Original subtitles

PHONE VIBRATS

What is, what have we got?

We’ve got a bit of crack. A bit of crack?

And a bit of cannabis. OK.

When we come into the property and you can see the drugs,

alcohol and the level of desperation from the people

that are here,

it shows you what they're being potentially subjected to.

The girls are in their early 20s.

They don't speak English and they're scared.

Police take them to a community center to talk to them.

You haven't got many belongings, have you,

considering you've been in the UK three years?

Who does she pay the rent to, then?

That girl is back in Romania.

Do you know her name?

The main reason to do that is to tease information out,

to try and see whether they have, A, been trafficked,

B, are they under any control

while they're at the address now?

The stories are similar, but they're not.

They are all saying they pay different money.

They're all saying they pay different people.

So it does raise concerns to me

that someone is potentially in control of that address.

But the girls give very little away.

They say they're here voluntarily,

though the youngest seems to want to help.

She is listening intently when I'm describing

some of the circumstances that girls find themselves in.

She's got my number, she might call.

I'm just trying to think moving forward then,

is it worth us doing another visit there?

Or... She's not a child. Yeah.

She's an adult. Yeah.

We can't force her to come out, unfortunately,

even if we know, we suspect, something's not right.

Yes, OK.

All we want to do is help these people.

But, like I say, we can only act upon what we're being told.

Because sex work is legal in the UK,

Brian and his team now have no choice

but to send the girls back to the house.

Of all the suspected victims of sex trafficking in the UK

last year, more came from Romania than anywhere else...

...and so I've come here to find out why so many girls

are being trafficked

and why they're so reluctant to accept help.

OK, you come in and then we release the dogs.

Hi. Hello.

You need to have a seat because

otherwise they will attack you, honestly.

Iana Matei runs the only shelter in Romania

for children who’ve been trafficked for sex.

Hi. Hello. Hello.

Along with help from her son, Stefan.

You are a great help, and I appreciate that.

Is he a good son? Yes. The best, honestly.

Now you stay here cos I work.

Watch me.

A new girl is brought in.

She's 16.

She has been trafficked

and they pushed her from the first floor,

so she doesn't have the teeth and her leg is broken.

She fall into a garbage bin, so she's lucky to be alive.

All the girls here have been lured into the sex trade

as children,

by traffickers pretending to be in love with them.

This tactic is called the lover boy.

The lover boy method is the most horrible method

of recruiting girls.

There are recruiters in the schoolyards.

They are planted in the school and they talk to the girls.

This guy comes and tells them, " I love you so much.

"You are so beautiful. You are so smart.

" I want to marry you."

They want to believe it. It's easy to believe.

Daniella is the youngest girl in the shelter.

I have a 13-year-old girl right here,

who's desperately trying to get back

to her 52-year-old lover boy.

When she runs away, she tells the police,

" I want to go to my lover boy, he's 52 years old.

" I love him."

This is one of them that she's in love with.

That's a photo of her with her trafficker?

Yeah.

She calls him I lubi.

I lubire means love.

Everyone talks about trafficking as being

a consequence of poverty.

Bull. It's not.

It's of unloved children.

If he tells them, " I love you,"

and the second day, he will beat them up

to go and work on the street, so what?

They've been beaten up so many times.

They've been put down by other people.

Whatever you want, they've been through all.

But, " I love you," they never heard.

The girls here are not unusual.

Last year, there were hundreds of victims of sex trafficking

in Romania.

Half of them were children.

They are getting younger and younger.

The younger the girl,

the easier it is for the trafficker to scare her.

They don't need to beat them up,

they don't need to work hard.

Now we have girls as young as 12 when they get to us.

They started at ten.

Is that what you’re seeing,

girls trafficked at ten years old?

Yeah, we had a few cases.

If they are on the streets since they are 13,

when they are 18 and they come to the UK,

this is the only life they know.

This is the only thing they will do.

Iana's son, Stef, is taking me to see

where the trafficked girls are pimped out.

Here's another girl, right in the front here.

So they get groomed here at very young ages

and years of constant abuse and manipulation.

These guys are smart. They work in a team.

It's too easy for them.

I mean, I was hearing a trafficker talk,

and he's like, "Man, stuff drugs.

" Drugs are so hard. You need capital.

"You need infrastructure.

"With girls, all you need is a big mouth.

"You tell them a few things and these dumb girls, you know,

"they fall right into your bag

"and you can make tonnes of money off them."

So that's a pimp's explanation.

It's easy - easy money.

After years of being trafficked in Romania, the girls are often

brought here, where there's more money to be made.

Elena was left for dead by her traffickers.

She was discovered in a flat in the West Midlands

and taken to hospital.

She's been moved now to a safe house.

I've never seen anyone in that state before.

She was repeatedly beaten. She'd been malnourished.

She had burns. She had lots of wounds on her body.

One of the consultants in there had estimated that

she'd only had 48 hours to live.

I'm meeting Elena a few months after her escape,

and I can see how traumatised she is.

She was trafficked to the UK by a man she thought she loved,

forced to leave her one-year-old son behind.

As soon as she arrived here, she was locked in a flat.

How many men used to come each day?

Elena was forced to advertise herself online.

So you had to put an advert of yourself on this website

for men to come and sleep with you?

This is the website Elena was advertised on.

It's legal and one of the most common sites used

by sex workers.

But a number of recent convictions

show traffickers have used it to sell their victims.

Viva Street says it cooperates with police investigations

and has measures in place to detect criminal behaviour,

which they continually review and update.

But by advertising online,

the girls can be kept off the streets,

hidden in houses, making them harder to find.

Age is 21 years old.

It's advertised on Viva Street, right.

Romanian female, isn't it?

Detective Colin Ward is scouring the websites,

looking for signs the girls have been trafficked.

There's at least two or three different females

using the same number.

This is the surest sign.

It tends to indicate someone else is controlling

that telephone number.

Someone else is controlling those sex workers.

Because of the change to online and because of the change from,

say, massage parlours, where we might have had traffic victims

working in the past,

the houses, it's just a normal house on a normal street.

It's a normal flat in a normal apartment block.

People will have neighbours who are victims of sex trafficking.

It's got harder for us because it could be anywhere.

We don't know where to go to.

We don't know where to go and visit.

And so Colin is trying a new but controversial tactic.

Once he spots a possible victim,

he tries to arrange a meeting by posing as a client.

Make sure I've got the right phone

and not send it from my own personal phone.

That's a good start.

I'm just saying, "Are you free?"

And then I'll get an address back, hopefully.

So at this stage,

she doesn’t know that you're a police officer?

No, and that's always up for debate over what we're doing.

You know, are we pretending to be someone else?

Not at the moment, no. Cos I'm just saying, "Are you free?"

As soon as we go to that premises,

as soon as she opens the door, I identify as a police officer.

Go, do a left.

Sex trafficking is rife in the UK.

I don't think we've got anywhere near the true picture

of how many victims there are there.

It must be miles bigger than what we know already.

Hi, are you OK?

We're actually police officers.

Yeah, it's OK. It's OK. Don't worry. Don't be scared.

No need to worry.

Colin finds a woman alone in the flat...

Where are you living?

You're not?

...with just a mattress and a bag of condoms.

You're not living here.

There's no clothes, there's no food, there's no nothing.

Yeah, so don't think we're stupid, OK?

There's £1,000 there in clients,

but you've not got a penny on you.

It makes me think that you're not keeping the money.

But just like in Birmingham,

the girl refuses to accept help.

For now, it's another failed attempt.

What I'm worried about is

I know you're not telling us the truth

and I understand that.

If there is anything going on, where you're not safe,

you need to let us know.

Oh, wait a minute. Bloody hell.

Probably a few minutes after we left the house,

I had a text message from the lady just saying, "Thanks,"

which is really unusual.

I've probably never had that before

when we've done this sort of work.

Romanian women in general,

there's very little trust of the police.

The experience they've probably had with their police

in their own country can be really, really poor.

I've been doing this for 14 years now.

I can count on one hand how many victims have gone,

" I'm a victim, I need help."

It just doesn't happen.

During my time in Romania,

I found that children are being groomed by traffickers

from the age of ten,

which explains why many of them don't realise

they've been exploited.

But I want to understand more about their deep distrust

of police and authorities, where this comes from.

Then I hear an unbelievable story

that might help explain things.

When I arrive to meet this family,

they're celebrating.

Their oldest daughter, Andrea, has just been brought home

after being trafficked three years ago.

Andrea is distant.

She's still adjusting to being back.

But after a while, she starts playing me her favourite music

and tells me what happened.

This is where the story takes an unexpected turn.

Andrea's parents say they knew who'd taken her,

but the police wouldn't help them.

Eventually, Marinara decided to rescue her daughter herself.

She contacted the trafficker

and arranged to meet him by setting up a fake drug deal.

Why do you think police didn't search for her?

The local police force have told us

they did look for Andrea, and they referred her case

to a specialist anti-trafficking team.

But I keep hearing the same story -

that when children here are trafficked,

police often turn a blind eye.

And I want to know from police themselves

why this is happening.

So I've come to meet Cosmin Andreica,

the head of Romania’s policing union.

Why have you decided to speak out?

Every year we have more and more girls who are trafficked.

The system is more than broken.

The system is overwhelmed.

Is it a case that these officers don't realise

the girls have been trafficked?

They don't see it as a problem?

We have more than 100 cases of disappearance in a county

and we only have one to five police officers who investigate

this kind of disappearance.

It's inefficient to investigate.

It's impossible. It's impossible. Yes, in fact.

But not only this,

Cosmin tells me the traffickers,

by luring the girls with the lover boy method,

are exploiting a loophole in the law.

When a child leaves voluntarily,

police here cannot treat it as a crime.

The prosecutor ask him,

" Do we have some real proof that she was kidnapped?"

" No."

"OK, then maybe she left because she got in love

"with some guy.

"Or maybe she left because she wanted a better future."

But then came a case

that was impossible to ignore

and sent shock waves through the country.

PHONE DIALLlNG TONE

This 15-year-old girl was murdered in a tiny rural town,

Caracal, which is renowned for trafficking.

Maria is the journalist who covered the case.

When a girl disappears in Caracal,

it's not such fuss

because usually girls, young girls, disappear here.

So when Alexandra Macesanu was kidnapped

on her way home from school,

her parents received a familiar response.

She was locked in a room.

She managed to grab a phone left in the room

and to do a 911 call.

This is a recording of the call she made to the police.

Alexandra made three calls to 911.

She was repeatedly asking, "Will you come here?

"Will you send somebody to save me?"

And they were mocking her because she didn't know

where she is detained.

Her last words were, " Please, please come."

Police didn't trace Alexandra's phone calls.

It would be 16 hours before they arrived at the house

she was being held.

But they didn't enter.

They waited outside for ten hours because they said,

"We have no permission from a judge to enter."

By the time they went inside, they found a barrel of ashes.

Her kidnapper said he'd killed her and burnt her body.

He also admitted killing another missing teenager,

Luiza Melencu, who disappeared three months earlier.

These events have triggered an outpouring of grief

and outrage across Romania.

Here is the candles that people are bringing

from all over the country.

It's... I think it's a collective trauma,

what happened here.

Why are people coming from so far?

To light the candle just to put light in a dark,

a very dark place and to make the authorities see

that we care about what happened and we expect,

I don't know, something to change.

The policemen in Romania,

they usually don't pay much attention

when a girl is missing

because they think it's about human trafficking,

and the investigation ends here.

How do you feel about the way the police

have handled your case?

As I spend time with Alexandra's mother,

I realise something truly heartbreaking.

They believe their daughter is alive.

Because of the police incompetence?

Because of the police, yes.

That was...

It was just really sad to meet them, really sad.

Because police investigate cases so poorly...

...they won’t believe their daughter's dead.

They think that it's a more plausible explanation...

...that she's been trafficked.

The state of Romania doesn't care about the lives

of their people.

Doesn’t care about the lives of the children.

Doesn't care about the life of children, yes.

This is the conclusion.

We've been to Romania

to try and understand what is going on.

We found that these children are beginning their trafficked

journey from the age of ten.

Does that surprise you?

It doesn't surprise me at all, no. No.

These are the girls that then end up in the UK,

in the houses that you find.

So Romania’s failings are becoming your problem.

Yeah.

But it's also the fault of us, you know,

I think in this, in this country

in as far as us not identifying the victims

as much as we want to,

not getting those convictions that we need to be getting

against traffickers.

Cheers, bye.

We're not getting enough cases to court,

anywhere near shape or form.

Anybody else here? Just you?

Go in, go inside.

We just want to make sure you're OK.

So I need to speak to this chap,

so if you just go back downstairs. Where are you from?

It's been so easy for so long.

You know, for when a victim will say, " I'm not a victim,"

for, you know, police to go, "OK, you're not a victim.

"We've got nowhere to go with this."

We need to get out there that people are not going

to come forward, so we do need to still investigate

these crimes.

Some forces, like Greater Manchester,

are now trying to build cases without testimony

from those who’ve been exploited.

But this requires time, skill and money.

Three months on from their visit to this house

in Birmingham and police have come back to check up

on the four girls they think are being exploited.

It doesn't look occupied. Looks like they've left.

We did a warrant there, we raided it.

The neighbour said that the occupants moved out

two weeks ago.

They're very pleased that they no longer live here.

That's what the neighbor’s saying.

All right. Thank you. Take care.

Police just have no idea where the girls are now,

and this is what keeps happening, they tell us.

The women get moved through different houses so quickly

that it's impossible to keep up.

Politicians are aware of the problem,

but still it continues to grow.

I'm going to meet the head

of the Parliamentary Group on Sexual Exploitation,

MP Diana Johnson,

who’s pushing the Government to act.

We have trafficking into this country

on an industrial scale.

Women being trafficked in for the sex industry

and we are failing to address it.

Although we've got the Modern Slavery Act

and we've got legislation about trafficking,

the number of prosecutions are tiny.

Over the last three years,

nearly 6,000 victims of sex trafficking

have come forward.

But in this time, there have been just 95 prosecutions.

Despite all the warnings,

the Government has failed to act,

and that's shameful.

The UK Government says it's

working here and with authorities in Romania

to ensure those responsible are brought to justice,

using what it says are some of the most stringent

human-trafficking laws in the world.

We could easily rescue someone

every day in Greater Manchester.

But we need that intelligence coming in to us.

OK, so it's not going to be you left here at this house?

Dealing with trafficking and dealing with this sort of

crime, it will have affected me. I've no doubt at all.

Because you just see the worst in society, you see what people

can do to other people without giving an absolute damn

about that person.

These are letters for Santa.

Ripped jeans.

Cigarettes.

Oh... Diapers for the baby.

And lots of kisses.

I remember one girl was saying, " I want a family to love me.

" I want to have a house...

". .and a family. "

These were the things that I couldn’t -

Santa couldn’t give them.

A few days ago, Daniella

tried to run away from the shelter again.

What's happened to her trafficker?

Nothing.

Nothing happened to the trafficker. I mean, the mother

went and filed a complaint.. . Where is he?

He’s at home, doing fine.

It’s not a case against him because she doesn’t say

that she was forced, she was whatever - she loves him.

Yes, in my opinion, he should be charged and

sentenced. He is 52 and she’s 12.

Bringing traffickers to justice

has always been a problem in Romania.

Convictions are rare and punishments are lax.

Last year, dozens of convicted traffickers avoided prison.

They were given suspended sentences instead.

What needs to change here?

Trafficking, it’s an organized crime.

As it is now, the income is high, the risk is low.

But if you reverse the equation

and you put them in jail for a long time,

and confiscate everything they have, then it’s not

going to be that easy to do trafficking.

I think that they will think twice.

Why do you have bigger sentences

for trafficking drugs?

The message you send out there is, you can sell a few

children from the poor countries,

you make a lot of money and you don’t go to jail.

It's been two years since I began this journey,

and I'm realizing that nothing ends well.

I'm going to meet Elena,

the girl who was rescued from the house in the UK.

I know that, after some hesitation,

she's agreed to give evidence to the police.

Hi! How are you?

I'm good. You look great. Yes.

I know you’ve had your tattoo changed

from where he branded you before.

Why did you choose a feather?

But Elena has some disappointing news.

West Midlands Police have dropped her case

and her trafficker has fled back to Romania.

Do you think you can go back to Romania?

Elena is one of the only girls I've ever heard of who's agreed

to give evidence to the police.

I know how hard it was for her to give that evidence.

It shows that even when the girls speak out,

which is so rare,

it's not necessarily enough to get their cases to court.

I also want to know about Andrea,

the teenager in Romania

rescued by her parents

from the boot of her trafficker's car.

Her dad's now working here in London. He's just called me and

asked if I'll come and meet him, because he says that he's

got something to tell me.

Hi. Oh...

How are you? I'm OK.

How are you? I'm fine.

How is your daughter?

It must be so hard, after two years,

to have this happen again.

So the minute you left, they came for her.

Are you worried they might try

to traffic her to another country?

Since the murders in Caracal, the Romanian Government

says it has made efforts to tackle trafficking.

There are now more specialist officers and tougher sentences

for trafficking children.

But on the ground, very little has changed.

I feel angry because I hear these stories for 20 years,

and we should have stopped this by now.

The only conclusion is that we didn’t have

the will to stop it.

The bottom line is that we don’t care.

Some days you do walk away and it does play on your mind

when you go home and think, "Could I have done something

"different? Could I have said something else to them?

"Could I have helped them another way?"

Do you feel like you’re fighting a losing battle?

No.

I think we're fighting a big battle.

It's going to take a lot of fighting.

I think if we thought we were fighting a losing battle,

it'd be time to give up.

She looks so like your wife, doesn't she, in that photo?

They look so similar. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, she's grown up. Yeah.