An Anthology of English Pros

NEWS broke last week that a Metropolitan Police squad has moved in on the five London Olympic boroughs with a campaign to get down and dirty with the sex industry in the run-up to 2012.

The cost has been put at £600,000 by the Guardian, which informs us that: “As the games draw closer, police believe there will be a huge surge in the numbers of young women trafficked into the boroughs from eastern Europe and Asia by traffickers keen to make money out of the arrival of millions of visitors…”

The origin of this item was a report to the Communities, Equalities and People Committee of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) into the potential for violence against women at the London Olympics, written by the MPA’s Lynne Abrams.

The report uses two selective and, in one case, outdated sources to paint a picture of impending mass rape and carnage unless action is taken to prevent a tsunami wave of prostitution, human sex trafficking (HTfSE) and sexual violence by organised criminals and the male athletes themselves.

It follows calls for a clampdown on trafficking in the Olympic run-up from the Bishops of Newcastle and Winchester at the Church of England Synod last February.

Harking back to the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the dioceses claimed:

“Sex huts” or “sex garages” for prostitution were set up, filled with 40,000 extra prostitutes, while special licences were issued allowing prostitutes to offer sex on the street.

Up to 10,000 men and women, sometimes including children as young as ten, are traded in the UK each year, with each girl worth up to £150,000 a year to those who “own” her.

But what actual evidence is there for this record and forecast of gross depravity and impending doom? Pretty thin on the ground, as readers of this blog will discover. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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: Read the rest of this entry »