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Britain woke up to the shocking truth about its trade in sex slaves this week with revelations that trafficked teenagers were sold in an airport coffee shop.

The two young women, aged 18 and 19, were promised they were going on holiday to stay with a friend’s father.

But on arrival at Gatwick airport they were auctioned off for £3,000 each at a Costa Coffee shop. From there they were driven to Sheffield. One of the girls was sold on after a matter of hours and taken to work in London.

Three Sheffield-based sex traffickers were jailed for a total of 48 years.

“The treatment those two girls suffered at the men’s hands just didn’t bear thinking about,” said Judge Trevor Barber. “The men had no moral scruples or compassion.”

The sentences were handed out as public awareness of sex trafficking reached a new high.

At the beginning of the month West Midlands police freed 19 women of different nationalities from a Birmingham massage parlour, all of whom had been promised regular jobs when they came to Britain.

But even if women are freed, they are not necessarily safe. They are classed under law as illegal immigrants and deported. They can be too frightened to return to their home areas and risk being trafficked again.

CMS, Amnesty International and others are calling on the UK government to adopt a new European Convention Against Trafficking. The convention guarantees emergency housing and medical care and offers victims breathing space to make plans.

“If you deport them very quickly and arbitrarily, you are simply throwing them back into the fire,” commented Amnesty’s Sarah Green.

Although Britain is the destination for thousands of trafficked women each year (between two and six thousand, according to Home Office figures), the problem is even more widespread in other countries.

This year CMS has been campaigning to raise awareness of the sex trade in South Asia, where, for example, 20,000 women and girls are trafficked from Bangladesh each year.

A CMS-backed project to fight trafficking in a border area of Bangladesh saw the first arrests of traffickers in June after confronting local politicians and community leaders with the gravity of the problem. [Click here to read the story]

But what can ordinary Christians do? CMS Prayer and Advocacy Co-ordinator Jamie Bird admits that it’s easy to feel powerless in the fact of such an issue. “But we can pray and we can be informed,” he said. “If people want to know more, they can download the leaflet Trafficking: exploring the issues further from our Setting Captives Free site

In our increasingly connected world, we are beginning to realise that we ourselves are implicated in the systems that make evils like trafficking possible, said Bird.

“We need to ask, why does this happen? What are the values in my society that make this possible? Does my lifestyle unconsciously go along with these values?

“Trafficking brings up questions of how men treat women as objects and how we all treat outsiders.

“As Christians we need to ask ourselves some searching questions about whether our own lifestyles are truly consistent with our beliefs, rather than the prevailing culture. How far are we prepared to admit our responsibility for the well-being of others?”

CMS is still appealing for funds to launch an anti-trafficking project with its partner the Church of North India, which will educate people about the dangers of trafficking and offer them alternative ways out of poverty across north India.

Click here to read stories of women trapped in the sex trade and what you can do about it.

 

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