The trade in hundreds of children smuggled into the UK for sexual exploitation, drug smuggling, under-age marriage, street crime and domestic slavery was exposed on Monday in a British government report.
The Home Office-commissioned survey identifies 330 cases of suspected or confirmed victims of trafficking -- most of them from China or Africa -- but warns of an "unknown quantity" that have not come to the attention of the authorities.
The true scale of child trafficking is believed to be far higher.
Organized gangs, including some highly sophisticated criminal syndicates, are profiting from trafficking children as young as nine months old into the country. In the case of African victims the traffickers have been identified as white British nationals.
The report, produced by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center, reveals:
* Concern over the safety of trafficked children placed in the care of local authorities. Over half of those in the study have gone missing;
* Most of the victims are girls and most likely to enter the country through airports to supply the underground sex trade or to work as domestic servants;
* Physical and sexual violence is often used to control and "break in" victims, with children gang-raped, beaten and burned with cigarettes;
* Albanian, Chinese and Vietnamese trafficking gangs are the most organized and are linked to criminal networks involved in drug production, identity fraud, money laundering and the sex trade.
While most of the cases identified concern children aged between 14 and 17, there are fears that the illicit import of much younger children is going undetected.
"These children describe their previous life in terms of wars, abject and relative poverty, years of physical and sexual abuse, miscarried abortions, prison, witnessing murders, neglect and a desire to escape," the report says.
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