.

“There has been a significant increase in the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation,” Detective Chief Superintendent David Eyles, the head of operations at the Metropolitan Police’s clubs and vice unit, told the media. “It is only since we started to tackle the problem [in an operation that was started in January] that it has become clear it’s a national and international phenomenon. If I got a train to anywhere in the country, I could find a brothel within an hour which was using women from outside this country.

“Fifteen years ago, if you went to a brothel, 75 to 80 per cent of the women would have been UK citizens but now the opposite is true and 80 per cent are foreign nationals. I don’t think there has been any appreciation until recently about the scale of what is going on.” According to Eyles, such women can make from 5,000 pounds to 10,000 pounds a week and most of the money is used to pay off the traffickers and the brothel owners or sent back to the prostitutes’ families.

A Home Office report five years ago estimated the number of such victims at 1,400, but the current figure is expected to be much higher.

India in US watch-list of human trafficking

A US State Department report on human trafficking has placed India on a Tier 2 “watch-list” because of what it said were existing bonded labour practices and the lack of adequate action to effectively end this. Briefing reporters on the fifth annual report on Trafficking in Persons, released here on Monday, Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons John Miller said they estimate that hundreds of thousands of Indians were victims of a form of slavery wherein a family is indebted to an employer generation after generation. Four major nations on the watch-list for at least the second year in a row are China, India, Mexico and Russia.