Nick Davis of the Guardian newspaper writes:

Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.
Two academics from the University of North London, Liz Kelly and Linda Regan, tried to estimate the number of women who had been trafficked in the UK during the calendar year 1998, an exercise which they honestly described as "problematic".
First, there was the problem of the word, which Kelly and Regan solved by accepting all variations of its meaning. Then, there was the shortage of facts. They spoke to specialists, studied news reports and surveyed police, who reported that 71 women had been "trafficked", whether willingly or not, during 1998. In Stopping Traffic, which they published in May 2000, Kelly and Regan argued that the real scale of the problem was probably bigger than this and, in the absence of any accurate data, they made various assumptions which they themselves described as "speculative".
At the very least, they guessed, there could be another 71 trafficked women who had been missed by police, which would double the total, to 142. At the most, they suggested, the true total might be 20 times higher, at 1,420.
But reaching this figure involved a further quadrupling of the number of victims missed by police, plus quadrupling existing estimates by sex health workers, plus assuming the accuracy of a newspaper report that "hundreds" of women had been trafficked into the UK from Albania and Kosovo, plus assuming that mail-order brides were also victims of trafficking, plus adding women who were transported within the UK as well as those brought into the UK. Kelly and Regan were transparent and honest about the speculative character of their assumptions. They were clear about their adoption of the widest possible meaning of the term. They presented their conclusion with caution: "It can be estimated that the true scale of trafficking may be between two and 20 times that which has been confirmed." In the summer of 2004, The Poppy Project, which is committed to ending all prostitution on the grounds that it "helps to construct and maintain gender inequality", surveyed London prostitutes working in flats and found that 80% of them were foreign, a finding which is well supported. They then added, without any clear evidence, that "a large proportion of them are likely to have been trafficked into the country", a conclusion which is challenged by specialist police, but which was then recycled through numerous media reports and political claims.
Research published recently by Dr Nick Mai of London Metropolitan University, concludes that, contrary to public perception, the majority of migrant sex workers have chosen prostitution as a source of "dignified living conditions and to increase their opportunities for a better future while dramatically improving the living conditions of their families in the country of origin". After detailed interviews with 100 migrant sex workers in the UK, Mai found: "For the majority, working in the sex industry was a way to avoid the exploitative working conditions they had met in their previous non-sexual jobs."

Quite a lot of the girls that I go with in the UK are actually English, Welsh, or Scottish. Irish seem to be rare.

I am wondering if these girls are actually "trafficked" as well. They all seem to have happy home lives and some of the girls invite me to their birthday parties, barbeques and other social gatherings.

The foreign girls that I know also live in nice luxury apartments and always seem to have tickets to concerts or going to the fashionable West End London clubs. These girls go to these events not to pick up lcients but because that they paid for them and want to go and have fun.

It's great to see some facts surfacing to give the lie to repressive-puritanical regimes' political agenda.

So, trafficking and exploitation does exist, but not into the sex industry. Anyone remember the Chinese cockle-pickers drowned by the tide at Morcambe? I'd say they were certainly exploited, and possibly trafficked too.

Sex workers from abroad might be escaped former victims of trafficking and/or exploitation, who are now doing fine, thanks for asking, have a disposable income, money to send home, and are meeting people as customers who (unless total hypocrites) don't disapprove of them and what they're doing. Not a path open to everyone (some haven't got what it takes, physically or mentally, or just don't want to), but for a good many it's an opportunity well worth taking.

Others are simply economic migrants, much like many of us who took our skills or talents to another country for the chance of more money and/or a better lifestyle.

Well, that sounds like it has more Truth than the Official Propaganda.

So, what's the Official Solution: make it harder to become a sex worker. Nice one, you sanctimonious cunts.

Meanwhile, dear readers, give yourselves a pat on the back for spending your hard earned assisting some beautiful young thing from far away to make a better life for herself. If only it was tax-deductible.

To LBC:

"I am wondering if these girls are actually "trafficked" as well."

Yes, of course, they MUST be.

"They all seem to have happy home lives and some of the girls invite me to their birthday parties, barbeques and other social gatherings."

Aha, they must be the victims of CUNNING traffickers, who arrange these sham situations to create a false impression among their customers. The girls are evidently terrified into going along with the sham.

"The foreign girls that I know also live in nice luxury apartments and always seem to have tickets to concerts or going to the fashionable West End London clubs. These girls go to these events not to pick up lcients but because that they paid for them and want to go and have fun."

The evil cunning traffickers always do that. Set the girls up in luxury apartments, of course, what a wonderful cover. And keep dragging them off to concerts and fashionable clubs, yes, I can see they would do that to keep them "controlled".

Never underestimate the cunning of the Evil Traffickers.

Cue for Action Movie Hero to burst in on the scene, gun down anyone male in sight, and rescue the poor girls from their dreadful luxury and turn them over to The Authorities, who will resettle them in Morcambe with a nice honest job of picking cockles at low tide....

I can't speak to the UK situation, but there is definitely sex trafficking going on in the US and various eastern European countries. And the non-western world.

Quantification is a real problem though. But so is calculating what an acceptable level would be and how much money per exploited woman should be spent.

Besides, as I pointed out elsewhere, just because a prostitute isn't a victim of sex trafficking that doesn't mean sex work for her is a free and happy choice. If you removed from the AMS RLD every prostitute who (1) has a pimp/loverboy (2) has a drug or alcohol problem or (3) was a victim of childhood abuse, how many do you think would be left?