Immigrant women reveal how Britain is home to sex slavery [View All]

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The Independent
By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent
04 December 2004


Kristie looks and speaks like many of the other young women out shopping in south-east London yesterday. Only a small scar above her left eye betrays her horrific past.

Sold by her father into sexual slavery at the age of 18, Kristie has spent 10 years working against her will in brothels in Brussels, Paris and London.

The scar marks where she was savagely punched in the face by one of the men who paid to have sex with her. But she says she received far more vicious beatings from the gang members who trafficked her from her farm in Albania to the Soho "model" flats in London's red light district.

Kristie's story will be told today for the first time at a conference on prostitution which partly aims to tackle the growing trade in sex trafficking..........................

Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but the most recent figures suggest that 80 per cent of the 5,000 women working in the London off-street sex industry are foreign.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=589596