With a dry, cutting wind blowing down the street, she tries to straighten her clothes - not hard to do when you are wearing just a miniskirt and a T-shirt. She looks 15 but, with her make-up smeared, it's hard to tell. The teenage girl returns half an hour later, DM50 (£20/€25.39) richer. Teenage girls, pre-pubescent boys and what's known as 'the special' - children of three and four, so young that they don't offer themselves but are offered by others, for rent or purchase.

A 10-minute drive from Germany and everything has a price. Bavaria is seven kilometres to the west, Saxony is 10 kilometres to the north. The men who go to the town know that to have sex with a child, you don't have to take a plane to Thailand, you just need to take your BMW over the border. Welcome to the child-prostitution capital of Europe. The girl climbs into the car and they disappear into the night. The lone driver rolls down the passenger-door window and speaks briefly to the teenage girl standing in the bitter cold. A black BMW with a German licence plate and a baby chair on the back seat stops at a street corner. By 10 p.m., the shops are long shut, but the cars still arrive. By day, the BMWs and Mercedes come to buy cheap cigarettes and alcohol. German cars are not unusual in the Czech border town of Cheb.