An Anthology of English Pros

‘According to Hebrew lore, Lilith was the original partner of Adam, the world’s first man. Lilith and Adam argued – some legends say she was too proud to submit to Adam’s wishes – and Lilith departed Eden, where she was succeeded as Adam’s mate by Eve. In other ancient legends Lilith is considered a demon or a mother of demons, and is supposed to haunt desolate places. The name of Lilith is mentioned only once in the Bible, in Isaiah 34:14, where she is listed along with hyenas and jackals as those who dwell in the ruins of God-forsaken Edom.’   Source  

THIS IS the story of an error. Two errors, in fact. But not just any old errors, as we shall see.

Back in 2003, an organisation known as Lilith produced a report entitled Lap Dancing and Striptease in the Borough of Camden (an area within London).

Lilith, along with the anti-sex trafficking Poppy Project, is part of Eaves Housing, the London vulnerable women’s support charity. These organisations receive much of their funding from the Government and London Councils and are generally regarded as being enormously influential in shaping Government policy. Within Eaves, the Lilith Project carries out “research, education, campaigning and training to prevent violence against women.”

By far the most quoted fragment of Lilith’s Camden report are statistics which seek to connect the arrival of four lap dancing clubs to cases of rape and sexual assault in the borough.

“Comparing the rape and indecent assault figures for 1999, before the establishment of Spearmint Rhino and Secrets Holborn, Finchley Road and Euston, and 2002…rape of women in Camden has increased by 50%, …[and] indecent assault of women in Camden has increased by 57%,” it announced.

The story, of course, grabbed the headlines, both in Camden and nationally. Women in the vicinity of lap dance clubs everywhere lived in a climate of fear, and were very likely induced to join the bandwagon of the moral crusade led by Eaves, which finds its goals realised in many ways in today’s Policing and Crime Bill.

The figures, though, were wrong. Indeed, they have been known to be wrong for awhile, but they still sit in the report on the web, and thus continue to be relied on by social conservatives in normally responsible reports and newspapers – often the very newspapers that have published the fact that they are wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

THE ANTI-SEX WORK STALWARTS of the Poppy/Eaves/Lilith brigade are on the march again, this time with a number 10 petition aiming to criminalise all clients of sex workers.

Making her case, Ruth Breslin, Eaves Housing’s Research and Development Officer, informs potential signatories that: 

Studies indicate that the majority of women enter prostitution under the age of 18 and that childhood abuse, poverty, drug dependency and homelessness are key triggers into prostitution. Once in prostitution, sexual and physical assault is common and 9 out of 10 surveyed women say they would exit prostitution if they could.

But what “studies,” where? Ms Breslin is interestingly silent on the issue, especially for a “research” officer. Meanwhile two new academic works have joined the pile suggesting the direct opposite is closer to the truth.

First was a study by Dr Nick Mai, of London Metropolitan University, whose team interviewed 100 migrant sex workers, mostly in London but also in Sheffield and Liverpool.

Among its key findings are:

• The majority of the migrant workers are not forced or trafficked

• Working in the sex industry is often a way for those interviewed to avoid the unrewarding and sometimes exploitative conditions they meet in non-sexual jobs

• By working in the sex industry, many interviewees are able to maintain Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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.

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.

VISITORS to the Number 10 website may know that it has a laudable facility for e-Petitions. If you have a gripe, or a constructive suggestion, you can pop it in an e-Petition and it will apparently be addressed.

Well, it’s a little tougher than that. But serious e-Petitions with 200 or more signatures are promised a response.

Visit closed petitions by size on the No 10 site and one can clearly see that No 10 or, more probably, the Government departments responsible for the policy area, do a fairly good (though far from excellent) job at responding to petitions.

And, indeed, most qualifying petitions get a response. The petitioners don’t necessarily like them, of course, but that’s politics, and at least someone in government is supposed to have considered what they have to say.

Read the rest of this entry »