A 22-year-old Lithuanian girl goes to a party where two handsome young men offer her a lift home. After much persuasion she accepts and goes back to their house, where she falls asleep. She awakes to find that her passport has been stolen from her bag; she is taken to the airport where she is met by a lady who forcibly escorts her onto a flight to the UK. At Gatwick airport she is handed over to an Albanian man in return for ?000. The man who purchases her buys her an array of new clothes, lingerie, condoms, and lubricants, and she is forced to work in a brothel in Birmingham; on her first night she is raped and beaten to ensure compliance, at one point she is forced to have sex with ten men in one session. Stranded far from home, the girl is stuck in a new life, and spends the rest of the time trying to escape. Unfortunately, this is not the plot of a Hollywood film, but is part of a real case from Operation Nais, a joint operation between the UK Human Trafficking Centre (UKHTC) and the Lithuanian Government. The case was presented by Mike Hand, Operation Director, UKHTC, this summer at the International Crime Science Conference. Hand detailed the operation, and the tremendous amount of work that went into the complicated task of tracking and assessing the workings of such highly organised international crime groups. It is just one of thousands of cases of vulnerable women across Europe being coerced into sex work by sophisticated criminal networks.
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