The girls from Brazil

HER words have been edited carefully, each one selected to pick up the most hits from Scottish men trawling for paid sex online. Lara is twenty-something, she says on her website, and is up for what she calls GFE or girlfriend experience, all for a 250 hour-long visit to your home. "I love the people. They are sooooo nice," she says of her new home in Scotland, before adding: "I am sure you have heard about Brazilian girls… we are wild."

Or rather, that is what her employers, one of the country's growing number of businesses providing exotic escorts, think Lara should be saying. She is, after all, part of the biggest new brand to hit the Scottish sex market: the Brazilian prostitute. And marketing is everything.

Brazilians, or, in a clear sign of the strength of the brand, other South Americans pretending to be Brazilians, have quickly cornered the market for what one senior Scottish police officer called the "dusky dark type" in vogue among punters north of the Border. "We have seen an increase of several hundreds of per cent in their numbers," the detective said. "We think at least one in five, perhaps as many as one in four, prostitutes working off-street in Scotland is now from South America." Most, he added, have been trafficked into the country, "by serious and organised criminals".

The gangs, with horrific cynicism, are capitalising on the glamour of Brazil – its football, its samba and its perceived bikini beach lifestyle of sexual liberation, to exploit women from some of the poorest places on earth. And punters in damp and dreary Scotland have fallen for it. "They think of Brazil and they think of carnivals and play, there is a huge buy-in to that," the officer said of the kind of Scots who dial up escort services or visit saunas.

The reality is quite different. The US State Department earlier this year, citing Brazilian federal police, revealed that between 250,000 to 400,000 children were being sexually exploited in the country, where prostitution, as long as it doesn't involve pimping, is legal and thriving thanks to both local trade and growing numbers of European and American sex tourists. The Americans said a "large number" of women and children, many from Goias, a poor state in the interior about the size of Scotland, were being trafficked to Europe for sexual exploitation. Now they're coming to Scotland too.

The authorities have cottoned on. In September a sheriff ordered three Brazilians, two women and a man, to be deported after they were found running a brothel in East Kilbride. Earlier, immigration officials in Newcastle refused to allow a Brazilian woman to enter the country. She claimed to be on a weekend break – but all she had with her was a bag of lingerie.

Scottish police forces – mostly thanks to the astonishingly frank ads placed online and in newspapers for their services – know exactly where a lot of the Brazilians are working. But there is more interest in who is actually pulling the strings.

"There will be just a few, few people, dealers, underneath all of this," said one Brazilian woman living in the UK who asked not to be named. "These things don't just happen by themselves. People make them happen." Brazilians have a word for the people who recruit poor girls, children and – sometimes men – from the poorer states for the vice trade. They call them Gatos (tomcats), dangerous thugs who threaten, coerce and kill. Last month Brazilian newspaper Correio Braziliense accused trafficking gangs of murdering ten women in Europe and America so far this year. Scotland has its own Gatos.

Many of the Brazilians, of course, don't fit "the old image of a trafficked woman chained to the radiator", as one source said. In fact, few trafficked women do, including the first wave of women brought to Scotland from eastern Europe in the 1990s or the booming trade in women from China and southeastern Asia.

Ann Hamilton, who works with a government and council-funded project to help the victims of trafficking in Glasgow, said: "Traffickers and pimps use many different means to coerce and control women and it is usually far more subtle than the stereotypical image, and can often include debt bonding or threats to them and their family. We believe that prostitution is a form of violence against women and should not be tolerated in any form."

Hamilton, who is head of equalities and women's services at Glasgow Community and Safety Services, was backed by Graeme Pearson, former director of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and now a professor at Glasgow University specialising in organised crime. "I was a policeman for 40 years and I never met a happy prostitute," he said. "What we are talking about here are women who are being marketed like a commodity, it is horrible and it not what we should want to see in Scotland. Some of these women may have made their own way here. But not many of them could afford the air fare, never mind the kind of advertising and other support they need here to work as prostitutes."

Brazilian women are finding themselves being sold in the same way their country markets itself as a tourist destination. Brazil and Brazilians are in fashion. The country's supermodels, like Gisele Bundchen and Adriana Lima, are catwalk favourites. Their look, fashionistas say, is in.

The popularity of Brazilian women has spawned an astonishing number of copycats. A senior detective told Scotland on Sunday of finding Africans, other South Americans and even Italians and Spaniards posing as Brazilians to sell sex. "It's crazy. We have people from rich European countries purporting to be somebody from a much poorer place," he said. Another officer described how pale-skinned prostitutes were "tanning up" with cosmetic products to ape the Brazilian style.

"There is a worldwide male fantasy about the Brazilian women and what you can expect from them," a Brazilian woman living in London explained. "They talk about the Brazilian wax and the Brazilian scanty bikini. Some people in Brazil think the same way. There used to be an old joke that said Brazilian prostitutes were the only ones in the world who have orgasms.

"But I have seen the men going to Brazil to find young girls, I have seen the way young teenagers, too knowingly, try to entice them, men in their forties, I have seen their faces. You can tell a lot from their faces. It is so uncomfortable to watch.

"I have wondered a lot about why Brazilian women have got this image. I think it is just that some foreigners have confused two things, the word sensual and the word sexual. Brazilians, men and women, are very sensual, tactile; our food, our sunshine, our lifestyle fills the senses. We know how to put people at ease."

But the reason Brazilian women are going into prostitution is not that they are sensual. The reason is that they are poor. The country, despite a huge economy, has massive pockets of deprivation.

UK-based Brazilian journalist Marcelo Mortimer dismisses the image of Copacabana and bikinis as something that happens on his country's coast. He thinks he knows exactly why some Brazilian women would choose to sign up for the chance to move to Britain. "They live in a country where they work for a month and get 250. And then they saw an opportunity to go with somebody for an hour and get the same money." Far from all, of course, will get to keep the money.

So how can Scotland tackle trafficking? The police, of course, are looking at dealing with the supply side, although many of the organisers of the trade are far beyond their reach. As revealed by Scotland on Sunday earlier this year, Strathclyde Police now has a dedicated people trafficking unit. Other forces, stung by criticism of their failure to make a single trafficking conviction, have followed suit with heightened awareness of the issue. Some 700 trafficked women and children are believed to be working in the Scottish sex industry at any given time. That is roughly the same number of Scottish women working the streets of Glasgow this Christmas.

Superintendent Michael Orr, the Strathclyde officer who chairs Scotland's Human Trafficking Working Group, said: "If there are people who are coerced or threatened at any stage of the process, even if they are originally complicit, we will do what we can to find them, bring them to safety and arrest the people responsible."

Other policy-makers are starting to think Scotland should instead focus on the demand for paid sex. The market appears to be growing, with polls suggesting between one in 20 and one in ten men have used prostitutes, and not just the traditional Scottish street girls with their obvious problems with drugs, drink or debt, but the foreign women found in apparently upmarket escort agencies. "We are getting all these guys going off to Prague or Amsterdam on stag nights and going with a prostitute and it all seems acceptable to them," said one detective. "Then they come back here and want the same experience, a happy end to a night out. That's getting to be a pretty serious problem."