ANNA was just 14 when she was taken from her village in northern Romania to a life of prostitution in Ireland.

A supposed friend sold her to a gang who took her by car to Paris, where she was given false papers and put on a plane to Dublin.

But the day after she arrived she was told she had to work as a prostitute. When she refused she was beaten every day and threats were made against her younger sister back in Romania until she succumbed.

After being forced to sell sex in the hotel rooms of Dublin for seven months, all the while enduring beatings by her pimp, Anna became pregnant, according to an RTE documentary, Prime Time Investigates, to be broadcast tomorrow. She then suffered a miscarriage and was taken into care.

Her sufferings did not end there, though. Her pimp abducted her from care and forced her back into prostitution. After another three months Anna escaped and was repatriated to Romania, where she is now being counselled.

The teenager, whose mother died from cancer when she was 10, was too traumatised to speak to Prime Time. “She tried telling clients ‘I am very young; I don’t want to do this,’ but nobody cared,” said Iris Alexe, a social worker with the International Organisation for Migration in Romania.

Anna is one of dozens of Eastern European women being brought to Ireland each year to work in the sex industry. The growing problem was highlighted on Friday when Crimestoppers launched a campaign on human trafficking with the garda, justice department and the International Organisation for Migration. Posters will be displayed at airports, ports, and bus and railway stations with a freephone helpline number.

Michael McDowell, the justice minister, published a report on human trafficking on Friday which said Ireland was facing the same problem as its EU partners. Two garda investigations — Operation Hotel and Operation Quest — are probing Ireland’s sex trafficking industry. Two foreigners have already been prosecuted and deported.

But the programme says the government is not doing enough and criticises “the failure of the Irish state to respond to what many believe amounts to slavery”.

Some girls are forcibly brought to the republic. Others are lured with promises of good jobs and then forced into prostitution for no pay.

Reporter Keelin Shanley travelled to Lithuania to interview a woman, Lina, who days earlier gave birth to a baby conceived while she was working as a prostitute in a midlands town. Lina has no idea which of her clients is the father.

Her pimp and his wife kept almost all the money she made, leaving Lina with just enough for basic essentials. When she became pregnant the couple, Lithuanians living in the town, tried to induce a miscarriage using drugs. She escaped and returned to her home country.

“I did my job almost for free,” said Lina. “I was told I had to cover the cost of my trip to Ireland. Even after one year they still said I owed them money. I had Irish clients . . . they were local people, young guys around 18-20 years old.”

The traffickers are often people the women know and trust, and sometimes work in pairs, such as husband and wife or mother and daughter. It was a friend in her local village in northern Romania who suggested Maria, 17, come to Ireland to work in a restaurant. She was driven to Paris then flown to Cork, where she was collected and brought to Dublin. Two days later she was beaten and put to work in an upmarket brothel in Herbert Park Lane in Ballsbridge, in an apartment owned by an Irish criminal.

She worked from midday to 5am seeing clients who paid €160 for 30 minutes or €205 an hour, which was split between Maria’s Romanian pimp and the Irish brothel owner. The programme says the brothel was owned by a man who had been convicted in 2003 for running a brothel.

Maria was eventually picked up in a garda raid and returned to Romania. She now lives in a shelter hundreds of miles from her home. Many women are rejected by their families after being trafficked.

An undercover reporter was able to arrange a deal with a Romanian brothel owner to buy a girl to bring back to Ireland for €3,500. Footage of the deal, filmed secretly, has been given to Romanian police by RTE.

Two human traffickers in a Romanian jail describe how the system works. “They should realise they are not taken there to be princesses,” said Alexandro. “They think that they go there, they find Prince Charming, they get married and swindle his money. But when they arrive they are locked up, beaten and . . . other treatments.”

There are no official figures on the numbers of women that have been trafficked into Ireland.

“We’re only meeting the tip of the iceberg and we’re aware of a couple of hundred cases,” said Rowley. “That’s after six years of working with the issue. Within six months we have come across 24 women who have been trafficked.”

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