Archive for the ‘Olympics’ Category
LONDON FAILS TO CONNECT ON SEX WORKER SAFETY
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 »
TRAFFICKING, the OLYMPICS, and the BILL
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.
“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.
