Human trafficking for the sex trade and cheap labour is on the increase in Europe but is less visible because it is going deeper underground, officials of the OSCE and U.N. agencies said on Thursday.

And they said the problem - particularly involving men, women and children from south-eastern Europe - is made worse by governments in western Europe who treated people trafficked as criminals rather than victims of a global criminal business.

“The problem is not diminishing…but is going more underground,” Helga Konrad of the OSCE, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told a news conference.

“For example, you no longer find the women victims only in brothels but also in private apartments and clubs.”

A joint report with the OSCE by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said that to combat the lucrative business all European countries needed to adopt more flexible policies.

These would have to adapt to the “changing nature of trafficking” and be combined with more research into what fuels the business, including the demand in Western Europe for cheap, unprotected labour and services, it said.

U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Mehr Khan Williams told the news conference trafficking - moving people illegally between countries for payment - is “one of the most globalised criminal industries.”

Experts tracking its operations put its worldwide turnover at between $7 and $12 billion annually, she said.

Adults and children who had been trafficked should be treated as victims, not illegal immigrants. Sending them back to their countries of origin was ineffective, she said.

The 337-page report, “Trafficking in human beings in south eastern Europe,” covered Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania and Serbia and Montenegro as well as the U.N.-administered province of Kosovo.

Many trafficked people are driven to flee their countries by poverty, unemployment or domestic violence.

“In western Europe, there is no mechanism for how to properly identify victims of trafficking,” said Konrad, special representative on the problem for the 55-nation OSCE, which is based in Vienna.