BRITAIN: Nineteen women from 10 countries, believed to have been tricked into working in the sex trade, were under police protection yesterday after a raid on a massage parlour in Birmingham.
Detectives think the women may have been held against their will behind locked doors and an electric fence.
The women, from east Europe, Italy, Turkey and east Asia, are thought to have been duped into coming to Britain with offers of jobs as nannies or waitresses.
Police say that once here, they were held at a house by day and taken to the Cuddles massage parlour on Hagley Road, near central Birmingham, each evening. Some may have had their passports confiscated, making it even harder to escape.
Interpreters were helping officers to interview them yesterday. Police said the women were being treated as victims, not offenders, and were not under arrest.
Human rights groups welcomed the police action, but said Britain was not doing enough for the welfare of victims of human traffickers. Campaigners want the government to sign up to a new European convention on the protection of such people, but ministers are resisting doing so.
The raid on Cuddles followed two months of surveillance as part of Operation Strikeout by West Midlands police, targeting violent crime.
Shortly after 8pm on Thursday, two male officers rang the bell at Cuddles, posing as clients. As the door opened, 25 female officers leapt off a bus and piled into the building. Two men and a woman from the West Midlands were arrested on suspicion of being "concerned with the management of running a brothel".
Two other men, thought to be clients, were later released. Police say they found a sawn-off shotgun, batons and condoms.
Cuddles has about 12 rooms. There is an electric fence at the back of the building and some of the windows are boarded.
Det Insp Mark Nevitt said: "We went to the property to execute a warrant in human trafficking. Intelligence suggests the girls were brought into the country under false pretences, sold on and held against their will in the massage parlour.
"These girls could be subject to violence, sexual assaults and forced to work as prostitutes. When they arrived in this country, they would have been told not to trust the police, so interviewing them will be a delicate process."
Amnesty International said victims of trafficking did not receive the protection they needed.
A spokeswoman, Sarah Green, said: "Most are deported without any care or support or assessment of the risks they face if sent back.
"Communities might not want these women back if they know what has happened to them, and there is evidence of people being retrafficked. If you deport them very quickly and arbitrarily, you are simply throwing them back into the fire."
Amnesty is calling on the British government to sign up to the new European convention on action against trafficking in human beings, which gives victims the right to emergency housing and medical care and a temporary residence permit in the country to which they have been taken.
The government is resisting because it feels the convention may be open to abuse by people with no right to stay in Britain.
Barnardo's children's charity meanwhile says more than 200 children have been rescued from prostitution in the past five years on Merseyside in north-west England. - (Guardian service)