Six men charged over child sex trade

Police in Oxford have charged six men in connection with an investigation into child exploitation.

Thirteen men were arrested on Thursday following claims that 24 vulnerable girls between the ages of 11 and 16 were groomed for rape.

The six will appear in court on Saturday charged with offences including rape, conspiring to rape a child, arranging child prostitution and trafficking. Seven others have been released on bail.

The arrests were made following raids on 14 properties as part of Operation Bullfinch, a joint investigation by Thames Valley police and Oxfordshire county council’s children’s social care team.

The six men, aged between 26 and 37, were charged with a total of 33 counts, including engaging in sexual activity with a child, conspiring to rape a child, arranging prostitution of a child, trafficking, rape, making a threat to kill and supplying a class A controlled drug to a child.

Police began their operation after it was suspected runaway girls were being preyed on. Some may have spent six years being transported around the country.

 Source: Guardian

The sex gang accused of grooming underage girls

Victims were chatted up and groomed by the men who then passed them around so fellow Asians could satisfy their lust, the court was told.

Prosecutor Rachel Smith said as 11 men including a 59-year-old went on trial for child-sex crimes how schoolgirls would be plied with drink until they were in a stupor.

Ms Smith said of one 14-year-old: “She was unable to describe all of the men but said she would regularly find herself drunk to near-unconsciousness, waking up with men having sex with her.”

The youngster told cops how she was so “hammered” on one occasion that two men even had sex with her while she was being sick over the side of a bed. The girl said: “They were just having it in turns sort of thing. There was nothing I could do — I was throwing up. I felt like I couldn’t move.” The prosecutor said: “Afterwards they left and she cried herself to sleep.”

On another occasion a man watching her being raped begged: “I want a turn, I want a turn.”

The 11 men in the dock plead not guilty to plotting to have sex with underage girls in and around Rochdale, Gtr Manchester.

 Source: The Sun

Chinese teen sex slave in UK ‘had no idea which country she was in’

A Chinese teenage sex slave who was kept in a cage in the UK did not know which country she was in when police found her, it was revealed Wednesday.

The 18-year-old was rescued from a locked cage inside a brothel in Birmingham, central England, and was put in the care of local nun Sister Helen Ryan and her order at St Mary’s Convent of Mercy.

Sister Ryan highlighted the young woman’s plight to draw attention to the problem of sex trafficking in Britain, the Birmingham Mail reported.

She told the paper, “One young boy was put in the back of a lorry [truck] by his granddad in Vietnam in the hope that he would get a better life. He was 13 years old and when he arrived in the West Midlands he was forced to work in the sex industry.”

Source: Fox News

Child trafficking raises alarm in the UK

The report refers to an “emerging issue” of British children being trafficked within the UK, which includes recruitment, transportation, transfer and harboring of children for the purpose of exploiting them. It also found that traffickers and pimps have been using young children for prostitution, drug trafficking and crimes in the UK. Moreover, according to the report, exploitations of children occur in “very, very, ordinary” places such as lower middle class and middle class neighborhoods. The method of traffickers is that men lure girls into prostituting themselves with drugs and gifts by acting as boyfriends. The girls usually go ‘missing’ from home to be with pimps, and succumb to prostitution due to rape, violence and threats.

(PressTV)

Child trafficking raises alarm in the UK

Sex trafficking for 2012 Olympics ‘a myth’ say campaigners

The raids—almost one a week—have been blamed on “ill-informed fears of a rise in human trafficking and sex exploitation” ahead of the summer Olympics.The idea that major international events like the Olympics attracts trafficking has been slammed as a ‘myth’ at a seminar aimed at protecting sex workers.No evidence was found showing increased trafficking or exploitation, last night’s conference at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine heard.

(East London Advertiser)

While I understand the frustration of those sex workers who choose sex work as their profession, it is far more frustrating that they would assert that sex trafficking is a myth. Of course there is no evidence – finding and citing any evidence is next to impossible when it comes to underground crimes such as these. This is just another reason that I wish prostitution was legal, so that prostitutes would be more willing to work alongside police forces to help find and help those who are not in the industry on their own free will.

Sex trafficking for 2012 Olympics ‘a myth’ say campaigners

Sex trafficking victims reveal horror of witchcraft and torture being used to enslave women in Scotland

In one of the testimonies to a Glasgow charity, a 21-year-old told how she was branded and forced to take a “witchcraft oath” to prevent her escaping.She said: “I had to take the oath. I was given this mark on my hand. I was told that this mark, if you tell anyone what has transpired, you are going to die.“They gave me a razor blade to eat, they took my armpit hair, they removed my nails from my toes and my fingers.“They removed the hair on my body, they tied it up and put it in this shrine, then they tear my body and told me that if I tell anyone, ‘you will just die’. When I saw the shrine, it was so big, I was so scared.”

(Annie Brown for Daily Record)Witch craft and superstition are often used to threaten and coerce people from various cultures into submitting to the whims of their aggressors.  
Sex trafficking victims reveal horror of witchcraft and torture being used to enslave women in Scotland

Child trafficking victims bounced back to France within hours of arrival in UK

The children, who arrived on the backs of lorries or in containers, included those being trafficked for exploitation as well as those fleeing war zones and persecution.The commissioner’s report, Landing in Dover, says unaccompanied children who were discovered being smuggled into the UK were being detained and subjected to immediate in-depth interviews even when they claimed to be tired or ill or said they needed to see a doctor immediately.In what she describes as a “significant failure in child protection”, Atkinson says lone children were being “bounced back” from the border without any contact with social services or children protection staff.The new chief executive of the UK Border Agency (UKBA), Rob Whiteman, halted the practice immediately after Atkinson discovered the existence of the “gentleman’s agreement” with France during her investigation in November.She highlighted the cases of seven Vietnamese children, who had been trafficked into Britain to work as “gardeners” in cannabis factories in 2010, who were sent back to France. Kent social services said they knew nothing about these children.

(Alan Travis for The Guardian)
Child trafficking victims bounced back to France within hours of arrival in UK

MORE THAN 200 allegations of human trafficking were made to gardaí in the past three years, but the Immigrant Council of Ireland says the figures reflect a small proportion of the victims here. At a seminar in Dublin yesterday the European Union’s anti-trafficking co-ordinator, Myria Vassiliadou, said human trafficking was one of the “most profitable type of crimes in the world with the least number of prosecutions”. She said that while the majority of cases involve sexual exploitation they increasingly include sham marriages, domestic workers and trafficking for organs and use in surrogacy. She said she was “very wary” of the assumption that trafficking involved third-country nationals coming into the EU and that, increasingly “the victims of trafficking could be Irish citizens or UK citizens or Swedish citizens”. (PAMELA DUNCAN for The Irish Times)

More than 200 human trafficking claims reported to gardaí since 2008

Figures compiled by Ecpat, combined with those of the Metropolitan Police and Ceop, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, show that at least 400 African children have been abducted and trafficked to the UK and rescued by the British authorities. Testimonies from many of these children have revealed that once they arrive in Britain, they are exposed to violent and degrading treatments, often involving the forced extraction of their blood to be used for clients demanding blood rituals. Some of these victims agreed to share their experiences on the promise of anonymity because they still fear their abusers. One boy explained how witch-doctors took his blood to be used in such rituals: “The traffickers or witch-doctors take your hair and cut your arms, legs, heads and genitals and collect the blood. They say if you speak out I can kill you.” Another victim feared for her life, saying the “witch-doctor told me that one day he would need my head. “Sometimes I would wake up and he would be standing over me with a knife, every night I was terrified that he would do it.” Meanwhile, a girl from Nigeria remains convinced the spell performed on her means she can never identify her traffickers, for fear her family will die. “They told me I was evil and made bad things happen. I believed it and that this was my punishment and what my life would be.” (R. CORT KIRKWOOD for BBC)

African children trafficked to UK for blood rituals

A LEADING detective whose team smashed a sex trafficking ring in Oxfordshire vowed to carry on its work after receiving commendations from Thames Valley’s Chief Constable. The accolades were handed out by Sara Thornton at a ceremony at Drayton Park golf club near Abingdon on Thursday. Det Insp Simon Morton led a team of officers at Oxford CID to bring to an end the exploitation of women from Eastern Europe who were being trafficked by two escort agency bosses. (Andrew Ffrench for Oxford Mail)

Vice squad get commendation in UK