An Anthology of English Pros

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

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: 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 »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »