Scottish students flying into prostitution - gardaí

Young Scottish women are travelling to Dublin to spend the weekend working as prostitutes, Irish vice squad detectives said today.

Amid fears over increased trafficking of Eastern European girls to Ireland as sex slaves, a senior Garda source warned the problem was closer to home.

Girls in their late teens and early 20s are choosing to board low-cost flights in Glasgow on Friday evenings to spend 48 hours earning cash for sex, according to the source.

Many of the women use the money to put themselves through university.

“It is a business for these girls. There is no question that these girls are being trafficked. They are here for the money,” a Garda source said.

Insisting it was common among students, the source said it was too difficult to assess how many girls were flying back and forth each weekend.

A report by the Department of Justice and An Garda Siochana on people trafficking warned that Ireland was at increased risk from criminals in Eastern Europe.

Crime gangs from Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania are heavily involved in people smuggling for the sex trade, the report said.

But gardaí revealed they have only uncovered a small number of cases of Eastern European women being trafficked in Ireland for sex.

The report said a trafficked Lithuanian woman could be sold for up to €6,000.

It noted most girls are trafficked from Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania and Moldova.

But detectives cautioned that fewer than 10 women had been rescued from forced prostitution over the last two or three years in brothels in the greater Dublin area.

The Government-backed report found illegal immigration was more of an issue than trafficking.

But it warned that Ireland faced the same risks as the rest of the EU, in particular the United Kingdom.

Since February, up and down the UK police forces, government bodies and travel industry representatives have been working side by side under Operation Parameter, an initiative designed to crackdown on people trafficking.

Garda Chief Superintendent Derek Byrne said there was strong co-operation between An Garda Siochana, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, UK constabularies and European forces.

Officers are often sent abroad for training and on exchange programmes, he said.

Two Chinese nationals, who lived in the Republic for a time, have been charged in the north over trafficking for prostitution.

The report noted that in the UK sex offences against children, including on-line child abuse, are among the main instances of organised crime.

And it said that it is assumed most child sex offenders act alone, but that there are extensive, secretive, criminal networks to exchange images or get access to victims.

Many children who wind up in the sex industry arrive in the UK as asylum seekers, it said.

The report compared it with the situation in Ireland where 260 children who applied for asylum in the country have disappeared over the past 10 years.

But officials said many of them went to Ireland to be re-united with families, or for education, but there was little suspicion the youngsters had been forced into the sex trade.