Europe's massive sex slave trade

Sex slavery, it seems to me, is one of the great neglected issues of our time. In Europe alone, officials estimate that more than 200,000 women and girls are smuggled out of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics each year, the bulk of whom end up working as enslaved prostitutes, according to this extraordinary investigation by journalist Preston Mendenhall on msnbc.com. Young women are tricked into the clutches of traffickers with false promises of jobs, beaten, raped and imprisoned and made to service clients. The centre of the trafficking business is Velesta (right) in Macedonia, a town the story describes as one of the most dangerous places in Europe. But trafficked women end up as far west as Amsterdam and the UK and do they end up in Ireland too? The misery is appalling, the numbers huge and our indifference shocking.....