Hard men who live hard lives in camp they call 'The Jungle'

The queue of foreign men waiting on the French dockside as the huge town hall clock in Calais chimes one each day does not look a particularly dangerous sight.

Walk among these men in the daylight, as the French charity workers give out bananas and baguettes, and some will shake your hand or try out a few words of English.

Occasionally, one will pass over a piece of paper with a mobile phone number of a relative already settled in Birmingham, London, or Manchester. 'Tell them I am on my way,' they say pitifully.

Afghan aslyum seekers crouch under plastic and blankets in the wooded area of Calais nicknamed 'The Jungle'

It is enough to make a woman cry. Yet the harsh reality is that the 600 asylum seekers who gather here hoping for a chance to slip the 21 miles over the Channel to Britain are often hardened men. They have to be.

They have already crossed continents to get to the north of France, smuggling themselves on to a lorry, boat or train from troubled villages or towns in the badlands of Iraq, Afghanistan or Africa with little more than the rags they stand up in.

Now, they hide in makeshift camps in the woods or under the railway arches near the port, waiting for night to fall when they can try to clamber on to a ferry, train or lorry travelling to Dover.

'We are determined,' one 20-year- old refugee from Afghanistan told me recently. 'We have nothing to lose and if it takes us one night or 20 nights, it does not matter as long as we get to your country in the end.'

Calais has been an established launchpad for asylum seekers for more than ten years. Every six weeks, say charity workers, 600 get through to Britain. In all, 80,000 are believed to have made the journey.

Over time, an unsavoury underworld has begun to flourish among the asylum community. People-trafficking agents can often be seen on the dockside touting a hiding place on a lorry going to Britain for a bundle of American dollars or the promise from an asylum seekers that huge sums  -  the going rate is said to be £1,500 a journey  -  will be paid back over months or even years after a refugee is deposited in Dover.

All too often (and with little publicity in the French press) gang warfare breaks out between the men of different nations.

There have been stabbings and bitter near-fatal fights. One asylum seeker of 27 from Chengdu, in China, told me last year that the battles are often over which group should control the ring of prostitutes who service this itinerant male community.

'Wherever there are men, then there is a need for women,' he said simply. The truth is that many of the asylum seekers come from countries where criminality is commonplace, corruption rife, and the equality of women or girls an alien concept.

In parts of Africa and Afghanistan, it is, after all, the custom-to imprison or even stone to death an innocent woman who has been raped. Why should they change their ways in Calais, or later, in Britain?

So the news that a student journalist from Britain has been sexually abused by a gang of asylum seekers in Calais comes as little surprise.

With literally thousands of men from every conceivable kind of background passing through this small French port each year, it is more extraordinary that such a vile act has not happened before.