Helena started in the profession aged 16 "when my mother sold me to a pimp." Her sister was six when she was "led to a client", and to this day the young gypsy does not know what became of her.

Helena's heartbreaking history -- she passed through the hands of around 20 pimps and was made to serve "20 to 30 clients a day" -- highlights how social distress and poverty still reduces some families into selling their children into the Czech sex trade, sometimes at a very early age.

Child prostitution took off with the end of communism and the opening of frontiers at the start of the 1990s and still thrives, according to Jiri Istvanik. He heads a special police task force in the west Czech town of Cheb that lies on the German border and has become infamous as a magnet for sex tourism.

European Union membership in 2004 has changed little.

"As long as the economic situation does not develop and there are different standards of living on both sides of the frontier, it will continue," commented Ludmilla Irmscher, a member of the German non-governmental organisation, Karo, which was created 10 years ago.

In 2005, 119 adults were charged with procuring minors, according to figures from the Czech interior ministry though specialist associations say this number should be multiplied several times to reflect reality.

Between five and 10 percent of women victims of human trafficking in the Czech Republic are underage, according to a 2004 report by the Czech Institute of Criminology (IKSP). "Clients" are for the most part Germans, Austrians and British, according to the ministry.

In Cheb, some maintain that child prostitution is a myth fostered by gypsies to attract foreign paedophiles to the town's deprived districts so that they can be robbed.

But local authorities and police do not deny the existence of child prostitution and say they are doing everything to combat it. "The gypsy community is the principle supplier (of children), the people are poor and for them it is a means of surviving," Istvanik asserted.

Cheb Mayor Jan Svoboda maintains that Czech law -- which fixes 15 as the age for consensual sex, compared with 18 years in neighbouring Germany -- helps attract the fans of young flesh.

The phenomenon is so commonplace that in the town's parks, young children play a game called "hookers and pimps", according to a UNICEF study published in June 2005.

One child in four, in the town of around 36,000, considers prostitution as a legitimate means of gaining a living, with around a third saying they have seen a child prostitute, according to the same study.

"We sometimes see girls of 13 and 14 passing the night at the side of roads," deplored Martina, a Karo worker who regularly tours the frontier region to distribute syringes and condoms to prostitutes.

Her tours are aimed at keeping tabs on what is happening, breaking the girls' isolation and offering help. "But it is very difficult because the prostitutes are afraid of speaking because their pimp is somewhere nearby," she said.

The children themselves are in a much more complex situation with their parents at the bottom of the social ladder and for whom being placed in a home would resolve nothing, according to social workers.

Helena, now 26, passed some of her childhood in a home where she claims to have been beaten. Telling her story "is heartbreaking" for her.

Sold, resold, beaten and drugged, she plied the streets or the private bars that mushroom on the Czech-German border for years. She worked even when she was nine months pregnant and never saw her baby, which her pimps immediately gave up for adoption without asking her.

To intimidate her, her masters showed her a video showing a girl she knew from a night club having her throat cut by "men from the Russian mafia", who apparently are said to control the sex business in the Cheb region. That was what made up her mind "to change her life", with the help of Karo, last summer.

To fight against sexual slavery and save the likes of Helena, specialised associations say laws need to be tightened, the police need to be taught to treat prostitutes as victims, and the wider public, including "clients", need to be made aware of what is at stake.

"It is not a question of attributing blame or moralising but to say that there are things that cannot be permitted and should be denounced," stressed Irmscher.

A group of German "sex tourists" are already cooperating with Karo by giving regular updates on the Czech nightclubs that they use, which are no-go areas for the NGO workers and similar organisations.

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