More daughters, sisters, girlfriends, wives and mothers taken before their time.

These girls were a target, not just because they were prostitutes, but specifically because they were street girls.

Any self respecting psychopath knows that if you want to go on a killing spree, you look amongst society’s lost folk for victims. If you’re looking for women to kill, then the obvious thing to do is find street prostitutes.

Why?

Because what they do is illegal, so they will hide themselves away. Out of sight, out of mind.

Maybe our hypothetical psychopath will strike it lucky, maybe his victim will be a runaway, homeless on the street and selling herself. If she has no home to go to, then she won’t be missed when she doesn’t return. Maybe, if he’s really lucky, she will have a drug problem as well. Maybe through her addiction she has isolated her self completely. Maybe the only person who will miss her is her dealer.

Why are these girls still out there? Making what they do illegal doesn’t stop them, it just makes them withdraw into dark places.

Why, in our enlightened society, where the AA and RAC will send a patrol at super speed to a woman on her own, where we are sent a text with details of our taxi after a night out so that we don’t get into the wrong car, are these girls left to hope for the best and fend for themselves.

Kick a little. Demand a change in the law. Not a law that drives them even further underground. A law that supports them. A law that lets them work together, in safety. The means to change their lives and get out of prostitution, if that’s what they want. Come on people… Kick a little.

Unfortunately, the one in Inverness decided to contact me.

I’m a 13 yr old lookin for sex. Don’t tell the police I contacted you. I have 150 I can get more if you want more.

Either a genuine 13 year old who needs to be grounded until he’s at least 40 or a sicko. I couldn’t decide, but I don’t have to.

I passed it on to the authorities. Ha!

Before I start:

Note to R. If you want me to take this down, then just let me know.

I noticed this on Punternet Forum earlier and it answers a couple of question that I’ve been asking:

Having looked at “10 Reasons” which another poster had drawn attention to, I used the “contact us” page to ask what/who the proponents were, and for references to allow me to check their “Home Office” statistics. Here is the answer that I received (which fails to provide links to the Home Office…):

Glasgow Community and Safety Services:
We are an organisation which aims to prevent crime, tackle antisocial behaviour and promote community safety in the city. We bring together around 500 staff from Glasgow City Council, Strathclyde Police, Strathclyde Fire and Rescue and Glasgow’s Community Safety Partnership.
In order to ensure we are providing local solutions to local issues we have developed a three-locality approach to our organisation, which aligns our services with Strathclyde Police divisions and the Community Planning Partnership – further enhancing our partnership working.
Each of our locality teams – west and centre; north and east; and south – comprise a wide range of services that allow us to achieve our six key
objectives:
- to reduce antisocial behaviour and crime;
- to increase prevention and diversion opportunities for young people;
- to make Glasgow a cleaner place;
- to provide community reassurance in relation to antisocial behaviour and crime;
- to provide support to families and individuals;
- to reduce violence against women.
By working in genuine partnership on a wide range of crime prevention, antisocial behaviour and community safety issues we can make a real difference to communities across Glasgow.
Glasgow Community & Safety Services is a Company Incorporated in Scotland (No. 130604) and a Registered Charity (No SC017889)
====
I do just wonder who, in these times of austerity, pays FIVE HUNDRED STAFF to churn out this sort of garbage. It is also interesting that the “Stop Prostitution” web site fails to comply with either the Companies Act or the new Scottish charities legislation in disclosure of the company and charity details required!

and a little later:

(and, answering my own post, to demonstrate my inadequacy) I’ve just found the following on www.endprostitutionnow.org which I think needs to be noted and giggled at:
Disclaimer
Glasgow Community and Safety Services makes no warranties, representations or undertakings about :-
* any of the content of this website (including, without limitation, the quality, accuracy, completeness or fitness for any particular purpose of such content);
or
* any content of any other website referred to or accessed by hypertext link through this website (“third party site”)

So that disclaimer covers this:
* Job Description
Prostitution is often described as glamorous, as an occupational alternative for women, as an answer to low-paying, low skilled, boring dead-end jobs, as a solution to the high unemployment rate of poor women, as a form of sexual liberation, and a career women freely choose.
HELP WANTED: Women and girls do you want this job?
Are you tried of mindless, low skilled, low-paying jobs? Would you like a career with flexible hours? Working with people? Offering a professional service?
• No experience required! No qualifications needed. No minimum age requirement. On the job training provided.
• Special opportunities for poor women – exotic looking women – single mothers – women of colour
• Women and girls applying for this position will provide the following services:
• Being penetrated orally, anally and vaginally with penises, fingers, fists and objects, including but not limited to bottles, brushes, dildos, guns and/or animals;
•Being bound and gagged, tied with ropes and/or chains, burned with cigarettes, or hung from beams or trees;
Being photographed or filmed performing these acts

So I can make whatever Bindel-style assertions that I please, but if I’ve posted such a disclaimer, that doesn’t matter, then?

and to close:

OSCR’s web-site shows that this marvelous Charity organisation had an income last year of over £21 million quid, all of which, presumably, comes from Glasgow Council, or Holyrood? Is that what the Council Tax payers want to fund? That isn’t enough to build the airport railway, but if the Renfrew – Yoker ferry really is needed, then that is where the money could come from!

In case you’re wondering why I’m just stealing someone else’s words, I’ll explain.

I have been trying for months to hold forth on the subject of that awful

website, but I can’t do it. It makes me so utterly furious that I cannot form sentences. I just wish that the fuckers arseholes idiots who dreamt up this bullshit cretinous twaddle would just fuck off go totally, utterly, endlessly and irretrievably away.

The answer (that is) according to Julie Bindel. Before I start can I just say that I don’t like the word “use” in that context. Visit is much better, but of course ‘visit’ doesn’t have the nasty connotations that ‘use’ does, so we won’t see Julie using it anytime soon.

Julie wrote another column for the Guardian yesterday. The title of which is exactly the same as the title of this blog. Unfortunately, I missed the deadline for comments, so I shall hold forth at you lot instead.

The subject of Julie’s latest article is a report on why men visit prostitutes. Although it has been undertaken by a group which includes members who believe that the only safe choice for women is lesbianism, I’m sure it isn’t at all biased (Where’s that SarcMark when I need it?).

I’ll deal with Julie’s article first and I’ll do my best not to wander off at a tangent (I’m not making any promises).

The reasons why many men pay for sex are revealed in the interviews that make up a major new piece of research

Translated: The reasons why the men they asked pay for sex. I would like to see how they worded their questions and whether anyone was quoted out of context.

‘I don’t get anything out of sex with prostitutes except for a bad feeling,” says Ben. An apparently average, thirtysomething, middle-class man, Ben had taken an extended lunchbreak from his job in advertising to talk about his experiences of buying sex. Shy and slightly nervous, he told me, “I am hoping that talking about it might help me work out why I do it.”

If that’s true, then poor old Ben probably shouldn’t be visiting prostitutes. Sounds like he has some problems/issues that he needs to work through. Having said that, who is he visiting? If he were to find a nice independent girl who was willing to sit and talk to him, then it could do him the world of good.

I, too, was hoping to understand his motives better. Ben was one of 700 men interviewed for a major international research project seeking to uncover the reality about men who buy sex. The project spanned six countries, and of the 103 customers we spoke to in London – where I was one of the researchers – most were surprisingly keen to discuss their experiences.

Yes Julie, I’m sure you were just dying to know their reasons. Just so long as they tallied with your pre-conceived ideas.

103 people? That’s all they could find in London? That doesn’t show a keenness in my view. I’m sure that 103 men visit girls in London and a damp Sunday in January. It puts me in mind of those TV adverts, when they say “8 out of 10 people said our product is marvellous!” So you think “Great stuff then”, until you spot the small print at the bottom of the screen which says: Based on a survey of 38 people. Not quite so convincing any more…

The men didn’t fall into obvious stereotypes. They were aged between 18 and 70 years old; they were white, black, Asian, eastern European; most were employed and many were educated beyond school level. In the main they were presentable, polite, with average-to-good social skills. Many were husbands and boyfriends; just over half were either married or in a relationship with a woman.

Not quite the axe wielding psychopaths you imagined then?

Research published in 2005 found that the numbers of men who pay for sex had doubled in a decade. The authors attributed this rise to “a greater acceptability of commercial sexual contact”, yet many of our ­interviewees told us that they felt intense guilt and shame about paying for sex. “I’m not satisfied in my mind” was how one described his feelings after paying for sex. Another told me that he felt “disappointed – what a waste of money”, “lonely still” and “guilty about my relationship with my wife”. In fact, many of the men were a mass of contradictions. Despite finding their experiences “unfulfilling, empty, terrible”, they continued to visit prostitutes.

Still no quotes from anyone who is completely comfortable with what they are doing. I can’t help but start to think that this survey attracted a certain type of chap. The few who are having problems. The guys who are visiting these girls for all the wrong reasons. The guys who feel bad because of what they do. The guys want somebody to fix them so that they don’t do ‘the bad thing’ anymore. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s just selective quoting.

I interviewed 12 of the men, and found it a fascinating experience. One told me about his experience of childhood cruelty and neglect and linked this to his inability to form close relationships with anyone, particularly women. Alex admitted sex with prostitutes made him feel empty, but he had no idea how to get to know women “through the usual routes”. When I asked him about his feelings towards the women he buys he said that on the one hand, he wants prostitutes to get to know and like him and, on the other, he is “not under delusions” that the encounters are anything like a real relationship.

“I want my ideal prostitute not to behave like one,” he said, “to role-play to be a pretend girlfriend, a casual date, not business-like or mechanical. To a third person it looks like we’re in love.”

I felt compassion for Alex. No one had shown him how to form a bond with another human being and he was searching for something that commercial sex was never going to provide.

Now, while I would agree that this chap needs some sort of counselling to get over his ‘inability to form close relationships’. I can’t really see what harm he’s doing. He wants someone to cuddle up to, he wants to feel wanted and until he sorts himself out, at least he has access to some basic human warmth. In fact (as much as Julie would probably disagree), sometimes that first step can set a person like Alex on the path to a happy and fulfilling life.

But another of the interviewees left me feeling concerned. Darren was young, good-looking and bright; I asked him how often he thought the women he paid enjoyed the sex. “I don’t want them to get any pleasure,” he told me. “I am paying for it and it is her job to give me pleasure. If she enjoys it I would feel cheated.” I asked if he felt prostitutes were different to other women. “The fact that they’re prepared to do that job where others won’t, even when they’re skint, means there’s some capability inside them that permits them to do it and not be disgusted,” he said. He seemed full of a festering, potentially explosive misogyny.

At the first sign of that attitude he would be out the door. I don’t expect men to be all consumed with the amount of pleasure I get out of our meeting. In fact I don’t mind if they’re not particularly bothered whether I get any enjoyment at all, but to feel cheated if I enjoy it? Goodbye!

That last line is a classic though: “He seemed full of a festering, potentially explosive misogyny”? This from a woman who seems (to most) full of a festering, potentially explosive misandry.

When asked what would end prostitution, one interviewee laughed and said, “Kill all the girls.” Paul told me that it would take “all the men to be locked up”. But most of them told the researchers that they would be ­easily deterred if the current laws were implemented. Fines, public ­exposure, employers being informed, being issued with an Asbo or the risk of a criminal record would stop most of the men from continuing to pay for sex. Discovering the women were trafficked, pimped or otherwise coerced would appear not to be so effective. Almost half said they ­believed that most women in prostitution are victims of pimps (“the pimp does the psychological raping of the woman,” explained one). But they still continued to visit them.

Again, I’d like to see how these questions are worded and I want to know whether the men were quoted out of context.

Another said that he had “seen women with bruises, cuts and eastern European accents in locations where lots of trafficked women and girls are”. One man suspected that an African woman he had met was ­trafficked because “she was frightened and nervous. She told me she had been tricked. I had sex with her and she seemed fine with the sex. She asked me to help her, but I said there was little I could do. She might have been lying to me.”

One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would “need” to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, “Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead.” Another put it like this: “A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape.” I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.

A couple of fabulous examples of the human race, right there. Honestly, if you will include the dregs of society in your survey then don’t be surprised if they give you answers like that. Oh, hold on, I forgot, that’s exactly the type of answer you were looking for.

Hang on a minute though, who are these men visiting? Dodgy brothels? I’m sure they exist somewhere. Street girls? Either way, what they are doing is illegal already. It has nothing whatsoever to do with independent girls like myself, who are working legally and whom these researchers would bring down in order to ‘save’ the exploited girls.

Only 6% of the men we spoke to had been arrested for soliciting ­prostitutes.

So we are talking about street girls here?

To be continued…

Quote of the day:
The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them. – Samuel McChord Crothers

According to a poster on the Punternet forum, it is ‘not possible’ to have a relationship with an escort because there will be ‘an eliment (sic)* of deep mistrust’.

The evidence for this is a case in Wales where a man is accused of murdering his wife after they rowed over his use of casual sex websites.

How are these things linked you ask?

Well, the lady in question worked as a prostitute. Actually, so did her husband.

A classic case of 2+2=7 if you ask me.

I think the only thing this proves is that couples who spend all their time yelling at and/or battering each other should just split up and have done with it.

You either have trust in a relationship or you don’t. What your partner does for a living is completely irrelevant.

* I’m quoting this verbatim to illustrate my linguistic supremacy… obviously.

Quote of the Day:
The easiest thing to find is fault.
–Anonymous

This is a confirmed fact!

Graeme Pearson, former director of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and now a professor at Glasgow University specialising in organised crime says:

"I was a policeman for 40 years and I never met a happy prostitute,"

Well, I’ve been on this earth for over 36 years and I’ve never met an astronaut…

*Taps nose*

Definitive proof!

Amanda xx

Quote of the day:
If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. – P. G. Wodehouse

Well it does.

What do you mean you don’t know what I’m talking about?

In Inverness (Academy street), there is a toy shop which has a chap in a teddy bear suit wandering up and down outside. He waves, blow kisses, hug passers by (not by force obviously) and generally makes people smile. Ok, he doesn’t make everybody smile. Whilst stopped at the traffic lights, I was watching people’s reaction to him, There were quite a few miserable buggers very serious folk who couldn’t make space in their day to be nice to the bear and would probably have died on the spot if they’d been hugged. I have to say though, he makes me smile, he makes most people smile and he gave me one of the best laughs ever when, having spent a few minutes sitting at the red light watching the bear, when the light turned green and I resumed my journey, my phone rang. It was Laura, in the car behind me:

Laura:

Ok, I just need to clarify this. There was a six foot bear back there yeah? I really did see that?

Me (giggling):

Yes, there was.

Laura:

You saw it too?

Me:

Saw it? I was flirting with it!

I must admit though, when a mentally handicapped man (having already passed the bear) ran back to receive a huge bear hug the other day, I started to well up. Watching the sheer pleasure on that chap’s face.

Why can’t we all be more like that? Why do people feel the need to be so bloody poker faced all the time? Why can’t we express joy and pleasure without anybody tut-tutting or telling us to rein it in a bit?

I tend not to care who thinks I’m mad. They’re probably at least partially right anyway.

I will laugh and smile. I will hug six foot teddy bears. I will dance with happy drunks in shopping precincts.

You only live once. Don’t waste it being miserable (unless you enjoy it of course).

Amanda xx

Quote of the day:
Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts — Charles Dickens

Thank you Nick Davies.

Taken from The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/trafficking-numbers-women-exaggerated

There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as the now notorious torrent about Saddam Hussein’s weapons.

In the story of UK sex trafficking, the conclusions of academics who study the sex trade have been subjected to the same treatment as the restrained reports of intelligence analysts who studied Iraqi weapons – stripped of caution, stretched to their most alarming possible meaning and tossed into the public domain. There, they have been picked up by the media who have stretched them even further in stories which have then been treated as reliable sources by politicians, who in turn provided quotes for more misleading stories.

In both cases, the cycle has been driven by political opportunists and interest groups in pursuit of an agenda. In the case of sex trafficking, the role of the neo-conservatives and Iraqi exiles has been played by an unlikely union of evangelical Christians with feminist campaigners, who pursued the trafficking tale to secure their greater goal, not of regime change, but of legal change to abolish all prostitution. The sex trafficking story is a model of misinformation. It began to take shape in the mid 1990s, when the collapse of economies in the old Warsaw Pact countries saw the working flats of London flooded with young women from eastern Europe. Soon, there were rumours and media reports that attached a new word to these women. They had been "trafficked".

And, from the outset, that word was a problem. On a strict definition, eventually expressed in international law by the 2000 Palermo protocol, sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. This image of sex slavery soon provoked real public anxiety.

But a much looser definition, subsequently adopted by the UK’s 2003 Sexual Offences Act, uses the word to describe the movement of all sex workers, including willing professionals who are simply travelling in search of a better income. This wider meaning has injected public debate with confusion and disproportionate anxiety.

Two academics from the University of North London, Liz Kelly and Linda Regan, tried to estimate the number of women who had been trafficked in the UK during the calendar year 1998, an exercise which they honestly described as "problematic".

First, there was the problem of the word, which Kelly and Regan solved by accepting all variations of its meaning. Then, there was the shortage of facts. They spoke to specialists, studied news reports and surveyedpolice, who reported that 71 women had been "trafficked", whether willingly or not, during 1998. In Stopping Traffic, which they published in May 2000, Kelly and Regan argued that the real scale of the problem was probably bigger than this and, in the absence of any accurate data, they made various assumptions which they themselves described as "speculative".

At the very least, they guessed, there could be another 71 trafficked women who had been missed by police, which would double the total, to 142. At the most, they suggested, the true total might be 20 times higher, at 1,420.

But reaching this figure involved a further quadrupling of the number of victims missed by police, plus quadrupling existing estimates by sex health workers, plus assuming the accuracy of a newspaper report that "hundreds" of women had been trafficked into the UK from Albania and Kosovo, plus assuming that mail-order brides were also victims of trafficking, plus adding women who were transported within the UK as well as those brought into the UK.

Kelly and Regan were transparent and honest about the speculative character of their assumptions. They were clear about their adoption of the widest possible meaning of the term. They presented their conclusion with caution: "It can be estimated that the true scale of trafficking may be between two and 20 times that which has been confirmed."

And they presented their conclusion as a range of possibilities: "It is recognised that this is a wide range, but it indicates the likely scale of the problem while reflecting the poverty of information in this area."

During the following years, the subject attracted the attention of religious groups, particularly the Salvation Army and an umbrella group of evangelicals called Churches Alert to Sex Trafficking Across Europe (Chaste). Chaste explicitly campaigned for an end to all prostitution and, quoting their commitment to the principles of the Kingdom of God, they were enlisted as specialist advisers to the police.

Chaste took the work of Kelly and Regan, brought the estimate forward by two years, stripped out all the caution, headed for the maximum end of the range and declared : "An estimated 1,420 women were trafficked into the UK in 2000 for the purposes of constrained prostitution."

The misleading figure was repeated in news stories and adopted by politicians. Even the government’s Crimestoppers campaign recycled it. And over and over again, the absence of a definition in the original work was replaced with the certainty that this was about women who were forced to work against their will. Chaste spoke repeatedly about "sexual enslavement" and "sex slavery".

Three years after the Kelly/Regan work was published, in 2003, a second team of researchers was commissioned by the Home Office to tackle the same area. They, too, were forced to make a set of highly speculative assumptions: that every single foreign woman in the "walk-up" flats in Soho had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as a prostitute; that the same was true of 75% of foreign women in other flats around the UK and of 10% of foreign women working for escort agencies. Crunching these percentages into estimates of the number of foreign women in the various forms of sex work, they came up with an estimate of 3,812 women working against their will in the UK sex trade.

Margin of error

The researchers ringed this figure with warnings. The data, they said, was "very poor" and quantifying the subject was "extremely difficult". Their final estimate was "very approximate", "subject to a very large margin of error" and "should be treated with great caution" and the figure of 3,812 "should be regarded as an upper bound".

No chance. In June 2006, before the research had even been published, the then Home Office minister Vernon Coaker ignored the speculative nature of the assumptions behind the figure, stripped out all the caution, headed for the maximum end of the range and then rounded it up, declaring to an inquiry into sex trafficking by the Commons joint committee on human rights: "There are an estimated 4,000 women victims."

The Christian charity Care announced: "In 2003, the Home Office estimated there were 4,000 women and girls in the UK at any one time that had been trafficked into forced prostitution." The Salvation Army went further: "The Home Office estimated that in 2003 … there were at least 4,000 trafficked women residing in the UK. This figure is believed to be a massive underestimation of the problem." Anti-Slavery Internatio

nal joined them, converting what the Home Office researchers had described as a "very approximate" estimate into "a very conservative estimate".

The Home Office, at least, having commissioned the research, was in a position to remind everybody of its authors’ warnings. Except it didn’t.

In March 2007, it produced the UK Action Plan on Human Trafficking and casually reproduced the figure of 4,000 without any of the researchers’ cautions.

The evidence was left even further behind as politicians took up the issue as a rallying call for feminists. They were led by the Labour MP for Rotherham and former Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane, who took to describing London as "Europe’s capital for under-aged trafficked sex slaves". In a debate in the Commons in November 2007, MacShane announced that "according to Home Office estimates, 25,000 sex slaves currently work in the massage parlours and brothels of Britain."

There is simply no Home Office source for that figure, although it has been reproduced repeatedly in media stories.

Two months later, in another Commons debate, MacShane used the same figure, but this time he attributed it to the Daily Mirror, which had indeed run a story in October 2005 with the headline "25,000 Sex Slaves on the Streets of Britain." However, the newspaper had offered no evidence at all to support the figure. On the contrary, the body of its story used a much lower figure, of between 2,000 and 6,000 brought in each year, and attributed this to unnamed Home Office officials, even though the Home Office has never produced any research which could justify it.

MacShane was not deterred.

"I used to work for the Daily Mirror, so I trust the report," he said.

Sources

The then solicitor general, Vera Baird, replied by warning MacShane that "we think that his numbers from the Daily Mirror are off" and then recycled the figure of 4,000 without any of the researchers’ cautions. MacShane then switched line and started to claim, for example in a letter to the Guardian in September 2008, that there were "18,000 women, often young girls, trafficked into Britain as sex slaves." He used this same figure in another debate in the House of Commons, adding "We have to get the facts and figures right."

On this occasion, the source he was quoting was Pentameter Two, the six-month national police operation which failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution. But MacShane had a point: presenting the results of the operation to the press in July 2008, its operational head, Tim Brain, the chief constable of Gloucester, was widely reported to have said that there were now 18,000 victims of trafficking in the UK and that this included under-age girls.

Other senior figures who were involved with this press conference say they were taken completely by surprise by Brain’s claim. "None of us knew where that came from," according to one senior figure. "It wasn’t in his pre-brief. It wasn’t in anything: ministers weren’t briefed. Tim may have meant to say 1,800 and just got his figures mixed up."

Brain now agrees that the figure is not correct and suggested to the Guardian that he had been trying to estimate the total number of prostitutes in the UK, not the total number of trafficked women.

But the damage had been done. Patrick Hall, Labour MP for Bedford, solemnly told the House of Commons that there was sex trafficking "in towns and villages throughout the land."

Fiona Mactaggart, a former Home Office minister, in January 2008 outstripped MacShane’s estimates, telling the House of Commons that she regarded all women prostitutes as the victims of trafficking, since their route into sex work "almost always involves coercion, enforced addiction to drugs and violence from their pimps or traffickers." There is no known research into UK prostitution which supports this claim.

In November 2008, Mactaggart repeated a version of the same claim when she told BBC Radio 4′s Today in Parliament that "something like 80% of women in prostitution are controlled by their drug dealer, their pimp, or their trafficker." Again, there is no known source for this.

Challenged to justify this figure by a different Radio 4 programme, More or Less, in January 2009, Mactaggart claimed that it comes from the Home Office’s 2004 report on prostitution, Paying the Price. But there is no sign of the figure in the report.

In the summer of 2004, The Poppy Project, which is committed to ending all prostitution on the grounds that it "helps to construct and maintain gender inequality", surveyed London prostitutes working in flats and found that 80% of them were foreign, a finding which is well supported. They then added, without any clear evidence, that "a large proportion of them are likely to have been trafficked into the country", a conclusion which is challenged by specialist police, but which was then recycled through numerous media reports and political claims.

Last year (2008), Poppy published a report called The Big Brothel, which claimed to be the most comprehensive study ever conducted into brothels in the UK and which claimed to have found "indicators of trafficking in every borough of London".

That report was subsequently condemned in a joint statement from 27 specialist academics who complained that it was "framed by a pre-existing political view of prostitution". The academics said there were "serious flaws" in the way that data had been collected and analysed; that the reliability of the data was "extremely doubtful"; and that the claims about trafficking "cannot be substantiated."

Illusion

But by that time, the report had generated a mass of news stories, most of which took the unreliable results and overstated them. Like Chaste, the Poppy Project, which has been paid nearly £6m to shelter trafficked women, has been drafted in to advise police and continues to have its own office in the Sheffield headquarters of the UK Human Trafficking Centre.

The cacophony of voices has created the illusion of confirmation.

Politicians and religious groups still repeat the media story that 40,000 prostitutes were trafficked into Germany for the 2006 world cup – long after leaked police documents revealed there was no truth at all in the tale. The Daily Mirror’s baseless claim of 25,000 trafficking victims is still being quoted, recently, for example, by the Salvation Army in written evidence to the home affairs select committee, in which they added : "Other studies done by media have suggested much higher numbers."

Somewhere beneath all this, there is a reality. There have been real traffickers.

Since the Sexual Offences Act came into force in January 2004, internal police documents show that 46 men and women have been convicted and jailed for transporting willing sex workers and 59 people have been convicted for transporting women who were forced to work as prostitutes.

Ruth Breslin, research and development manager for Eaves, which runs the Poppy project, said: "I realise that the 25,000 figure, which is one that has been bandied about in the media, is one that doesn’t really have much of an evidence base and may be slightly subject to media hype. There is an awful lot of confusion in the media and other places between trafficking (unwilling victims) and smuggling (willing passengers). People do get confused and they are two very different things."

She said that in the six and a half years since Poppy was founded, a total of 1,387 men and women had been referred to them, of whom they had taken in just over 500 women who they believed had been trafficked into sexual exploitation or domestic servitude by the use of coercion,
deception or force. "I do think that there a lot more trafficked women out there than the women we see in our project. I do think there are significant numbers. I would say the figure is in the thousands. I don’t know about the tens of thousands. That’s probably going too far."

Certainly there have been real victims, some of whom have been compensated as victims of crime. The internal analysis of Pentameter Two, obtained by the Guardian, reveals that after six months of raids across the UK, 11 women were finally "made safe". This clashes with early police claims that Pentameter had rescued 351 victims. By the time that Brain held his press conference in July last year, that figure had been reduced to 167 victims who were said to have been "saved from lives of abuse, exploitation and misery".

However, the internal analysis shows that supposed victims variously absconded from police, went home voluntarily, declined support, were removed by the UK Borders Agency or were prosecuted for various offences.

Dealing with this, the document explains: "The number of ‘potential victims’ has been refined as more informed decisions have been made about whether or not the individual is believed to be a victim of human trafficking for sexual exploitation … Initial considerations were made on limited information … When interviewed, the potential victim may make it clear that they are not in fact a victim of trafficking and/or inquiries may make it clear that they are not and/or inquiries may show that initial consideration was based on false or incomplete information."

Research published recently by Dr Nick Mai of London Metropolitan University, concludes that, contrary to public perception, the majority of migrant sex workers have chosen prostitution as a source of "dignified living conditions and to increase their opportunities for a better future while dramatically improving the living conditions of their families in the country of origin". After detailed interviews with 100 migrant sex workers in the UK, Mai found: "For the majority, working in the sex industry was a way to avoid the exploitative working conditions they had met in their previous non-sexual jobs."

The UK Network of Sex Work Projects, whose outreach workers deal with thousands of prostitutes, told the home affairs select committee last year: "It is undoubtedly the case that women are trafficked into the sex industry. However, the proportion of sex workers of whom this is true is relatively small, both compared to the sex industry as a whole and to other industries." The chairman of that committee, Keith Vaz, observed: "We are told that this is the second largest problem facing the globe after drugs and we do not seem to be able to find the people responsible."

For the police, the misinformation has succeeded in diverting resources away from other victims. Specialist officers who deal with trafficking have told the Guardian that although they will continue to monitor all forms of trafficking, they are now shifting their priority away from the supposed thousands of sex slaves towards the movement within the UK of children who are being sexually abused. They say they are also dealing with more cases where illegal migrant workers of all kinds, including willing sex workers, find themselves being ripped off and overcharged for their transport.

Unheard

However, the key point is that on the sidelines of a debate which has been dominated by ideology, a chorus of alarm from the prostitutes themselves is singing out virtually unheard. In the cause of protecting "thousands" of victims of trafficking, Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader and minister for women and equality, has led the parliamentary campaign for a law to penalise men who pay for sex with women who are "controlled for gain" even if the men do so in genuine ignorance.

Repeatedly, prostitutes groups have argued that the proposal is as wrong as the trafficking estimates on which it is based, and that it will aggravate every form of jeopardy which they face in their work, whether by encouraging them to work alone in an attempt to show that they are free of control or by pressurising them to have sex without condoms to hold on to worried customers. Thus far, their voices remain largely ignored by news media and politicians who, once more, have been swept away on a tide of misinformation.

I’m sure that he will be shot down in flames. The truth doesn’t seem to be of any interest to the people behind this. They have their own agenda and will fight for it at any cost. The women they claim to be trying to save are trampled and silenced.

These people don’t want to save anyone. They want to further their own barmy causes. They want to be saviours at any cost, lauded by their peers.

It’s a bit like ‘helping’ an old lady across the road whilst ignoring her protestations that she didn’t want to cross the road in the first place.

Yours in gratitude to Nick Davies.

Amanda

Quote of the Day:
Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offense.
–Marcus Tullius Cicero

Another day, another misguided do-gooder.

This time it’s Mary Honeyball MEP (stop sniggering at the back!). On her blog page “The Honeyball Buzz” she says:

The plans announced by the Metropolitan Police to abolish its specialist unit dealing with human traficking – trafficking of women and children – are nothing short of a disgrace.

So… Men don’t get trafficked then, no? (Cockle pickers anyone?) Or are we looking for the sympathy vote? Searching for a White Knight to save all these “poor defenceless” women and children? How patronising. This from someone who in the next breath would be almost certain to tell you that she wants equality for women.

Trafficking of women is to a large extent trafficking to sell women into prostitution.  These often unsuspecting women are lured away from their homes, frequently on the pretext of a better life elsewhere, only to find themselves totally in thrall to ruthless criminals whose only aim is to exploit them for gain.  It really is a modern form of slavery and should be treated as such.  I hope there will be a major outcry against the Met’s plans so that they are forced to think again.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that no woman has ever been trafficked or coerced into prostitution, but methinks her numbers are screwy.

What is more, the Met trafficking unit has been viewed as an international example of good practice.  It also takes several years to develop expertise into trafficking, expertise which would more than likely be lost if the Met were to disband its unit which has built up a range of knowledge since its inception in 2007.  The nature of the crime also means that those cases which are brought to book are only the tip of the iceberg and if more of the iceberg is to be exposed, specialist expertise is required.

Blah blah blah…

Has this woman actually spoken to the Met about this? I very much doubt it. You see what happens is the same thing that happens when us tarts speak out: What we say doesn’t tally with what these people want to people, so they shout over us and we are ignored.

The facts are that these women just want to be remembered as heroes. They want to save someone. Unfortunately, they’re not particularly bothered about whether the aforementioned people actually want to be saved.

There is, in addition, the matter of the Olympics in London in 2012.  The last football World Cup in Germany attracted thousnads of prostitutes who openly plied their wares as prostitution is legal in Germany.  I was, in fact, one of a number of women who signed a petition to the German Government to outlaw prostitution at the World Cup.  The general view was that a large number, more than likely the majority of those women had been trafficked from outside the host country.  For the sake of the trafficked women, we need to be extremely vigilant to ensure that the same thing does not happen in London in 2012.  It would be a massive tragedy if the Games were marred by any form of criminal element.

What about the prostitutes who are working independently and legally? No mention of those eh? Because again, we apparently don’t exist, because this woman chooses not to believe in us. Bloody good job my name isn’t Tinkerbell… Please clap your hands just to be on the safe side.

Anyway, as irritating and infuriating as all that is, its not a patch on this next quote from the comments on her blog, which I actually find rather insulting.

I’ll add the comment that she replied to, because it actually injects a modicum of sense into the madness:

Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon, on October 7th, 2009 at 8:41 pm Said:

It seems strange to scrap the Trafficking Unit only 6 months after the government announced that it was to get a further £3.7m over 2 years. Maybe this is an acknowledgement of the falsity of the trafficking figures for sexual exploitation. No one denies that people are trafficked. The numbers quoted of those trafficked for sexual exploitation are spuriously high, while people brought to this country on visas issued by British Embassies to families for their staff are very high. Many of these staff are not allowed to hold their own passports nor do they speak the language here. See the Committee of Human Rights recent report on trafficking. These are ignored because people like Ms Honeyball find prostitution a bit ‘icky’ and tries to ban things which have been decided by other democratically elected governments.
There was mass hysteria before the World Cup about how dreadful it would all be, all the usual gothic horror stories were trotted out. What did we see? Happy families, and contented smiles. It is your own side Ms Honeyball who ramped up these figures. Even Alan Johnson admitted recently they have been badly worked out. And now they take the cowards way out with silent cuts.

maryhoneyballmep, on October 8th, 2009 at 10:07 am Said:

Dr Brooks-Gordon, Thank you for this comment. I take your point about the figyres. However, I do take issue with your comment that I find prostitution a bit ‘icky’. Prostitution is exploitation of women for fianacial gain. Few women either enter or stay as prostitutes willingly and most have a drug habit. I want every single woman to have the opportunity for a fulfilling life; prostitution most definitely does not provide this.

 

Most have a drug habit? Ok, I give in. I have two words for you Ms Furball:  They start with F and end with off!

I feel better now.

Yours, still un-pimped, un-coerced and not a junkie (unless you count 2 Ibuprofen for the headache you’ve given me).

Amanda

Quote of the Day:
Truth will always be truth, regardless of lack of understanding, disbelief or ignorance.
–W. Clement Stone

Having experienced it on several different occasions, I can now announce that:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Claire’s driving!

In fact I would go as far as to say that Claire is a bloody good driver.

Thank you for listening.

Amanda x

Quote of the day:
There’s no point in being grown up if you can’t be childish sometimes. – Doctor Who