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 »

LONDON Mayor Boris Johnson’s sidekick Kit Malthouse did his best to up Olympic 2012 trafficking paranoia this week by again dusting off his nine-year-old anti-carding campaign.

Johnson and Malthouse are anxious to get phone companies to disconnect the mobiles of sex workers. Predictably nobody in the  gullible London media had the bottle to question whether this was wise, given the proclivity of sex workers to get attacked by maniacs (in Canada, for example, the local community gathers up old mobiles to give to sex workers for safety).

Instead, the journos blandly accepted Malthouse’s version, warts and all.

The Telegraph reported that Malthouse demanded that “an agreement must be reached between mobile phone networks and police that sees [the phone numbers] taken out of use as soon as they are identified.”

Adding that there were several “poor girls” operating “behind the number,”  Malthouse proclaimed: “If you are an American tourist and if you walk into a telephone box you would think it was a sex shop.”

A very small sex shop, surely? Typical London politician: sod the British, what will the yanks think?

But it was the scenery in the background in the Telegraph that was the most questionable aspect: “Police have already warned that the Olympics may fuel an unprecedented boom in London’s sex industry,” it said. “Sex workers from across the world are expected to attempt to cash in on thousands of site workers, spectators and athletes.”

Among the errors repeated in papers like the Guardian and the Times was the vague assertion that human trafficking ‘doubled’ or thereabouts at the Athens 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 »

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 »

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 »