LONDON: There may be one near where you live: a flat or house that looks unremarkable but is actually a prison for women and teenage girls who are being forced to work as prostitutes.

It’s a lucrative business and it’s growing, as the police’s latest estimates showed last week.

They believe there may be as many as 18,000 victims of human traffickers in this country, most of them foreign, although there is evidence of British girls being groomed to enter prostitution. The police have just rescued 167 victims, including 12 children, in a six-month operation called Operation Pentameter Two, which targeted the sale of women and children for forced labour and prostitution. In the same operation, they arrested more than 500 people in England, Wales and Scotland.

Most of the victims are from China, South-east Asia and Eastern Europe, and the authorities are struggling to look after them. The Home Office says it now recognises such women as victims of crime, rather than regarding them as illegal immigrants, yet there are thought to be only around 70 refuge places for trafficked women.

Half the women and children rescued during Pentameter Two have refused to co-operate with the authorities, no doubt fearing reprisals.

A Home Office minister, Vernon Coaker, revealed his frustration with this situation in an unfortunate choice of words last week, saying it was difficult to know what to do with the victims short of “locking them up”. That isn’t the answer, any more than “removing” them from the country n a polite word for deportation. If the government is serious about its responsibilities to victims of serious crimes n kidnapping, imprisonment, rape it will have to provide many more hostel places.

Most of these women need treatment for physical injuries, sexually transmitted diseases and emotional damage, but the bonus is that victims who have had the chance to get their confidence back are more likely to give evidence against their abusers.

Ministers have promised to ratify the Council of Europe convention against trafficking in human beings later this year and extend the mandatory rest and recuperation period offered to victims to 45 days, which makes the need to address the shortage of hostel places even more pressing.

Last week’s announcements about the success of Pentameter Two did little to break the official silence over the men who are driving this horrible trade. The reason sex-traffickers roam villages in Thailand and Eastern Europe, tricking girls with promises of jobs in bars, is that hundreds of thousands of men on this side of the Continent are eager to pay for them. No doubt some of them paid for abusing the children rescued during Pentameter Two, opening themselves up to a prison sentence of up to seven years under the Sexual Offences Act 2003.— Dawn/ The Dawn/ The Independent News Service