Five Albanian pimps have been convicted of sex trafficking offences after a trial at Southwark Crown Court. On 31 October , a year-old Lithuanian girl made what was probably the biggest mistake of her young life when she agreed to go on a trip to the UK with a group of new friends. Instead of the few days of fun she had been promised, she ended up being sold into prostitution in an ordeal that was to last for months. A missing persons hunt sparked by her disappearance eventually led police to a series of west London brothels and a gang of Albanian people traffickers. Jurors at Southwark Crown Court heard how the girl was "tricked" into leaving her home in a village near the town of Siauliai after being befriended by a young man.

Saule had just finished high school and was dreading the prospect of becoming a shop assistant, so when she saw an advertisement promising exciting work in France as an au pair, she jumped at the chance. Like a growing number of young people throughout the Baltics, she wanted to see more of the world and to experience life in a foreign country, and like a growing number of those young people, she ended up locked in a room and having sex with countless strangers for money. Young Baltic women, men and children have been used as currency in the trafficking of human beings since the early 's, but only recently has the problem begun to garner the attention and publicity necessary to start combating it, say those trying to fight it. According to the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental organization which monitors human trafficking, over 2, people from the Baltics fall victim to trafficking each year - mostly women and girls between the ages of 14 and Arturs Vaisla, the head of the Latvian police's vice squad, said that a survey of 1, prostitutes in Switzerland last year showed that more than of them were from Latvia alone.

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