For most people, Sunday, September 11, will represent the tenth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York.

But for Christians in the Bradford Ecumenical Group – Methodists, Anglicans, Black Community Chuches, Roman Catholics and Baptists – that day is Racial Justice Sunday, an annual event that usually takes place at Bradford Cathedral.

This year, Westgate Baptist Church in Carlisle Road, Manningham, plays host. The theme of the 5.30pm service will be human trafficking.

The flyer for the event shows a woman in a wire shopping trolley being pushed by a man. ‘People shouldn’t be bought and sold,’ says the accompanying logo.

But every working day, between 9am and 5pm, that’s what happens to an estimated 480 people worldwide.

This crime flourishes in parts of the UK. We are more familiar with it as grooming, the practice of picking up young girls – usually run-aways – and with a mixture of sex and drugs, inducing them to earn money as prostitutes.

In July, Bradford teacher Shohab Ali organised a talk entitled Thugs Or Mugs – Reality Of Gangsta Lifestyle, at Keighley’s Highfield Community Centre, given by Bradford-based youth worker Alyas Karmani. About 50 teenagers attended the talk, which covered drugs and sexual grooming.

Mr Ali, who lives in Shann Park, Keighley, explained he had taken the initiative because of the rivalry of two feuding gangs in Keighley.

He said: “We wanted to tackle sexual grooming, which has hit the news in Keighley. We wanted to tackle it from an Islamic point of view, sending a message to these kids that sexual grooming, alcohol and drug abuse, not working but just sitting about – the gangsta lifestyle – were deplorable and had to stop.”

The previous month, Keighley-based crime writer Lesley Horton said the issue of sexual grooming had been kept ‘under the radar’ because of racial sensitivities. She urged officials not to be put off investigating sexual exploitation by people playing the race card.

Child prostitution in Bradford features in Mrs Horton’s novel, On Dangerous Ground. The author spent 12 years leading an education unit in Bradford for pregnant schoolgirls, several of whom had been groomed. The youngest was just 12.

In 2009, three men from Keighley and Skipton were given a total of 18 years’ imprisonment for the ‘calculating and evil’ sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl, who was running wild and was seen by the men as easy prey. They supplied her with drugs, alcohol and tobacco.

West Yorkshire Police’s spokesman on child sexual exploitation, Detective Inspector Granville Ward told the T&A: “The people who are victims often don’t regard themselves as such. They are groomed and developed to be compliant with the abuse. The difficulty for us is that victims don’t want to tell us what happened.”

The Serious Organised Crime Agency, the national body that deals with human trafficking, has a number of case studies which prove Det Insp Ward’s point.

A Nigerian woman brought to the UK on the promise of legitimate work was forced into prostitution by the people who trafficked her. After she escaped, they tracked down her family in Nigeria and murdered her father.

Even though the woman got away from her abusers, after five years she still feels the effects and is always anxious that she might see them or that they might find out where she is.

In 2009, specialist immigration crime teams prosecuted more than 2,200 people for a variety of immigration crimes including fraud, drug smuggling and human trafficking.

One case involved Nigerian men and women involved with sham marriages with Slovakians in Bradford. To combat this, local vicars have been given guidance by the UK Border Agency on how to identify fake marriages.