An Anthology of English Pros

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.

“Never mind the quality, feel the width” seems to be the Government’s motto, as the Home Office’s new toy frogmarches its way through the parliamentary process to add to the 3,600 new criminal offences New Labour has created since 1997, at a rate not far off one a day.

Help needed for new Home Office Coat of Arms: How does one write “If it moves, imprison it” in Latin? Or maybe we’ve got the onus wrong? Perhaps we Brits should be born in prison and just allowed out for good behaviour?

The new Bill includes a measure allowing courts to send street prostitutes for compulsory rehabilitation sessions instead of fining them, because so bad have things become that the measure had to be dropped from the last Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill when it had to be rushed through to prevent a strike by officers in our much overcrowded prisons. Things may seem bleak now, but Britain, it seems, has a glorious future as the Alcatraz of Europe.

Despite notable attempts to talk some sense into the Home Office, notably by Dr Evan Harris of the Liberal Democrats at the committee stage, it looks likely that clients of prostitutes who turn out to have been ‘controlled for gain’ (nobody has come up with a satisfactory explanation of what that actually means since the Government invented the phrase in 2003) will face a fine of up to £1,000, irrespective of whether they knew of the control or not, and irrespective of whether any sex has actually happened.

This is expected to result in even fewer victims of sex trafficking being rescued, as punters (unlike the Home Office) currently form an important source of intelligence – somewhat less likely if they or their friends are going to find themselves in court and thus on the front pages of local papers.

“The Government has a Co-ordinated Prostitution Strategy,” claims the Government’s response to the petition. That’s a laugh for a start – any follower of the Pentameter anti-trafficking drives will know the Government’s strategy is about as co-ordinated as a millipede with multiple sclerosis.

Our only hope must lie with the fleet of Noble Lordships to attempt to restore sanity, not for the first time.

Meanwhile, we in the provinces must give up our habit of selecting the worst local undesirable who hasn’t actually been imprisoned or sectioned yet and sending them to Westminster for four or five years at a time.

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). Read the rest of this entry »

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….

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.

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.

IT WAS a collection of people one would not normally put together unless one aimed to start World War III.

In the one corner were representatives of the English Collective of Prostitutes  and the UK Network of Sex Projects, in the other the Poppy Project  (which rescues London’s ’sex slaves’) and ‘Object’  - the Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells etc’s campaign against lap dancing clubs. All of them females, I imagine all feminists, together epitomising the division in feminism over something the rest of the world knows as prostitution, but which, even with UN help, they could not possibly get as far as even agreeing the terminology for.

That was the scene for the first session of the parliamentary committee inquiring into the  Home Office’s latest perpetration, known as the Policing and Crime Bill. Read the rest of this entry »