The horrific trade in British children for sex

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The terrible plight of foreign women trafficked into the UK and forced to work as prostitutes has overshadowed a home-grown scandal

By Emily Dugan

Posing for her first school photograph, Joanne was like any other girl at the age of five. She loved drawing and painting, and her favourite game was to play hide-and-seek in the woods near her home in Leeds with her five siblings. As she grew, Joanne liked to hang around, chatting and laughing with friends. But soon after she turned 12, while out playing, she met a gang of men who were to become her pimps. They took advantage of her freedom, gained her trust and prepared to abuse her.

In the beginning, the men who befriended her had seemed nice enough: they showered her with compliments, bought her a phone, and one of them – a 42-year-old married man – became her "boyfriend". Within a year, she was forced into prostitution.

By the time she was 16, Joanne would disappear from the family home for weeks at a time. She was transported between Manchester, Rochdale, Bradford and countless other towns, locked into rooms and made to have sex repeatedly with men for money – not that she saw any of it.

Joanne is only one of many young women who have been subjected to such horrific ordeals across the UK. She is the victim of sex trafficking with a twist: not women brought in illegally from abroad and forced into prostitution, but British born. Targeted on estates throughout the country, they are passed from gang to gang, and work from town to town.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/revealed-the-horrific-trade-in-british-children-for-sex-2053047.html