EXPOSED: THE HOME OFFICE DODGY DOSSIER ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND SEX SLAVES

AFTER FIVE YEARS, the secret dodgy dossier behind the Government’s claim of 4,000 ‘sex slaves’ in the UK has finally been revealed.

The figure has been repeated countless times by ministers and is relied on to justify a wave of new prohibitionist laws – such as the plan to criminalise some sex workers’ clients – and to strengthen others, by closing premises housing ‘brothels’ for three months and arresting ‘kerb crawlers’ without warning.

But the means by which it was reached has been a closely guarded secret since it was first estimated in 2004.

Home Office Minister Alan Campbell: "The latest estimate is that at any one time in 2003 there were up to 4,000 women in the UK who were possibly victims of human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation."

Enquiries both in and out of Parliament merely elicited the response that it was in an “internal Home Office document on serious organised crime.”

Even the Joint Committee on Human Rights was unable to gain access, and noted in Paragraph 78 of its report on Human Trafficking, that: “Though [new research] has not yet been published, the Government told us it showed there were an estimated 4,000 victims of trafficking for prostitution in the UK during 2003 at any one time….we have not been able to judge the validity of this figure.”

And we can now see why it wasn’t published.

The figure has been repeated countless times by the media as a definitive indication that the UK’s brothels are teeming with coerced migrants.

Yet the rationale in Chapter 3 of the Home Office’s study could be pulled apart by any reasonably intelligent Year 7 pupil.

To arrive at their 4,000, the Home Office researchers started with three sources:

Poppy’s strange records improvement

CONTROVERSY continues to surround the Home Office’s plan to subject clients of sex workers to £1,000 fines if the women they arrange sex with subsequently turn out to have been coerced, though the nonsensical “controlled for gain” phrase has been dropped in favour of women who have been “subjected to force, deception or threats” including those “subjected to force by psychological means and the exploitation of vulnerability.”

This followed heated exchanges in the Commons Scrutiny Commitee on the legislation – the Policing and Crime Bill – where MPs queried the fates of many trafficking victims and whether they would continue to be rescued by punters given the prospect of £1,000 fines and resulting publicity.

Among those giving evidence at the Committee was Denise Marshall, chief executive of the Poppy Project, which provides homes and support for rescued trafficking victims, mainly in London. Suddenly at the Committee, she made an astonishing assertion:

Interestingly, in the time we have run the POPPY project, we have had 22 referrals from punters—from those buying sex from trafficked women.

They made the referrals because the women were in an obvious physical and emotional state of distress. That sounds good on the surface until you realise that all the 22 men had sex with the trafficked woman before they phoned us.

These are trafficked women whom we have taken into our projects and whom have given evidence to us in statements. All those men, knowing the women were trafficked, had sex before phoning us to help the women to get out of their situation.

This clearly had a stunning effect on the committee, and was duly quoted by Home Office minister Alan Campbell to Parliament at the Report Stage. Yet the more one thinks about this, the less astonishing it becomes, and the more one studies the subject, the more one has reason to question Ms Marshall’s assertion.

Whereas in society in general, a relationship precedes sex, in a brothel the process is reversed. Sex comes first and a relationship, if it happens at all, develops afterwards. That is what brothels are for: it is their very raison d’être. So we should be less than surprised that the men had had sex with the women at an early stage in the proceedings.

A trafficked woman, furthermore, is unlikely to divulge her story to every punter who comes along. In doing so, she risks the punter taking the matter up with the brothel management and the possibility of reprisals. Imparting her plight to a punter therefore entails a degee of risk and consequently requires the build-up of trust.

Furthermore, many trafficked women have little or no English. This story tells the tale of one woman’s remarkable escape and the lengths that a punter had to go to in order to overcome the language barrier.

And from the punter’s perspective, the conclusion that a woman may be a trafficking victim is not necessarily reached quickly. It may gradually dawn. Furthermore, once the conclusion is reached, aiding the victim’s escape may be a dangerous enterprise and may require at least some degree of co-planning, perhaps with repeat visits to the brothel.

But why would a punter get involved in the escape himself, rather than tip-off the police or Crimestoppers and spark a raid?  Some undoubtedly do spark raids, but there can be many reasons not to – the possible prosecutions of low level managers, the loss of the establishment, possibly the enforced deporation of some of the other sex workers. In addition to this, the relationship with the victim may by now have become important to him, and this also could be threatened.

More questions could be asked of Ms Marshall’s assertion, however, once one has read through her Poppy Project’s publication Routes In, Routes Out, produced less than six months before her statement to the Committee.

This document was “collated from the case files of 118 women supported by the POPPY Project (on either an acute or outreach basis) long enough to have developed a trusting relationship with their Senior Support Worker between March 2003 and July 2007.”

Paragraph 5.4 on Page 20 gives a breakdown of how the 118 women escaped their captors. Only nine, it states, were known to have escaped with the help of punters.

However, Poppy had no record of how some 25 of these women escaped, whilst a further score or so escaped as a result of police raids which may or may not have been sparked off by punters’ tip-offs.

The other point is that no well-infomed punter is likely to refer a trafficking victim to Poppy – a notoriously anti-punter institution – given alternative organisations who provide support such as the Salvation Army.

It becomes clear, then, that out of the best documented of their 118 referals just last August, Poppy had no idea how more than a fifth of them had escaped their captors, and no apparent knowledge of how many of the police raids were sparked by punters.

Given the departure of most of the women back to their home countries many months ago, it seems extraordinary that Denise Marshall could tell the Scrutiny Committee so definitively not only that Poppy has received 22 referrals from punters, but that in each and every case the men had had sex with the victims after knowing they were trafficked.

A revolution in record keeping indeed.

Taxmen pressure brothel raid – owner gets 15 months

GEORGE McCOY, of the famous McCoy’s Guides, sometimes compares the UK sex industry to the Wild West. And it’s funny, but I know exactly what he means.

Only last August, Nicky Taylor was showing us the Dagenham brothel on Channel 4 where the local police had fitted panic buttons lest any of the girls get attacked and the owner had insisted on being listed as a brothel for VAT despite their suggestions of terming her grotty Portacabin a ‘massage parlour’.

That, of course, is Essex. But in that part of Middlesex known to the Government as Surrey (Staines to be precise), trying to give the Government its share of your professed £100,000 income can land you with 15 months in the clink.

This is the fate that befell sobbing 35-year-old former street prostitute Jennifer Schott, of Twickenham, last Wednesday. According to her solicitor, Andrew Thomson, Schott “had naively filled in the tax return as she was told by workers in the sex industry if her form was filled out correctly the Inland Revenue would turn a blind eye to the nature of the business,” says the Staines Guardian.

The police had known of the Staines brothel for some time, but only acted after being “pressed” by the Inland Revenue, he said. I wonder if he had considered an ‘abuse of process’ defence (or heard of it). It sometimes applies to brothels of longstanding – I believe if the police have known of them for eight years.

The UK’s quaint, rustic, dangerous, ineffective and totally bazaar prostitution laws have long been known to have resulted in a postcode lottery over which police force might implement what, where and when. Now the game of Russian roulette seems to have spread to the taxmen. The inevitable result, of course, will be a reduction in Treasury income as brothel owners think twice about filing their returns.

Several years ago the Government evacuated its ‘Co-ordinated Prostitution Strategy’, which, among those who’ve read it, is generally thought to be the result of excessive use of confiscated crack and heroin in Marsham Street. As you can tell from the above, it has all the co-ordination one might expect from a millipede with multiple sclerosis.

As distinct from its aim of ‘disrupting’ the sex industry, it’s actual impact has been to reinforce previous suspicions that the Government hasn’t a clue what it’s doing, but is absolutely determined to spend a lot of money on it and impress the Daily Wail readers with their moral fortitude.

The message now being given to those people who provide safe environments for working girls and boys is to think very carefully how to approach the Inland Revenue, where the sign is that tax really HAS to be taxing.

As for the girls and boys themselves, whose off-street activities are perfectly legal – yes, even in brothels -  help is on hand from taxrelief4escorts and the tax page of  Support And Advice for Escorts (SAAFE).

BATTERING DOWN THE DOOR – how not to handle human trafficking

POLICE IN ‘protective clothing’ rammed the door of a suspected Plymouth, UK brothel on Wednesday morning, handcuffing two Thai women – one in her nightwear – and placing them in separate rooms while they used a dog to search the premises.

The women, in their thirties, were later interrogated at a police station using an interpreter. Police have not yet explicitly mentioned human trafficking, but according to the Plymouth Herald, a 47-year-old man was later detained having arrived at Heathrow following a business trip to the Far East on suspicion of money laundering and Consumer Credit offences.

Furthermore, along with immigration officers, the raid squad boasted members of a new ‘South West Illegal Money Lending Team’ – which would be consistent with debt bonding suspicions, a common feature of trafficking.

The Plymouth raid is far from alone – during their two national Pentameter operations targeting human trafficking in the sex industry, the UK’s 55 police forces conducted no less than 1,337 raids, largely on people’s homes and massage parlours, yet discovered a mere 255 victims – a tiny fragment of the Home Office’s albeit dubious 4,000-strong estimate of the numbers supposedly trafficked for sex in the UK.

But the police action could come strait out of the Guide on How Not to Handle Human Trafficking Incidents, according to a recent report from the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Centre in New York.

 The study said the centre found that

raids can be counter-productive to anti-trafficking efforts by further traumatizing, intimidating and sometimes violating the rights of people who have been trafficked, making them less likely to seek help.

The Wolverhampton Wanderers

THIS IS the story of Belinda and her friend of many years standing, Wendy, who live nearby one another in Wolverhampton.

Wendy, now 41, was a sex worker. As such, studies show she was vulnerable to potential assaults and stigma once the word gets out in her local community.

Happily, however, she had Belinda. Neither were  too well off and together, they rented a flat well away from Wolverhampton, in Worcester, where Wendy could do incalls. Between December, 2007 and last May, the pair would commute daily to Worcester, where Wendy would ply her trade with the security of knowing Belinda was in an adjoining room should things go awry. Besides acting as security, Belinda took calls from customers and banked the takings, which were shared between the two of them. Few, if any, knew of this arrangement back in Wolverhampton.

Business was brisk on occasions at the ground floor flat in Malvern Road, St Johns, where the pair had up to 10 satisfied clients a day, each paying up to £80. Wendy’s “massage” service was advertised in a local magazine.

Sadly, however, the neighbours – or at least some of them – were not amused, and contacts were established with West Mercia Police.

It was not long before the flat, unbeknown to Belinda and Wendy, was monitored by a network of spy cameras to establish clients’ comings and goings. There were two clients present when police finally pounced on May 29.

It has taken more than nine months for the case to come to court, which it finally did this week.

The pair were charged with keeping a brothel and Belinda was charged with controlling a prostitute for gain.

Both denied the brothel charge and were found not guilty – premises do not become brothels unless at least two sex workers are involved. But Belinda admitted the controlling charge and was fined £500 with £500 costs. She has a month to declare her assets, from which any profit she made from her venture will be seized and dispersed under the Proceeds of Crime Act to, among others, West Mercia Police, to enable them to continue to live off immoral (as they’re stolen) earnings.

Now the case of Belinda and Wendy is not a particularly sensational one. It is fairly run of the mill, which is, or should be, a matter of great concern.

Notice that Wendy, the sex worker herself, walks off scot-free. It is the person who provides her security who is penalised, even though this is a perfectly happy non-coercive relationship.

Under the new Policing and Crime Bill, as Wendy has been pronounced ‘controlled for gain’ , both the clients found on the premises during the raid and any identified from CCTV coverage and traced would face fines of up to £1,000 – NOT because they had hired Wendy – but because of Belinda’s involvement.

The Government is in a state of denial that cases such as that of Belinda and Wendy exist. But the fact is that it provided no definition of ‘controlling’ in ‘controlling for gain’  in the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, thus the courts make of it what they will.

Witness the statements of Home Office minister Alan Campbell to the Commons scrutiny committee:

…we do not believe that a prostitute who employs a receptionist to arrange her appointments will be considered controlled for gain, as some have suggested, nor do we consider that a prostitute who arranges for a security guard to protect her will be controlled for gain. That does not accord with the ordinary meaning of “controlled”.….the measure is not directed at the receptionist, the maid, the security person, or any other woman working with another prostitute, where they are working together for reasons of safety. It is difficult to envisage a situation where a madam…would fall under the definition of “controlled for gain” that this offence would be based upon. If we are talking about someone who arranges the appointments, shares the venue, ensures that the prostitutes are safe—the things that we are talking about that we are confident are not covered by this offence—we believe that the definition “controlled for gain” would not extend to include….”

Ah, but it does, doesn’t it? The Government’s confidence is clearly misplaced, as a glance at any one of a large number of court cases would show. We blame their teachers.

Mr Campbell, to do him justice, went away from that committee meeting with a pledge to look into the situation. That was some weeks ago, and came on top of a Bar Council offer to look at the wording of “controlled for gain.” But needless to say, the wording of the Bill remains unchanged.

Meanwhile, however, our courts are still no closer to a definition of controlling which even vaguely resembles what the Government continues to proclaim it to mean.

There’s not much flying on this – just the safety of some 80,000 UK women and the potential criminalisation of about a tenth of the UK male population, so we really can’t expect Parliament to spend much time on it, much less get it right…

Government’s paradigm of evasion on sex worker rights

JUST FIVE and a half months late, the Government has finally ‘responded’ to the 734-signature Sex Workers’ Petition on the Downing Street site.

 

The petition called on it to reject calls to criminalise clients of sex workers and thus avoid the problems associated with driving prostitution even further underground. Instead, it urged decriminalisation  in line with Royal College of Nursing and National Association of Probation Officers policy, and the empowerment of sex workers with the limited rights recommended by the Council of Europe.

 

Predictably, whichever tea lady (should that be tea person?) accorded the task of responding on behalf of the PM merely regurgitated existing dribble and known facts, failing completely to address the questions raised by the petition. We blame the Home Office staff’s teachers.

 

Among the justifiably irritated signatories is Professor Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, who wrote to the PM‘s office:

 

Your response to this petition simply repeats the proposals that we are petitioning against: you have done nothing more than to iterate the points against which the petition was raised in the first place. Your reply is accordingly a paradigm of evasion, and makes a mockery of citizen response to projected legislation. As this is a wholly unacceptable reply we ask that you think again, and respond again.

 

Well done, Professor! But as it took them nearly six months to respond the first time, forgive me if I resist the temptation to hold my breath.

 

Successive Governments since Victorian times have lost all traction on the issue of prostitution, and the yawning chasm between de jure and de facto is poised to become even wider thanks to the Home Office’s new Policing and Crime Bill, which shows our legislature drifting off further and further into cloud cuckoo land, with less and less grip on reality, presumably fuelled by massive quantities of confiscated Class A drugs financed by dubious expenses claims for second homes.

Streets behind – what happens with UK kerb crawling laws

IN THE WEE hours of the morning here in the UK at present, Channel ITV3  hosts a programme known as ‘Nightwatch with Steve Scott.’ On at least two occasions recently, this has featured the strange shenanigans of the Nottingham vice squad, as they chase around after street prostitutes and punters for loitering and so-called ‘kerb crawling’ in the city’s red light district.

As an example of unctuousness, Scott leaves little to be desired, the whole series being an unquestioning, uncritical endorsement of the fine actions of our boys and girls in blue.

Two police officers – Andy Coles and his partner Dav Singh – steal the limelight in Nottingham, lying in wait in plain clothes in their cars waiting for punters to strike up liaisons with the ladies of the night, then following the couples to catch them in flagrante in parks or down back alleys and render their coitus well and truly interruptus.

“That’s outraging public decency!” they cry, above the sounds of hasty rezippings and background traffic, before blinding their embarrassed captives with references to sections this and that of whatever Act.

This, then, is how Nottingham’s police officers spend their time. And it may go some way to suggesting why this city, once renowned for its lace, is now regarded by many as the crime capital of Britain, recently ranked No 1 in England for murders, burglaries and car crimes by action group Reform.

It has twice the violence of the English average, four times the burglaries, and some three times the sexual offences and car thefts, a position that has predictably left the authorities there in a state of denial.

So let’s ask a few questions that need asking – (as Steve Scott would be the last person on earth to think of them).

Punter rescues 29-year-old Thai trafficking victim from UK brothel

AS PARLIAMENT debates how to criminalise clients of trafficking victims and others ‘controlled for gain’ in prostitution, a Crown Court case last week has further revealed the stupidity of the Home Office plan.

  

A 29-year-old Thai mother of two was rescued from a life of misery in a Plymouth brothel and taken to the police by a punter, who would have faced a £1,000 fine for his trouble if the planned law was in effect.

 

 

Six Malaysian and Thai nationals have so far been put away for a total of 17 and a half years for the human trafficking case, with another two facing sentencing on February 17.

 

 

As the Plymouth Herald reported of the victim:

Ordered to service one more [punter]…she took a risk and begged the client, a Danish man known in court as Mr K, to rescue her using a mixture of Thai and sign language to explain she had been trafficked into prostitution.

He had left, spoke to his ex-wife who was visiting Plymouth and together they hatched a plan. He called back the next day, claimed he was a police officer and grabbed the woman. He and his ex-wife then used a electronic translation machine, typing in the question “prisoner?” which when shown in Thai caused [the victim] to break down sobbing.

Judge [Francis] Gilbert said Mr K’s conduct was to be “highly commended” and investigators said it was his bravery which not only saw [the victim] freed from sexual slavery, but also lit the fuse which saw those involved in the evil trade brought to justice.

[UPDATE February 17 - the two fellow defendents were jailed for nine and a half years between them.] 

It is only the latest of many such cases revealing the crucial role of clients in aiding trafficking victims – a role played despite everything the Home Office can do to prevent them – witness the department’s “Walk in a punter, walk out a rapist” posters, inferring (wrongly) that a client is a rapist if the woman he has a liaison with subsequently turns out to be a trafficking victim.

 

Since my memorandum to the Parliamentary committee scrutinising the proposed Bill, the Poppy Project (which rescues and cares for sex trafficking victims in London) has revealed to the Committee that even it itself has received 22 referrals from punters. This must have been like pulling teeth, as the Project is renowned for its enthusiasm to see punters behind bars.

 

 

Denise Marshall, Poppy’s CEO, said 

Interestingly, in the time we have run the POPPY project, we have had 22 referrals from punters—from those buying sex from trafficked women. They made the referrals because the women were in an obvious physical and emotional state of distress. That sounds good on the surface until you realise that all the 22 men had sex with the trafficked woman before they phoned us. These are trafficked women whom we have taken into our projects and whom have given evidence to us in statements. All those men, knowing the women were trafficked, had sex before phoning us to help the women to get out of their situation.

 

This sudden remarkable turn around in the state of the Project’s records should not go unnoticed. Only last August it published Routes in, Routes Out based on the case files of 118 carefully selected women it had helped. Paragraph 5.4 has a table that reveals that it then had no idea how some 26 of these women escaped their captors. Nine of the 118 were known to have escaped with the aid of punters, who also may or may not have provided the initial intelligence  responsible for a score of other women escaping through police raids.

 

 

Suddenly, five months later, Poppy can now reveal to the committee of MPs not only that 22 women escaped with the help of punters, but that in each and every case the punter had sex with the women, not only before saving them, but after knowing they were trafficked. A veritable revolution in record keeping appears to have taken place.

 

 

“All those men, knowing the women were trafficked, had sex before phoning us to help the women to get out of their situation.”

 

 

Really? Hmmm….

UK brothel law blamed for Hong Kong murders

THE DOUBLING of Hong Kong’s murder rate last year has been blamed in part by the former British colony’s inheritance of UK laws on prostitution.

Five of the city’s 36 murders in 2008  were those of prostitutes – four of them killed over three days last March in their apartments where they are prevented from having co-workers due to inherited UK brothel laws. A Pakistani was charged with three of the killings.

Now a further four prostitutes  have been slain this year and a 24-year-old Chinese man arrested in connection with two of the murders.

Welfare groups have called for repeal of Hong Kong’s UK laws on safety grounds.

SWEDISH SEX CRIME UP ANOTHER 13%

A FURTHER 13 percent upsurge in Swedish reported sex crime during 2008 has been revealed by the nation’s crime prevention organisation, BRA.

The statistic appears on the Swedish crime barometer on BRA’s site, and compares to an overall increase of 5 percent in all Swedish reported crime.

There were 14,162 reported sex crimes in Sweden last year, 154 per 100,000 population, compared with less than 12,600 the previous year.

The figures come on top of a 40% increase in ’serious’ sex crime – defined as rape, sexual molestation and sexual coercion – between the country’s controversial criminalisation of clients and the end of 2007.

Swedish reported rape figures leapt 13% during 2007 to 4,750. No breakdown is yet available of the 2008 sex crime figures.