The Independent (UK) has a story about Lena Suriane, a Lithuanian woman who was trafficked into the United Kingdom and forced to work as a “sex slave”.

From the Independent:

The day after her arrival, Suriane was set to work on a daily 12-hour shift, from 11am until 11pm. “On average I had sex with 15 men a day,” she says. On one particularly busy day, that number rose to 37. Charges started at £20 for 10 minutes, rising to £140 an hour. The takings were huge but Suriane received just £10 a day.

The number of women trafficked into the UK is hotly contested. The proposal last month by Harriet Harman, who heads the Government’s Equalities Office, to criminalise men who pay for sex has provoked fierce debate. She was backed by Denis MacShane MP, who said there were 25,000 trafficked women in the UK. Yet critics such as Professor Julia O’Connell-Davidson say those figures are massively inflated and do not match the information available – just 84 women were “rescued” during a recent concerted national police operation on brothels across the country.

According to Andrejus Pavlovas, a senior police inspector working in the field of organised crime in Lithuania, most of the women who are trafficked from his country know they will be working in prostitution. What they don’t know is that they are likely be held captive, treated badly and not allowed to keep their earnings. “Each trafficking gang has its own style,” he says. “Some use psychological violence, some use physical violence – often the two go hand-in-hand.”

Havocscope is listing the number of foreign women who are being trafficked into the United Kingdom at 4,000.

Worldwide, the Human Trafficking market is valued at $32 billion.