About 1.2 million children are trafficked each year for $10 billion, the United Nations Children?s Fund (UNICEF) said in a report. ?Trafficking is a truly global problem, affecting all countries everywhere,? said the report, titled End Child Exploitation: Stop The Traffic. The issue hit the headlines in Britain yesterday as police arrested 21 people in connection with the ritual murder of a Nigerian child whose headless and limbless torso was found floating in the river Thames two years ago. The boy, named Adam by police for lack of any identification, is believed to have been trafficked into Britain. The report said that while Europe was a major market for the trade of children, with West Africa and Eastern Europe being the major suppliers, there was also a thriving business within the supplier regions and across Asia.

It said in Europe 500,000 women and young girls were trafficked each year from all over the world, mostly from former Soviet nations. The price for a woman at the start of the trail in one Romanian town was put as low as 30 pounds ($49).

It said some 200,000 children were also trafficked each year in Western Africa, either to enter the export trade to Europe or to be sold into slavery as domestic workers. Southeast Asia too accounts for one-third of the domestic and international trade in women and children, the report added.

It noted that there had been a 20 per cent increase in child prostitutes in Thailand in the past three years, and 15 per cent of the girls trafficked from South Vietnam were under 15 years old. In China 250,000 women and children were victims of trafficking, the report said. The trade was not limited to females. Thousands of boys as young as five were traded from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates each year to work as camel jockeys, it said.

Jeremy Lovell