By David Williams for the Daily Mail

Aid workers call it ‘survival sex’ – Syrian refugee women and girls, some as young as 12, forced to sell themselves to earn money for their families to survive.

Vulnerable, desperate and trapped in spiralling debt as the Syrian conflict drags into another year, women are being forced or sold in to prostitution while in the most disturbing and extreme cases, girls have undergone so-called ‘marriages for pleasure’ that last just days.

Aid workers say these ‘marriages’ are a sham, the groom making a payment or dowry – a sum that is traditionally paid in Muslim society to guarantee a bride’s security – effectively in return for sex with a young bride, who is probably unaware she could be divorced or abandoned in days.