From the outside, with its chimney and red bricks, it looks like a house like any other. But when the police break into this residence in the city of Birmingham, in the center-west of England, nothing in it resembles a typical family home.
In the middle of half-empty rooms, poorly furnished with a mattress and a few old junk, the agents meet four young Romanian women in their underwear, barely defending themselves with monosyllables in broken English.
Sex toys, beauty items, cigarettes, drugs and condoms can be seen scattered throughout each of the environments.
Although they deny it, the police suspect that they are victims of child sex trafficking.
Since sex work is legal in the UK, after taking them away for questioning in a secure environment, the security forces have no choice but to return them to the place where they were found.
The scene is alarming, but sadly familiar: in different corners of the country, women and girls are held as enslaved and sold for sexual intercourse.
Of all alleged victims of sex trafficking in the UK in 2021, there were youngest from Romania than anywhere else in the world.
BBC journalist Jean Mackenzie traveled to this southeastern European country to understand how these girls end up in the business of trafficking and prostitution, and why they are so reluctant to accept help from the police when they try to rescue them in the United Kingdom.
heartbreak
“They are recruited in schoolyards,” explains Iana Matei, who runs the country’s only shelter for girls who have been victims of sex trafficking, to the BBC.
Last year, in Romania, they registered 429 victims of sex trafficking, according to government sources. Half were girls.
“Recruiters go to schoolyards and say, ‘You’re beautiful, you’re smart, I want to marry you.’ And they want to believe it. They are brainwashed.”
It is what is known as the tactic of lover boy (young lover): they convince them that they are in love with them, that they want a future together and soon they start them on the path of drugs, alcohol and prostitution.
“I have a girl here (Daniella*, 13) who is desperate to get back together with her 52-year-old ‘lover’.”
“When he runs away, he tells the police that he wants to go with him. ‘I love him,’ he tells them,” says Matei, who believes that trafficking is not, as many think, only a consequence of poverty, but of the lack of love.
“If the lover tells him I love you and the next day he hits him so that he goes to work in the street, what does it matter? They have been beaten so many times, they have been humiliated so much. They’ve been through everything you can think of, but they never found an ‘I love you,’” says Matei.
It highlights that the girls recruited are getting younger, 12 or even 10 years old. When they arrive in the UK, aged 18, she explains, “that’s the only life they know.”
48 hours of life
Elena was abandoned by her traffickers in the UK when she was left for dead, after she hemorrhaged and wouldn’t stop bleeding.
When the police found her in an apartment in West Midlands county, in the center-west of the country, she was immediately transferred to hospital.
Doctors believe he had no more than 48 hours to live. They had beaten her, cut her, she was malnourished, with burns.
Now recovered, she says she had no choice but to accept being trafficked. “(My trafficker) threatened to hurt my son and kill my mother,” said the young woman, who had to abandon her one-year-old child.
Upon arrival, she says, they placed her in a house with other young women. “We were three girls. I had to sleep with several men every day.”
“Were between 10 and 20. Sometimes he earned about $1,300 and gave him all the money.
On the internet, away from the public eye
Elena, like many other young women, was forced to offer her internet serviceson pages that are legal.
“(This activity) moved from brothels to the internet,” Colin Ward, a police inspector for Greater Manchester, a county in northwestern England, explains to the BBC.
“Now they are in a normal house, on any street.”
As a consequence they do not have to go out to the streets for clients, it is much more difficult for the police to identify them.
“We don’t know where to go to look for them,” adds Ward, who assures that the sex trafficking business in the United Kingdom is buoyant and that they are not clear about its true dimension.
Distrust
Almost all young Romanian women are unwilling to take the help offered by the British police. Ward believes that is probably due to their experience with the police in their own country.
“I’ve been working on this for 14 years, and I can probably count on one hand how many said yes, I’m a victim, I need help. It just doesn’t happen,” she says.
In part, it is because the work of traffickers with girls begins in many cases when they are barely 10 years old, that is why many do not realize that they are being exploited.
But above all it is the Romanian police inaction This generates a deep distrust in them, as the BBC journalist Jean Mackenzie was able to confirm when she spoke with the parents of Andrea*, a girl trafficked not once but twice.
“When I went to the police they told me that there was nothing they could do, that they had no staff to look for her,” recalls her mother.
It was she who ended up rescuing her own daughter by posing as a drug dealer and striking a deal with the man who was holding her.
Police told the BBC that they investigated Andrea’s case and referred him to a specialist unit.
However, it is not the only story in which parents report that the police turn a blind eye.
legal loophole
Cosmin Andreica, president of the police union in Romania, acknowledges that the number of young women trafficked in Romania is increasing.
“The system is overwhelmed“, it states.
“We have over 100 cases of disappearances a day in a county, and we only have between one and five police officers who investigate these types of cases. It is impossible to investigate.”
But it is not only that, the problem is that as the traffickers use the “young lover” tactic to attract the girls, they take the opportunity to exploit a loophole: When a minor leaves voluntarily, the police cannot treat the situation as a crime.
“To the State of Romania does not care about the lives of children. That is the conclusion”, says Andreica.
Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, despite the efforts of the police, the results are far from optimal, with the majority of cases not reaching the courts.
According to official figures, Of the 6,000 victims of sex trafficking identified in the country between April 2018 and December 2020, only 95 cases reached the courts.
For Matei, the only way to bring about change is to make this crime punishable by higher penalties.
“Trafficking is organized crime. The way it works now, the profit is high and the risk is low,” he says.
“But if we reverse the equation, jail the traffickers for a long time and confiscate everything they have, it’s not going to be that easy anymore. They are going to think twice (before doing it).”
*Names in this story have been changed to protect the identity of the victims.
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
