By KATHRYN KNIGHT

Last updated at 01:04 27 March 2008

Their faces remain shadowy, but Jane clearly remembers the sheer, terrifying numbers of men who would be brought to her bed at night.

"It happened every night. There were loads of men involved." Her voice cracks.

"You couldn't keep count." It was like a conveyor belt, she recalls.

A conveyor belt of men all expecting sex. She was only 14.

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Sinister: Young girls are being forced into prostitution by Asian and Afro-Caribbean gangs

The very idea seems medieval, a horrific nightmare.

But this was 21st-century Yorkshire, and Jane's experiences as a child prostitute were all too real.

In fact, it's believed as many as 5,000 under-age British girls have been groomed for prostitution by ruthless criminal gangs.

It is a sinister and deeply uncomfortable scenario, not least because these crimes frequently have a racial element: in many of the identifiable cases, the pimps come from the Asian or Afro-Caribbean communities.

As such, the parents of some young victims claim the authorities are reluctant to tackle the issue for fear of upsetting race relations in areas with large ethnic minorities.

Whatever the politics, the reality of the plight of these young girls is chilling.

Tonight, an eight-month investigation by the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Panorama reveals evidence of a growing number of young girls being sexually abused and brutalised, pimped by gangs of criminals and recruited to a life of degradation and shame while barely into their teens.

All are left irrevocably damaged by what they endure, while in certain quarters the police stand accused of failing to protect them from the sexual predators who stalk Britain's regional centres.

As Aravinda Kosaraju, a researcher at the campaigning organisation Crop (Coalition for the Removal of Pimping), puts it: "The abuse these girls suffer is horrendous. What we're dealing with is gross criminality, and that should be confronted irrespective of the race of the perpetrators.

"We are battling to get recognition that what we are dealing with is organised crime against children."

It is hard to disagree when confronted by the brutal details of Jane's story.

A slightly built blonde from Yorkshire, who does not look her now 18 years, her memories follow what emerges as a depressingly familiar pattern: wooed by manipulative gangs of older men, victims are made dependent by expensive gifts and constant compliments.

A sexual relationship ensues before the abusers begin to exert control through threats, brutality and drugs before selling the girls to other men for sex.

In Jane's case, her treatment was textbook, sparked off by an innocent conversation with a group of Asian men in their late teens and 20s during a trip to town with schoolfriends.

She was just 13 at the time.

"The grooming starts where you meet them and they're nice to you and take you to McDonald's and buy you cigarettes," she tells Panorama.

"I was flattered that older boys were interested in me, which at 13 is nice.

"And then you start to meet the cousins and the brothers, and then you realise that you've been passed on because suddenly you're hanging around with older people."

It was not long either, before the "hanging around" took on a more sinister tone.

"They start to touch you and say sexual things to you," she tells Panorama.

"And then the abuse starts. I was pinned down by two men while a third man raped me.

"And there were other men watching."

Too scared to confide in her parents, Jane felt held to ransom by the terrifying threats from the gang if she even considered asking for help.

"They'd say things like they'd bomb my house and gang-rape my mum," she says.

Within weeks, Jane was being made to have unprotected sex with a succession of men day after day.

Astonishingly, she remained in school and even returned home most evenings to her parents, who found themselves powerless to discipline her.

Chillingly, so regular and routine were the experiences that it became "normal" to her.

"I had to perform sexual acts on different men. One would come in, do whatever he wanted, go out and another would come in," she recalls.

Little wonder her pimps "worked" her hard: for them, Jane meant big money: according to the Metropolitan Police, a pimp can make £300,000 to £400,000 a year selling a 16-year-old girl - and, as David Barratt, a professor of applied sciences at the University of Bedfordshire and author of several books on child prostitution, points out, the younger the girl, the more money they make.

"The criminal network can receive very significant money," he says.

Jane, or course, did not receive a penny, instead accruing "debt" by the day, a trap heightened by the fact that she was by now addicted to drugs.

"They'd introduce you to cannabis and alcohol, and then after you'd been doing that for a while they'd get you to take ecstasy or cocaine and then they'd want to get you onto heroin or crack cocaine, which is addictive," she tells the TV programme.

"You don't pay for your drugs - you have sex with loads of different men to pay for them."

Across the Pennines in Blackburn, Lancs, this cycle is all too familiar.

Here in this former mill town, the phenomenon of young girls being groomed for sex by local gangs has caused such concern that police set up a dedicated unit, Operation Engage, to tackle the problem.

Its first major case caught two men with a history of preying on young teenagers in care, and highlighted what some believe is a growing phenomenon - the racial background of the pimps.

Both Asians, 32-year-old Qaiser Naveed, and Zulfqar Hussain, 46, were jailed for nearly six years for abduction, sexual activity with a child and supply of a controlled drug.

Their two victims were just 14 - and in both cases, their parents had no idea what had caused the huge changes they'd seen in their daughters.

Like Jane, the story of the two girls - we shall call them Lindsay and Fiona - followed a predictable pattern.

Both rather troubled youngsters who'd had problems at home, they fell under the spell of the older men.

"We met Zulfi and Qais in a take-away in Blackburn," Lindsay, now 16, recalls today.

"We were just mates. They'd give us cans of lager, bottles of Jack Daniels and sometimes ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis.

"We knew at some point they'd expect sex with us. But we didn't think there was really anything wrong with that."

They soon did: both girls quickly became dependent, dragged into a world of sordid sexual exploitation while their parents could only stand by helpless as their daughters became wild and uncontrollable, staying out all night and refusing any discipline.

As Fiona's mother, Megan, reveals. "Her outlook on everything changed. She didn't want to know us as a family."

Persistent complaints to the authorities, Megan says, paid off only when the local MP, Jack Straw, intervened.

Within weeks, both girls were taken into care in a bid to remove them from the source of the abuse.

Horrifyingly, though, this was not enough to protect the girls from Naveed and Hussain.

Furious, they hatched a plot to abduct the girls from care and took them back to their life of sex for sale.

This time, however, the increasingly sickening violence the girls faced was to prove a turning point for Lindsay and Fiona, and both found the courage to report the men to the police.

One incident in particular, stands out. "The time Zulfi attacked Fiona was the worst," Lindsay says quietly.

"I remember hearing her screaming because he was whacking her across the back with a metal bar when she refused to have sex with him.

"I guess she had sex with him in the end just to keep him quiet."

Nor is this kind of violence unusual: Jane, too, was threatened more times than she can remember.

"One day I was picked up by an older man who took me to a park.

"He pulled a gun out from under the car seat and put it to my head and told me that I was going to die in three seconds," she remembers.

"Then he counted down and pulled the trigger, but it wasn't loaded. He found that amusing."

Eventually, terrified for her life, Jane confided the truth to her parents, who reported her case to the police.

What ensued is subject to dispute: while the force concerned say they couldn't find enough evidence for a prosecution, Jane insists she felt forced to withdraw her allegations because officers couldn't guarantee her safety.

Certainly, Jane's case highlights a central problem: in this shadowy, underground world, it is not always easy for either police or the victims to provide hard evidence of abuse.

Child prostitutes may not stand on street corners - they are more likely to be hidden away in places such as a flat above a taxi firm.

And with few victims turning to the police for help, officers are reduced to visiting known pick-up points: parks, amusement arcades, street corners, looking for girls at risk of grooming into prostitution.

Many do not want to listen. And even when they do manage to rescue their victims, many cases do not make it to court because the children are too scared to talk.

As Sara Swann, a former government adviser on child protection, puts it: "Many girls are terrified and with reason. We had a case in the West Midlands where a girl had her tongue nailed to the table when she threatened to tell," she says.

"Another had her head pulled back, and a kettle of boiling water held over her open mouth. You won't give evidence when that's happened."

The race issue continues to prove contentious: in 2004, a Channel 4 documentary on the topic of Asian pimps operating in Bradford was pulled from the schedule at the request of the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, who felt the timing of the programme could contribute to community unrest.

But there is hope. A decade ago, a pilot scheme in Wolverhampton showed that with a concerted effort on the part of police and community leaders, perpetrators can be brought to book.

Under the scheme, which was funded for only 18 months, victims of abuse were put in "safe houses" out of the area. It was to prove extraordinarily effective, as the team's head, Det Sgt Lyndon Whitehouse, recalls on Panorama.

"We investigated 91 cases, and in 71 of those cases, we uncovered evidence of coercion and exploitation and in 35 we brought a prosecution.

"Thirty-five adults were charged with exploiting children for prostitution, and virtually all of those people were convicted," he says on the programme.

His team showed how these crimes could be tackled throughout the country. But ten years on, no such scheme is in place.

This month, the Home Office confirmed that pimping children will be covered by new police targets, while a warning video will be produced for use in schools.

These measures come too late for Jane, who can only live with the legacy of her past.

She has, to a certain extent, repaired her life - she has a job and her relationship with her parents remains strong.

The long-term damage, however, is profound, and she suffers nightmares, flashbacks and depression.

As she puts it: "I was just this innocent little girl who went from playing with her dolls to having sex with lots of different men."

And unpalatable though it may be to confront, there are, even now, many other innocent little girls at risk of being forced into the same sickening transition.