A Brisbane-based charity says it has smashed a child-trafficking ring that has sent 200 teenage girls from Laos into sex slavery in Thailand.

Two Brisbane business figures started the charity, The Grey Man, which claims more than 400 supporters in Australia and South-East Asia.

The Grey Man says its raids this month, with the help of Thai police, rescued five 15-year-old girls from brothels and karaoke bars.

It is alleged an accused child-trafficker took the girls from their families in 2005 after promising to find them factory work. The girls' families allegedly each received $600 - twice the average annual wage in Thailand. Three alleged ringleaders of the child trafficking ring were arrested this month in northern Laos, The Grey Man says.

Retired chartered accountant Russell Hawksford is one of the two men who front The Grey Man. The other, who only goes by the name "John", is said to be an ex-Special Air Service (SAS) officer.

"John . . . became an anthropologist," Mr Hawksford said. "He works in Brisbane when he is not in Laos."

The Grey Man also runs projects to provide solar energy, community centres or school equipment.

Rotary backs some projects. But the main game was running covert operations to rescue child prostitutes, Mr Hawksford said.

The last raids had been the most successful since the group formed in 2004.

"We find that [the girls] are trafficked for either their labour or for the sex trade," he said. "We find that in the south [of Laos] . . . a lot of them are trafficked into Thailand for factories. But the ones we rescued [this month] were definitely for the sex trade. The intelligence we have is that the gang has been running roughly 200 girls a year."

Mr Hawksford said The Grey Man's work barely scraped the surface towards eradicating child prostitution. "It is the tip of the iceberg, but it is still five lives," he said. "Once they are trafficked, they are beaten and raped. And if the resist they are beaten and raped and many of them end up with AIDS."

Intelligence about the latest child-trafficking ring had come from a non-government agency working in northern Laos, he said.

"They would prefer to give the intelligence to us and then we would work out the best way of handling the operation," he said.

"We don't break the law, we don't do operations that might become an international incident and we obviously engage the police.

"In this case, the provincial police engaged the Bangkok special squad and we worked out the logistics of doing it."

He said the arrests, near Chiang Khong, had taken place on the Mekong River, with Thai police leading the operation. Police now had information that could lead to seven more arrests.

Mr Hawksford said there was no evidence of children trafficked to Australia, but there had been a few cases of Asian women smuggled into brothels.

No one knows how many women and children are affected, but estimates for the East Asia region alone are between 250,000 and 400,000 a year.

tony.moore@fairfaxmedia.com.au

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald