Some young women in Eastern European nations, desperate for a better way of life through well-paying jobs, are tricked, then threatened and abducted and finally bought and sold like so much livestock.
Prices range from £325 to £1,300 ($520 to $2,080). Many are forced to stand on wooden crates as bidders callously examine them like slaves. Those considered to be of the highest quality wind up in Britain and America.
Paul Holmes, head of London's Metropolitan Police vice squad, estimates that "more than 70 percent of women working in brothels in Soho [a district in London] are from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe."
Pino Arlacchi, executive director of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, stated: "Trafficking in people, taking women and children into slavery and prostitution, is producing profits second only to those from the drug trade within organized crime. The trafficking in people is the fastest growing transitional criminal activity." (Source: Sunday Times Magazine [London].)
