'I survived years of exploitation - sick online supermarkets of the vulnerable must be shut'

A sickening online "supermarket of the vulnerable" which sees women sold for sex by criminal gangs must finally be shut, an exploitation survivor has pleaded.

Mia de Faoite, who endured harrowing abuse including vicious sex attacks from men who were paying her for sex, backed calls for a radical shake-up of prostitution laws. She told The that so-called "pimping websites" must be tackled, and sex buyers - predominantly men - should face criminal charges.

Her call comes as more than 50 MPs demanded these sites, popular with sex traffickers, are closed and "out-of-date" prostitution offences are scrapped. Mia, who successsfully campaigned for the changes in her native Ireland, told The Mirror: "The UK has a serious trafficking situation. The online pimping websites are a modern day slave market, that's where women and girls are being sold, and men are willing to buy them.

"They make millions and millions of pounds, and all of that comes from ordinary Joe-types who are buying women on a daily basis. In 2025 we really shouldn't be accepting that.

"They can go online and say 'I'd like a Black one, I'd like an Asian one, I'll have a teenager'. It's a supermarket of the vulenerable for these men. You can't look at any of these women and think life had been good and things hadn't gone seriously wrong. There's always a coercive element."

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Mia, 54, has previously described her sickening six year ordeal - which included being gang raped and witnessing her friend being sexually assaulted before dying from a drug overdose - to MPs. She told The Mirror: "Do you (in the UK) want to leave 80,000 women or do you want to do something about it? Tackling these websites is a must."

Proposed legislation before Parliament would see jail terms of up to 10 years for anyone convicted of sexual exploitation, and prison or fines for those who buy sex. It comes more than a year after a damning probe by the cross-party Home Affairs Select Committee found websites selling sex were responsible for a "flagrant facilitation of trafficking".

Mia said traffickers often target care homes and orphanages overseas to recruit women and young girls to exploit. "They know where to find women and girls to coerce," she stated.

"They arrive in London, they arrive in Birmingham, and before they even get there, their adverts are up online. They're moved around like they're cattle and treated a lot worse.

"It's so twisted. We know they're just using them, but the psychological damage it does to someone is quite complex. I went in thinking I'd do it for three or four months and then go to the UK to get detox. I stayed for six years because I didn't know what I was getting into.

"It's wholly damaging, no one leaves it unscathed, however you get there. What connects us is we've been used and exploited and raped by the same people."

Mia said it is essential that the law is changed to ensure people who pay for sex are the criminals, and not exploited women. She said: "I never met a sex buyer who said 'here's £50, go and do what you want to do with your own body'.

"It shifts the burden of criminality, it sends a big message that what's being done isn't acceptable. "If your sole focus is going to be on the pimps and the traffickers then you're missing the demand side. You're missing what's feeding it, you're missing what's funding it."

And Mia said that by shifting the legal responsibility to buyers from sellers, women are more likely to seek help when they are faced with harrowing violence.

"I think about the amount of stuff I would have told the police if I wasn't going to be charged with a crime," she said. "We're now seeing successful convictions for sexual assault. What's happened is the police are taking it seriously and it's making it all the way to conviction.

"One guy is doing a nine year sentence, that's a real shift in the relationship. If you reduce the demand the supply diminishes."

MP Tonia Antoniazzi has put forward amendments to the Government's Crime and Policing Bill, warning that exploitation is happening on an "unimaginable" scale. She branded the brazen online trade "absolutely sick" and said customers are complicit in exploitation and abuse.

Ms Antoniazzi told The Mirror: "The sex trafficking that goes on is on a scale that is unimaginable. We have to open people's eyes to this because it's just wrong."

A Government spokeswoman said: "Any form of commercial sexual exploitation is completely abhorrent. As part of the Labour Government's forthcoming violence against women and girls strategy we will look to ensure the law is fit to protect women and girls from violence and exploitation."

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