We are working to tackle sex grooming - expert

Grahame Maxwell, chief constable of North Yorkshire Police, spoke to crime reporter Charlotte Bradshaw about the national crusade to protect victims of underage sexual grooming - spearheaded by the Lancashire Telegraph's Keep Them Safe campaign.

"VICTIMS are treated like cars by their abusers. It's a horrible analogy to use but the more "owners" they have had the less valuable they become."

Chief constable Grahame Maxwell speaks with authority on the matter.

With over 25 years experience working in the police, he was the man responsible for setting up the United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre - UKHTC - based in Sheffield.

He convinced Government ministers and police chiefs to create the centre, which co-ordinates all police anti-trafficking operations.

A Lancashire Telegraph investigation last year - which prompted our Keep Them Safe campaign - revealed that up to 100 girls between 12 and 16 in East Lancashire had been targeted by gangs of older predatory males, predominantly Asian in one year.

It showed that girls repeatedly went missing from home or care, were showered with gifts and given drink and drugs before being forced to perform sex acts in return sometimes with more than 10 men a night.

Grooming or "internal" trafficking involves young girls being turned against their family they are persuaded to have sex with other, often older, men to repay the gifts.

In some cases they are then moved out of the area and used as prostitutes.

The married father-of-one said with both human and "internal" trafficking or grooming the motive is always the same.

He said: "It comes down to greed, with no regard shown by the perpetrators for the personal or societal costs."

However Mr Maxwell said: "The offenders heritage is proportional to the make-up of the community.

"It's easy to make it a taboo subject by saying it's a problem with a particular race of people but that simply is not the case, both white and Asian men are equally involved."

As the UK lead and spokesperson for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), he was also recently the programme director for the UK wide anti-human sex trafficking operation - Pentameter.

It ran for three months and during that time police it rescued 84 victims - 12 of whom were under 17 - and included some from East Lancashire.

Police in the county uncovered an international sex slave ring following a raid at India Cottage restaurant in Samlesbury.

A 22-year-old Czech woman had been forced into a life of prostitution when she came to the UK looking for work.

Mr Maxwell said: "At the time I said if we make 20 rescues then this is a major problem - and we rescued 84!

"We found out that the price for a victim ranged from £8,000 for an innocent 15-year-old girl to £500 for a 39-year-old woman who had been trafficked many times.

"Some trafficked women are forced to have sex with as many as 30 clients a day, resulting in organised criminals - the traffickers - making in some cases over £1,000 a day from this type of human misery - each time a man has sex with a trafficked woman he is raping her."

The chief constable hailed the Lancashire Telegraph's Keep Them Safe Campaign, which is aimed at tackling the growing number of men targeting girls for sex.

And he thanked the paper for highlighting the problem, which helped prompt the Home Office to commission an inquiry into the problem earlier this month.

The UKHTC is to coordinate the national investigation into the extent of sexual grooming and abduction, which involves girls as young as 10 being targeted by groups of men.

The scale of the problem is being examined by a working group set up to look at "internal trafficking" of girls in their teens or younger.

Once older than 13, a girl may be asked to give evidence in court against an attacker.

Mr Maxwell said this causes problems when hoping to achieve a prosecution.

"In practice, unless the primary victim is prepared to give evidence then it's very difficult to make charges stick," he said.

The men know this, so they often wait until the girls are 13 before actually having sex with them.

He said many forces were aware of this problem and officers were now trying to piece together the national picture.

He said: "It is a very difficult crime to detect.

"We are talking about people who don't want to talk about things in the open.

"When they actually find out the extent to which the exploitation has been carried out on them, how much they have been abused, how much they've been forced to have sexual partners, it's a very difficult thing to comes to terms with."

Mr Maxwell said the scale of internal trafficking cases was unclear.

"The whole issue with trafficking is that it's a secret, covert crime and there's a great deal of control placed over the victims and so that's always difficult to break down irrespective of the age," he said.

"We have individual prosecutions taking place all over the country but the problem is that they're not being collated collectively. That's something that this inquiry will look into and I'm hoping will be achieved to give us a more uniform picture of the extent of the problem."

A graduate of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Mr Maxwell, who has an MBA from Durham University Business School and a post graduate diploma in Criminology from Cambridge University, concluded: "By working together, we can defeat crime in all its forms, including rescuing trafficked victims and defeating the criminals who profit from this heinous crime."