An Anthology of English Pros

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).

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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…