LIES, DAMNED LIES and HOME OFFICE STATISTICS

EVER HEARD of a guy called Robert Whiston? I ask because, according to Mr Whiston, the Home Office’s rocketing rape figures are just as contrived as its pumped up sex trafficking statistics.

It appears that Mr W is no ignoramus. He has served on committees attached to the Home Office, the Lord Chancellor’s Department and the Ministry of Justice since 1999, and written briefing papers on sexual offending and rape sentencing tariffs in the UK and abroad.

More of this later in this post, but first, what a few weeks we’ve had since I last posted! Coming back to it all and ploughing through a sea of emails, I feel like those NASA scientists extrapolating results from a lunar impact and concluding that yes, sure there’s boring old water on the moon, but look what else we‘ve found!

Just for the record, for those that have been on holiday, it all started with the demolition of the Home Office Pentameter 2 stats on sex trafficking by Nick Davies in the Guardian on October 20.

The two Pentameter inquisitions, for the uninitiated, were months-long combined operations by all 55 UK police forces (and numerous other odds and sods) throughout the parlours and saunas of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, ostensibly aimed at unearthing alleged sex trafficking networks.

Now ever since the first Pentameter, back in 2006, it had been clear reading between the lines that the boys and girls in blue were not finding the Aladdin’s caves full of sultry sex slaves they had been led to believe existed.

Phrases like “charged with a variety of offences” cropped up in contrast to numbers charged with human trafficking, and it has been clear to those who follow the media that most arrests were for brothel keeping, ‘controlling’ a prostitute for gain, or banking the proceeds (‘money laundering’) rather than for proper crimes with real coerced victims worth police time.

Which is not to say that there were no victims, nor genuine cases of coercion. Just not very many of them.

Not that the UK has actually passed any legal anti-Human Sex Trafficking law, you understand. The UN enshrined the international definition of human trafficking nine years ago in Article 3 of the Palermo Protocol, which determines what human trafficking “shall mean.” The UK Home Office sat on its bum for two or three years and then passed 

HOW BOOKING A CAB CAN MAKE YOU A UK SEX SLAVE DRIVER

THINK OF HUMAN  sex trafficking and you think of young, usually migrant women forced into prostitution against their will by villains.

Often, though not always, they are attracted to the UK with promises of vanilla jobs, and then imprisoned and forced to service men, paying all their earnings to traffickers who see them as nothing but cash cows.

This horrendous practice takes place throughout the world. And this includes the UK, though the numbers here are clearly far less than often painted – hundreds, rather than the 4,000 once (very badly) “estimated” by the Home Office but still quoted on occasions.

It is, of course, a very serious offence, for which one can spend up to 14 years in prison. Which is why one should be angry when it is used gratuitously against someone who clearly does not deserve the label.

Such a person is Yan Yang (right), a 50-year-old woman gaoled for 10 months at Ipswich Crown Court this week. Her “human trafficking” offence was to arrange a taxi from the local station for two young women who had come from London to work for her.

Let’s make no bones about it – Yan Yang was setting up a parlour (aka brothel) in Ashmere Grove in the town. She already had one young woman in her employ, and the two arrivals from London had responded to an advertisement she placed for masseuses in a Chinese newspaper.

When the law makes things worse…

This is a story, the first of three I’m planning, on victims in the UK sex industry.

A little like Amanda Walker, these are victims, not of traffickers, but of Her Majesty’s Home Office and its bizarre laws. And I believe each to be a lesson in failure by the criminal justice system.

Unlike Amanda, however, the victims in these cases worked not as street prostitutes, but at various levels of management in the sex industry – people many would call ‘pimps’.

The variations in their income for this task were extraordinary. They range from the pocket money required for a single haircut for many weeks’ work at one extreme, to – reportedly – millions of pounds at the other.

The penalties they suffered at the hands of the law varied too – from eight months’ prison at one extreme to a community service order and a fine. And, as this is Bizarre Britain, it was, of course, the one who only earned the haircut money who wound up behind bars.

UK ‘SEX SLAVES’ FLEE TRAMPLING HERD OF RESCUERS

THIS WEEK’s revelations in the Daily Telegraph and More 4 news of the disappearance of two-thirds of the migrant sex workers “rescued” in the UK’s ‘Pentameter’ anti-sex trafficking raids comes as no surprise.

The two Pentameter inquisitions, in 2006 and 2008, involved all 55 UK police forces and rendered coituses interruptus from Lands End to John O’Groats, as well as in Ireland. There were some 1,300 raids on premises, largely brothels, but a mere 255 women  “rescued” were deemed trafficked – a tiny fragment of the 4,000 supposed sex trafficking victims the Home Office had promised in its dodgy dossier.

Of those 255, only 37 – less than 15 percent – accepted offers of support. Another three dozen returned to their home countries voluntarily, while 16 were deported.

The remaining 166 (65%) refused offers of help and left the police facilities, their whereabouts now unknown.

The Home Office stated that due to the nature of trafficking, “a significant number of victims are unwilling to engage or accept support.”

But their reasons for declining help are controversial:

STREETS BEHIND: how police kerb crawling drives kill street sex workers

LATER THIS YEAR, a new law is due to come into effect which will criminalise those who arrange a liaison with a sex worker subsequently discovered to have been coerced.

The offence will be New Labour‘s 3,601st since 1997, contributing the latest instalment of what Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne (right) has described as an attack of “legislative diarrhoea.” 

Other clauses in the Policing and Crime Bill, now in the Lords, will:

• remove the right to a warning for kerb crawlers

• enable buildings housing brothels to be closed for up to three months, and

• introduce three compulsory sessions of rehabilitation for street sex workers caught persistently soliciting (as an alternative to a fine), with persistently defined as just twice in three months (it is now a week).

But it is the new client offence which has caused most jubilation among some feminists, and vehement opposition from others. Cheerleaders for the new moves are, predictably, Eaves Housing and Object. Their new campaign, Demand Change, is in the vanguard of the movement to use the new law as a thin end of a wedge towards their ultimate goal of criminalising all who hire sex workers, or, as the prohibitionists would put it, buy prostituted women. 

But just before we rush headlong to sign the petitions, dust off the banners and jump aboard this moral crusade’s bandwagon, let us pause and mourn the fallen from previous conflicts. Soldiers die in crusades, but the casualties in this war are unlikely to include many representatives of the socioeconomic groups A, B and C1, who throng launches and campaign meetings in the salubrious surroundings of Portcullis House.

Among those women who will be unable to join, for example, is one Amanda Walker (pictured).

Amanda, 21, was a Leeds street prostitute who left her two year old son at home with his father in the Rawcliffe area of the city to seek work in London as a result of income lost through a local ‘kerb crawling’ drive by West Yorkshire Police ten years ago.

The police initiative was held in

SEX SLAVES “LEFT WAITING DAYS FOR POLICE RESCUE”

SEX TRAFFICKING victims can be left waiting days in UK brothels while police “make observations” before stepping in to rescue them.

The women, commonly referred to by Home Office ministers as being expected to service as many as 30 or 40 clients a day, could be left waiting “a number of days” while police keep the brothel “under observation,” Home Office minister Lord Brett (right) told the House of Lords during debates on the Policing and Crime Bill, which includes a controversial measure to criminalise clients of sex workers deemed coerced or trafficked.

Their ordeal would continue until “at some point, sufficient evidence will have been gathered,” he said.

LONDON FAILS TO CONNECT ON SEX WORKER SAFETY

LONDON Mayor Boris Johnson’s sidekick Kit Malthouse did his best to up Olympic 2012 trafficking paranoia this week by again dusting off his nine-year-old anti-carding campaign.

Johnson and Malthouse are anxious to get phone companies to disconnect the mobiles of sex workers. Predictably nobody in the  gullible London media had the bottle to question whether this was wise, given the proclivity of sex workers to get attacked by maniacs (in Canada, for example, the local community gathers up old mobiles to give to sex workers for safety).

Instead, the journos blandly accepted Malthouse’s version, warts and all.

The Telegraph reported that Malthouse demanded that “an agreement must be reached between mobile phone networks and police that sees [the phone numbers] taken out of use as soon as they are identified.”

Adding that there were several “poor girls” operating “behind the number,”  Malthouse proclaimed: “If you are an American tourist and if you walk into a telephone box you would think it was a sex shop.”

A very small sex shop, surely? Typical London politician: sod the British, what will the yanks think?

But it was the scenery in the background in the Telegraph that was the most questionable aspect: “Police have already warned that the Olympics may fuel an unprecedented boom in London’s sex industry,” it said. “Sex workers from across the world are expected to attempt to cash in on thousands of site workers, spectators and athletes.”

Among the errors repeated in papers like the Guardian and the Times was the vague assertion that human trafficking ‘doubled’ or thereabouts at the Athens

MURDER PROBE: POLICE SEEK BROTHELS’ HELP

IN THE EARLY hours of Monday morning, a man was stabbed to death in a Bradford brothel.

Police, in the form of Detective Superintendent Dave Pervin (pictured), are requesting any of the city’s brothel owners who may have been robbed recently to get in touch, says the Telegraph and Argus.

Sure. Well, I mean, Dave, what’s possible imprisonment for seven years, confiscation of all your income from your enterprise, the likely forced deportation of many of those working and – shortly – the closure of the building involved for three months, between friends? This is murder, for Chrissakes.

And if they come forward to aid the police, Dave, as Diana Jones did when she discovered two trafficking victims

OFFICIAL: POLICE CRACKDOWNS CAUSE VIOLENCE TO STREET SEX WORKERS, SAYS NEW STUDY

A NEW STUDY of street sex workers confirms higher levels of violence against them during police interventions such as kerb crawling clampdowns and arrests for soliciting.

The study, published by the British Medical Journal, is believed to be the first to quantify the greater violence levels in the outdoor sex market caused by the enforcement of anti-sex industry laws.

Homelessness and an inability to access drug intervention programmes – street workers are often class A or B drug users – were also linked to higher levels of violence, says

WHO DIALS 999 in a BROTHEL?

ON FEBRUARY 23 last year, three men appeared before magistrates in London charged with 18 counts of gang rape, and various counts of conspiracy to burgle and rob at a series of brothels.

As national headlines dwelt on the conviction of Ipswich serial killer Steve Wright two days earlier, little space was devoted to this culmination of a successful inquiry by the Metropolitan Police Specialist Crime Directorate.

But between them, Ibrahim Gunduz (18), of Hackney,

Imani Williams

Imani Williams and Andre Victor (both 20, of Upper Clapton), had robbed 13 women and raped or sexually assaulted seven in a five week reign of terror targeting brothels in Newham, Hackney and Waltham Forest.

A handgun was used to threaten women and Gunduz feigned disability by using a crutch with which he later battered his victims into submission.

Eight months after appearing before the magistrates, the trio were sentenced to a total of 53 years imprisonment.

But hardly had the cell doors been slammed shut on the thugs than the same problem flared up again – this time hitting brothels in Redbridge and east London. The Ilford Recorder’s report is sadly missing now from the web, but read as follows: