Abstract
The cross-border trafficking of women and girls for the purposes of prostitution has been the focus of considerable media and political attention in the UK in recent years. Though far from a new phenomenon, the alleged scale of its contemporary manifestation, its apparent connection to networks of organised crime and state corruption, its relationship to comparative debates over divergent models for the regulation of prostitution and its situation within broader contexts of globalisation, socio-economic displacement and migration control, have ensured its status as a high policy priority.