Her name wasn’t Carrie (but very nearly was), but I’ll use that to cover her ID.

I was playing around, as is my wont occasionally, on the UK’s AdultWork site. This currently boasts some 1,600 plus profiles ostensibly of women marketing their escorting services around this sceptered isle, many of whom actually exist, and many of whom don’t, but that’s another story for another post.

Now as regular readers know I’m neither a sex buyer nor seller, but I do like excellent presentation and perhaps that’s why I have a thing about the absolutely appalling general quality of AdultWork’s photographs. I’m sure I’m not alone. Or perhaps it’s because I spent a period of my life cropping and treating photos for publication (not, I hasten to add, of the AdultWork variety).

Now AdultWork – alongside, perhaps, the Women’s Institute – is one of the last sites on the planet you’d go to for porn, innumerable examples of which of far better quality are – as we all know – freely available on tap elsewhere. You go there to see who’s on the game in your neck of the woods using its search facility, and you don’t even have to join the site to use its search.

Because I’m not a client, I very rarely contact any of the lasses whose labour is on offer, as the site is notorious for time wasters, and on the exceptional occasions when I do write I think it only fair to make it very clear up front it’s not a booking. One such exception was Carrie.

Carrie was – is, if we accept her profile – an attractive dark-haired Sagittarian lass of about 21-22 in Suffolk. She created her profile on the site last Friday. As soon as I read it, alarm bells rang, albeit faintly. In a short profile she announced what she said was her real first name and what club she attended in her community on a Saturday night. Furthermore, her photos clearly showed her face, which is a big decision to take. This wouldn’t be how I’d have played it, but then, who am I? She’s well over 18, and I would never like to open myself to accusations of displaying patriarchal tendencies by radical feminists.

By the time I first saw her profile on Saturday morning, the page informed me it had already had 300 viewings.

One of the things that had first attracted me to the profile (I live nowhere near Suffolk) was that Carrie had clearly prepared her arrival. Her profile already boasted a gallery of photos; an additional ‘private’ gallery (which requires payment of a small admission fee of a quid or so in AW points to view for a short period); a completed AW interview; a verification photo of her holding a paper stating ‘Adultwork’ and the date of 3 December 2011; and several videos, including a free one, just of her, fully dressed, talking (but, alas, my audio isn’t functioning).

So I looked at the free shots. Basically, it was a potpourri of vanilla shots and soft porn. Some were too dark, others badly cropped, some had red eye, others were just plain seedy and needed binning…now I am a perfectionist and the full list would stretch on. But some were very good, many were redeemable if worked on, and there are a lot of galleries on AW that are a great deal worse than this was. At least these clearly had some potential, even if its photos were merely rearranged.

One photo, captioned ‘wall’, for example, was about as tasteful and attractive a full nude shot as you could reasonably imagine, showing off Carrie’s best physical attributes to the full. It would have sat very happily on Page 3, both making punters amorous and any reasonably broad-minded granny proud, which is quite a skill. Yet this was hidden away in a gallery while the principle shot on the front of her profile featured at one point (during the profile’s short life the main pic changed several times) an unflattering facial of her sticking her tongue out – not in the least bit seductively.

Now the main pic on the front in AW is crucial, because it’s the one clients see when they select profiles to visit. There’s no arguing with success, though, and within a day of putting her profile up, Carrie had already got two AW escort ratings apparently from very satisfied clients, and, no doubt bolstered by the talk at her nightclub, viewing figures on her profile page had topped 3,000. A newly created blog on her profile informed us she’d got a booking for a modelling session from a Dave next Thursday.

Oh sod it, I thought, I’ve got some time to kill, I’ll write. So I sent her an AW email on Sunday morning. Now you can’t add attachments to AW emails but I gave her a normal email address and said that if she cared to give me hers, I’d send her some ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots of my previous work on what we might call ‘relevant’ photos and she could consider whether to send me hers to work on.

This is the sort of thing….

An original AW shot and two variations of what a little work can do

…So I sent it off into the ether, and expected to hear nothing. Her AW inbox was no doubt inundated. Thus I was surprised to shortly receive notification that a 140 plus MB file had been sent via MediaFire. I duly downloaded it and wrote off to the accompanying hotmail address to acknowledge receipt with my samples attached, only to receive an instant failure notice.

I discovered she’d confirmed that she’d sent this by AW email, so I replied explaining the situation and again asking for a valid email address, as there was no point in working on her photos if I couldn’t get the results to her.

I returned to extract the files from her ZIP, and noticed the folder file’s title. One word in it was ‘portfolio’ but the other two were what I believe to be her full actual name.

Googling her name, together with the area she was working from in her AW profile, led me to a PDF file which contained some of her more hardcore photos together with a number of ‘vanilla’ shots of Carrie. In them, she’s pictured with people whose ages are consistent with them being her parents and siblings – family photos – together with the identity of what I take to be their then (or possibly current) village location in a neighbouring county.

Patriarchal or not, I already felt I knew far, far too much about Carrie and was seriously worried about what others might do with this information, and whether they’d find it as easily as moi.

I got more worried when I opened her zip file and discovered amongst its contents a series of photos, some clearly self-taken using a mirror, of herself heavily pregnant. So she has a baby.

Now it could be my worries are misplaced. It could be that Carrie, whatsoever she does, has the full and unreserved backing of her folks, that she’s been brought up to be wonderfully uninhibited about her body. For all I know, she might come from a long and proud line of sex workers, the skills lovingly passed on from mother to daughter since the 12^th century and beyond. Do I have evidence to the contrary? I do not.

Email addy or otherwise, natural curiosity, of course, led me to explore Carrie’s portfolio. It includes all the AW photos I’d seen, all the videos and much, much more. I found myself working on into the wee hours on photo after photo, altering brightness and contrast, straightening, eliminating red-eye, brushing out the pimples, yet this was but the first phase of a multiple stage process I go through with various bits of software. I don’t have anything sophisticated like Photoshop or proper air-brushing programs, and all I can say is I end up with something far superior to that I started out with. Anything I can’t improve, I don’t try to; anything apparently not worth improving I try to at least explore first, then bin. I don’t try to make her more beautiful than she is, which would be unfair to her clients and potentially create problems for her, but I do try to make her stand out with appropriate work on the photo and the clearance of clutter.

There’s a certain triumphant satisfaction to be gained from rendering AW photos somehow viewable, even if they never get further than your hard drive.

As I worked through these photos, I got to really like Carrie, and certainly know her, albeit in a somewhat un-cerebral sense. She’s very versatile, whether cavorting as a naked wood nymph, modelling lingerie or posing on a bed in the most explicit of what she entitles ‘UK Mag’ shots. Whether she’s quite up to hardcore is another matter. “No, Carrie,” you want to say, “you’re supposed to look like you’re driving yourself to ultimate ecstasy when you stuff that WKD bottle up yourself, not fall about in uncontrollable laughter.”

But there you are, you see, that’s what makes her so likeable. A playful spirit perfectly capable of revealing her nether regions in a rail carriage – if Virgin Trains disappear shortly, we’ll all know why – and speaking for myself, train journeys will never be the same again, but may become more frequent.

But there’s kind of, well, mistakes. For example, she’s got several train photos, mostly vanilla, and while the train carriage appears identical, with the same upholstery etc in every shot, she’s wearing totally different apparel in the vanilla shots to (what remains of) the outfit in the one you definitely wouldn’t show your granny. Shame, and a disciplinary problem here for continuity…

And then there’s lots of nice vanilla photos of her out and about in club land in Suffolk, lying on grass and on a beach in her bikini, getting topless in a car park, flashing her boobs (of which she hasn’t very much, more of a flicker than a flash you might say) at various points in broad daylight in town centres. All good fun, daring do, naughtiness. So yes, I do like her, enough to use a very tasteful shot of her nude on a bed on all fours with a Jackson Pollock print on the wall as my desktop background.

As for the videos, the world really is better off without them, as is Carrie whether or not she returns to sex work, ’nuff said.

At midday yesterday I logged into my email to discover from AW that there had been a reply from Carrie. But when I logged in to read it, there was a simple message to say that the member concerned is no longer active on the site. Her message wasn‘t there. And true enough, her profile – photos and videos and all – has disappeared. Poomf, vanishéd!

Now I dread to think what kind of hot water she’s in and I just hope she’ll come through it OK. It could be anything from her folks finding out about her capers to something worse, or from simply getting some nasty emails from the community to finding her inbox so cluttered the whole thing looked just too formidable. Maybe she’s just suspended her profile and she’ll resurface with or without a new username, who knows?

Exiting sex work brings a whole host of agencies to the fore, but as the dangers are said to exist in it, the help’s at the wrong end. There are better ways than others to enter sex work, and I suspect that Carrie, despite all the preparation with the photos, videos, etc, has just come across one of the less good ways, bless her.

You don’t declare any part of your real name, on the web or not, to anyone you haven’t good reason to trust, and often not even to those you have, you try to control access to your explicit photos to a close circle and you don’t make a public announcement about where you go on Saturday (or any other) nights. You also seriously consider commuting to sex work rather than working in your own community, you have a different wardrobe for sex work, you consider a hairstyle that can be worn up for sex work and down for community or vice versa, etc etc.

She is, of course, not alone. Innumerable would-be AW escorts push the ’poomf, vanishéd’ button either permanently or temporarily, and the number of profiles of those in suspended animation awaiting, perhaps, to reappear one day is known only to the site management. Whatever the outcome, I hope Carrie’s social network is supportive, as her family may not be, and that she gets through what may be a tough time.

Meanwhile, I’ll sit on a lot of photos of what she’s sitting on, and if they get out on the web, as I suspect they certainly will unless I’m the only one with the file – which I doubt – they won’t have come from moi.

But then, I do worry too much. Maybe I’m taking it all far, far too seriously and, like me, she just thought it would be a good laugh for a chilly weekend in November.

Still, I’ve got a lovely desktop background….

Readers should note that I offer no silver bullet. It goes without saying that every escort, each of their partners and every relationship is unique, and all I aim to do is to flag up what I suspect are some potential common issues. I’m sure there are lots of wonderful escorts out there, many with equally wonderful partners, either or both of which can give much better advice than moi, so I shall stick to flagging up issues and making a few observations on them, and hope for some readers’ comments to latch on to.

The first post I read was Jenna’s, who is an agency escort in the southern US. Jenna has just started her Sweet Courtesan blog. Over to Jenna:

My dilemma:
shall I simply lay it out?
the bf “rescued” me from sex work
he was first a client, now a bf and somewhat provider
but, i don’t think it is ever going anywhere…and there are things i need to do to provide for myself and my children…
so, aargh! i hate the lying that comes with this whole industry!
i don’t mind so much the role playing, the acting ~ but the lying to those closest to me is so damn hard
and i’m not great at lying, or maybe it’s that i’m too good at it when i want to be that i really don’t want to be; does that even make sense?

Now Jenna, in a previous post, revealed that she has been through the wars. She got into escorting with the full backing of her then husband, but says the latter seems to have had problems step-parenting her teenage children, leading to divorce. In the chaos, Jenna’s entire family …

…found out about my job. My children enjoyed reaping the benefits; however, they also complained to their friends about their mom’s choice of occupation. My mom did not talk to me for a couple of months; my siblings even longer.

None of them have any idea I am back in the workforce.

So she started sex work with the full support of her partner. How many escorts would give their last shred of lingerie for that? But then somehow the situation is chronically mishandled, the kids find out and next you know, news reaches not only her brothers, sisters and mother but the community at large via her kids. She asks for divorce and her family breaks off contact. Does anyone have any kind of sensitivity here?

She then gives up sex work for a period, how long who knows, but now, unbeknown to her loved ones for obvious reasons, she’s stolen herself to return to life between the sheets. So now what happens?

A client falls for her.

Or let’s be a little more precise here, a client falls for an image of someone he has a mind to turn her into. Surprise, surprise, this seems to preclude any more clients. Maybe he saw My Fair Lady too young, or maybe he just wouldn’t like the publicity if the news broke (could one blame him?), or maybe it’s just good ole’ sexual jealousy. In any event, this client is now yet another addition to the Great American Rescue Industry.

Now let’s leave him, but just for a minute - because he’ll have his needs too – but I want to concentrate on Jenna. What are Jenna’s needs?

The obvious ones are to provide for herself and her children. The kids are teenage now so should soon be off her hands but maybe they’ll need to go through university, which costs big money in the States. Hopefully she’s making that sort of money through escorting. Her boyfriend, she says, is a “somewhat provider” (her emphasis), but she doesn‘t “think it’s getting anywhere.”

But let’s just put all these needs with dollar signs in front of them on one side for a little while, inevitable though they are on the bottom line, and let’s put Jenna also on one side and let’s ask what escorts, generically, really need.

Because by and large, escorts don’t need money. By and large, if they want money they just do more escorting. There are, of course, unsuccessful escorts who do need money. There are ones with huge debit balances or overwhelming desperate needs who are equally desperate for every last cent. And there are those with extraordinary cash needs as a result of brushes with the law. But as a general rule, escorting more than covers the money side of things for most escorts.

The other thing that escorts get a lot of is, of course, sex. Whether this is, for them, desirable sex, enjoyable sex, whether the earth really moves or they’re providing an optical illusion, etc, is another matter, but I think everyone will agree that a sex starved escort has a problem. One study I read suggested about half indoor escorts enjoy the sex, and to pinch an extract from a Ron Weitzer paper:

…a comparison of 75 call girls and 75 street prostitutes in California and 150 women working in Nevada’s legal brothels found substantial differences in whether workers experienced orgasms with customers – 75% of call girls…reported that they frequently had orgasms with customers (Prince, 1986: 482).

So if California’s typical, three-quarters of call girls frequently have orgasms with clients. But after sex all day with clients, and with a long queue of clients stretching into the future, do sex workers really enthusiastically rush home for a tumble in the hay with their partner, or can even orgasms become a pretty run-of-the-mill experience?

Theoretically it is possible, I guess, for a very altruistic partner to actually rejoice in the fact that his loved one is regularly driven to ecstasy, albeit by third parties. Could even be a big plus, if his energy levels are low, to have this side of his life on autopilot.

But with her financial situation sorted, and her sex drive more than satiated, the question is what role is left for a partner in a sex worker’s life, given that even the groceries get delivered nowadays?

The obvious gap is the emotional one. The bills may be paid and the libido satisfied, but many sex workers have emotional vacuums desperate to be filled by the right partner. Finding him – or indeed her – is another matter, and it is ironic indeed that with so many clients, many sex workers can be inwardly so very lonely and isolated. A case of water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

Or is it surprising? Take Jenna’s position. In the past, her sex worker status resulted in her family eschewing her and her kids spreading the word around the neighbourhood. She’s now in an agency and though its manager is supportive, she’s too busy to be approached. To whom can she turn, not only in a crisis but for the basic day to day emotional support that 99+ percent of us in families take for granted, when she dare not reveal even her occupation at home, let alone the highlights and lowlights of her day? Or, on the other hand, expose her home life to her clients, for obvious security reasons? And is the whole situation not supremely frustrating, as she refers to many of her clients as “so many men who become ‘regulars’ and want to be emotionally attached for the short amount of time allowed.”

In the world of the escort, it seems to me, there are contradictions of attachment and detachment. Letting go and moving on, however, is part of the job when faced with the unenviable task of trying to be all things to all men, so she winds up with us in cyberspace. At one point the cry goes out: “I have to be honest with you, or with someone at least.”

And if we think the escort’s position is unenviable, consider the potential partner’s. Her real or potential earnings are likely higher than his, her libido comes pre-satiated, furthermore if this gets out etc etc…. And we’re talking about the poor guy’s perceptions. So, well may she fling her arms around his neck and try to turn all amorous to meet his needs – and even be amorous – but there’s an over and under-doing this sort of thing and will he buy it? Because his needs, too, are very much on the agenda.

So if all this isn’t too much, suppose the poor mutt tries to be supportive? Well, there can be a fine line between emotional support and potentially being stood up in the dock for pimping, and there’s all manner of legal debris on living off the avails and heavens knows what s**t in the USA, where legislation varies from state to state, so he has to get the law books out and check if they’re living on the right side of some state line…

Then of course there’s all the violence stories about sex workers and the worry, needless or otherwise….

And whilst sex workers nowadays have organisations at all manner of levels, from unions to sex workers’ rights campaigners to innumerable supporters in the blogosphere, and while NGOs will fly in from anywhere from Alaska to Nigeria to Delhi at the whiff of one needing rescuing, even if she’s just laddered her tights, what support organisation for their partners is there?

Being the partner of a sex worker, I conclude, requires a very special breed of man (or, indeed, woman), with the emotional constitution of a Panzer tank (if a tank can have a constitution), a superhuman capacity for empathy, and comes best fully equipped with a low sex drive, a big bank balance, and a good lawyer.

Such men do not trees drop off. In any decent country they’d get a Congressional Medal of Honour, but we’re talking the land of the free here so they probably just stuff them in prison and stick them on their Sex Offenders Register with any of the rest of their male population caught with their heads over the parapet, or (Jenna’s in the southern states) roast them alive.

But both Jenna’s husband and her client-cum-boyfriend walked into the situation with their eyes open. What happens when a guy is enjoying a longstanding relationship and suddenly discovers his partner is a sex worker?

For this insight, we have to head off to Adelaide, Australia, and Jane’s blog, Becauseimawhore and her post But baby, just think of what we could do..

Of course, it tells of only one man’s reaction to the shock news, and of how it led to the suspension of Jane’s sex work for awhile, but of how financial pressures eventually caused (/enabled?) her return with her partner’s blessing. And it has a sort of happy ending, but right at the end she states “we were a partnership,” and one sadly wonders what happened to end it. Perhaps one day Jane will tell us in her inimitable, beautifully written style, meanwhile her account of her rollercoaster of emotions over this period is not to be missed.

Well, what could I do? I’ve introduced Jenna to Jane and there’s been a warm response, so there’s reason to be optimistic it’ll do her a whole lot of good and here in Europe we’ll look out for a warming of American-Australian relations.

Jenna’s posts are here and here, and Jane’s must reader is here.

All has seemed relatively quiet on the Home Office front since the Tories took office, with New Labour’s flow of ‘legislative diarrhoea,’ as Chris Huhne famously put it, apparently stemmed and the hopeful restoration of at least some semblance of order, if not exactly law.

The fallout, however, continues, with even venerable judges finding great difficulty in sorting out which laws are in effect and which not, as in the tragi-comical case of David Shields, a rapist released because (said the Daily Mail) “the charge brought against him was for breaching a ‘sex offender order’ under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 – a provision which was superceded by the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, which introduced Sopos.”

‘Sopos’ are ‘Sexual Offences Prevention Orders.’ As distinct from Sex Offender Orders. So Mr Shields, despite apparently being a “significant risk to female members of the public,” walks free courtesy of Home Office Rebranding Exercise Number whatever-it-was, all for the lack of a suitably timed Sexual Offences Prevention Orders Prevention Order.

I wish I was surprised. I’m not. I know no lawyers who would be in the least bit surprised. The deluge of criminal justice legislation since 1997 would be well beyond the scope of any system to cope. Speed readers lost track somewhere back in 2003 and are still catching up.

And it really has been of such appalling quality. Now I must confess that there are areas of the Judeo-Christian ethos which elude me, but the notion that new laws should be personally carved out on rocks and then hauled down from the summit of, say, Mount Snowden, by whatever Home Secretary is thinking of proposing them, seems to have a very great deal to commend it. There would be every reasonable hope that they would be as succinct as they would be rare, especially if they could be repealed with considerably greater ease.

If ten bullet points was enough for the Almighty, why can’t they suffice for the likes of Messrs Straw, Blunkett, Clarke, Reid, Smith, Johnson and May?

Turning from the Bible back to the very unholy mess that is UK human trafficking law, it would indeed begger the belief of the Almighty how the Home Office has achieved such a complete and utter mess, and it says little for our media that it has not only been so little publicised, but that the media itself has been so proactive in perpetuating the myths.

It was some time around the millennium that the global powers that be, including the UK, defined human trafficking in Article 3 of the Palermo Protocol. We did, of course, sign up to it.

Proper co-signatories with grown up legislatures then went away, cut and pasted the definition into their domestic laws, attached a nasty big penalty to anyone breaching it, and moved on, the job, insofar as the legislation’s concerned, done (enforcement, of course, is another matter). Examples include the USA, Ireland and most of Europe.

Not so in the UK, of course. The heart of the UK mistake seems to have lain in asking the Home Office to do something, instead of, well, just about any other group of people who live on this rock. Faced with the mammoth task of cutting and pasting, the Home Office freaked out. It presumably found the new legislation insufficiently diarrhetic.

For a start it decided to have two pieces of legislation – one for persons deemed to be sex trafficking and another for persons deemed trafficking people for anything else. It then twisted and utterly mangled the definition of sex trafficking until any semblance of the internationally agreed definition had truly vanished.

At the same time, the police, the media and the politicians have constantly portrayed sex trafficking by the international definition, thus we think of it as involving some form of force, coercion or fraud, pressurising young women into prostitution. And sometimes it is. But very often it is not.

For this is one of the distinctive qualities of the UK Sexual Offences Act 2003 definition - in the Home Office cock-up the volition of those involved – normally, but not always, women – is ignored. Well, they’re only women after all.

Thus if one knowingly drives a young lady to a brothel, it makes no difference whatsoever to the Home Office whether you’re holding a gun to her sobbing head as she sits petrified at the experience that lies ahead, or whether you’re going out of your way on her behalf gratis and fending off pleas from her to drive quicker because she’s running late and she might miss out on clients. You’re a sex trafficker either way, and Parliament will let you be locked up for 14 years.

If a willing sex worker, the young lady, incidentally, commits no offence even if the place is a brothel, as she of course has to play the role of victim – willing or not – and be duly deemed ‘rescued’ in order to bolster the self-images of MPs, the dinosaurs of the criminal justice system and various other do-gooders.

At the same time as imprisoning the innocent at considerable public cost, the HO manages to completely let off the hook many persons who are internationally defined sex traffickers.

It is concerned purely with those involved in arranging the transport of persons into, around and out of the country (irrespective, as we’ve seen, of whether those persons wish to be transported). Among the categories of internationally defined sex traffickers it ignores are those involved in transferring, harbouring or receiving people against their will if they are not involved in the transport process.

The peculiar and perverse nature of the Home Office ‘review’, however, is what stamps it as particularly British. According to the Guardian, we hear of a new and exciting Home Office rebranding exercise strategy:

The strategy recognises that there are some problems caused by the fact that trafficking for sexual exploitation is prosecuted under the 2003 Sexual Offences Act while labour trafficking comes under the 2004 Asylum and Immigration Act which has a different standard of proof.

“While there have been successful prosecutions under both, there are some disparities which make the legislative framework less straightforward than it could be for prosecutors. In addition, the different levels of proof mean that it is more difficult to prosecute for labour exploitation,” says the new strategy.

In other words, the labour trafficking legislation has that annoying characteristic of requiring some evidence that someone has actually been, as the world understands it, trafficked, while the sexual trafficking legislation doesn’t, and it’s always easier to get convictions without that annoying and expensive chore of having to produce evidence that something of any consequence has actually occurred. So let’s muck around with the definition to get the numbers up and impress people with what a large number of ‘traffickers’ we’ve caught, rather than taking on the Herculean task of teaching first and second division civil servants how to cut and paste. My God, we’ll be requiring them to tie their own shoelaces next.

Back to the Grauniad and to its Home Affairs editor Alan Travis’s piece. It’s pretty obvious on the face of it that Alan prefers simple rewrites of Home Office press releases to a decent day’s work.

Only some 40 men have been prosecuted for the new offence of paying for sex with trafficked women since April last year, he tells us. Err, no Alan, sorry, the offence is not ‘paying for sex’ but arranging it, no money has to change hands, no sex has to take place and they do not have to be trafficked women but anyone – woman or not – who has been coerced.

But it’s the whole angle of the story that is unduly depressing: “The failure of police and prosecutors to enforce a law that criminalises men who pay for sex with trafficked women is jeopardising the attempt to tackle human trafficking into Britain.”

More spin than a centrifuge. And what a weird angle. For a start, it’s wrong to conflate all human trafficking with sex trafficking, which is what is being written about. Now these are 40 prosecutions, which is certainly not the same as 40 convictions, and the fact that only 40 cases could be found could be interpreted in other ways. A more obvious interpretation is that cases of coercion are a lot fewer and farer between than whoever took Alan to lunch would have us believe.

“..and that includes prosecutions of kerb crawlers,” says Alan. My guess is that it almost comprises prosecutions of kerb crawlers.

Here’s a different angle, which would have been at least as valid:

“The tendency of the media and the Home Office to alienate the hearts and minds of sex workers’ clients is jeopardising the attempt to tackle sex trafficking into Britain.”

Probably a lot truer. Might not get you as good a lunch, though.

Anyway, it’s cached here.

I found it well-intentioned but depressing and above all, ill-informed and full of stereotypes. “The dark and dangerous world of prostitution on our doorsteps,” it verblessly proclaimed at the beginning. 

Now to be fair to her, she seems a sweet and well-meaning person judging from the speed with which she withdrew it, and it was apparently written for a “Writing for the Media” assignment, so it could be that she had the subject thrust upon her. Nevertheless, if this is the stuff of tomorrow’s media, I for one will cancel my copies. 

“Just Google ‘Bournemouth’s brothels’ and with the first few results it’s blatantly evident that there is a serious problem in the area,” we read. 

What the problem is, we never discovered, so presumably it’s either that they exist or that there’s a shortage. 

You would presume that if there was a brothel on your doorstep, there would be bright flashing lights, loud noise, and the stench of disgrace in the air. However this is not the case, due to the recent involvement of the police many of these brothels have been forced underground making the world of these poor women even more treacherous. 

Bright flashing lights? Loud noise? No, Dawn, check your law and you will discover that neither bright flashing lights nor loud noise doth a brothel make, to the intense relief, I imagine, of Dorset police.

And if you check your law very carefully, you will discover that if you and a female mate get plastered one night and are deemed to be acting lewdly in any building in the presence of at least one man, the owners and managers of it (if aware) could be prosecuted for running a brothel, and that not one penny need change hands.

And as for “stench of disgrace”?! “I was proceeding in an easterly direction, Your Honour, when I happened across a Stench of Disgrace which appeared to be coming from the vicinity of the building in question.” Hmmm… Still, just one more phrase with which to further stigmatise the already marginalised.

Now the next sentence made sense. Yes, police action has forced brothels underground, increasing danger to the sex workers involved. What does it teach us? That the laws not only don’t work but actually increase the danger to sex workers. At this point I was hopeful that Dawn’s piece would redeem itself. I hoped in vain.

There followed a great call to arms and a proclamation that “it is our problem and every citizen has the moral obligation to act.” But just before you switch off your computer, dive into your car and dash to Bournemouth, I should warn you that it is by no means clear what on earth you are supposed to do when you get there.

So some people exchange sex for cash in Bournemouth. What on earth has it got to do with anyone else? Is there anyone under-aged or coerced? In fact, is it a problem at all, or would the assembled millions flocking to Dawn’s request be better to spend their time litter-picking?

 “…there will always be those willing to pay for sex and those willing to pay for the manipulation and control of women,” we were told.

Yes, there always will be. And if one happened to sell one’s sexual services, the fact that there will be those willing to hire one would be rather reassuring, one would feel. But while there may always be “those willing to pay for the manipulation and control of women,” what evidence is there for their existence in Bournemouth?

There followed ex-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s quotes from the Labour Conference 2008, beefing up the kerb crawling laws that have caused the death of, among others, Amanda Walker, and introducing S14 of the Policing and Crime Act, criminalising men who arrange sex with those who turn out to be trafficked or coerced and thereby making it impossible for them to report the plights of these women to the police.

We were then informed that:

These laws are becoming ever more complicated and fraught with loop holes, making the prosecution of those soliciting sex and those orchestrating the selling of these services, ever more difficult to control and punish.

I see. So we’ve just established that there will always be demand for sex and that the laws we have in place, supposedly to protect the vulnerable, make life more dangerous than it need be for sex workers, but what we want is not to get rid of these laws, but lots more of them in order to close “loop holes”? A good dose of “control” and “punishment” to stop consenting adults from consenting in ways thought unfit by what Maggie Thatcher (whose administration brought us kerb crawling laws) would call “people like us.”

What, specifically, Dawn had in mind we don’t know. But, as with all laws, they will only be complied with by the law abiding, and seem unlikely to persuade serial killers such as the Stephen Griffithses, the Peter Sutcliffes and the Steve Wrights of this world to instead settle down for an evening with Coronation Street and a mug of cocoa. Indeed, laws to suppress demand would make sex workers more dependent on such monsters, and would be a blackmailers’ charter.

Dawn now slips beautifully into patronising rescue mode. These women, we are told, need help and education. No Dawn, sorry, it’s you who needs help and education. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised to discover several of the women are studying at your Uni, may well be doing PhDs and could even be teaching there, who knows? Heard of Belle de Jour and Brooke Magnanti? Try searching the AdultWork site for female escorts in Bournemouth, there’s well over a hundred of them so there’s a good chance you’ll know somebody.

And if you do, for God’s sake speak to them. Leave pontificating about sex work without having a clue what you’re talking about to the Home Office. That’s what they’re paid for and they do it endlessly. The right people to talk about sex work are sex workers.

This is a rehash of the notorious The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Slaves by October Films, and comprises the fraudulent nonsense a film company in London comes up with to get itself out of the shit after it’s devoted months of film crew time and footage into a police anti-trafficking operation (Pentameter 2) that got precisely nowhere.

Basically, it lies its teeth out….

Pentameter 2 famously convicted ZERO persons for human trafficking as internationally defined. But just after the start of it – and nothing whatsoever to do with Pentameter 2 – a Danish client in a brothel in Plymouth UK rescued a trafficked woman, leading to the convictions of an international gang.

The facts – that a client was necessary to achieve the escape – would, of course, ruin the pitch. After all, it’s supposed to be all the fault of clients, just like the international banking crisis would never have happened if naughty people didn’t have bank accounts.

So the documentary crew skirt the facts with a bit of careful editing, and Whoopie! – another blockbuster to befuddle Joe Public and TV executives with and keep the dollars rolling in, both for the 45 NGOs dealing with the plights of 90 confirmed sex trafficking victims a year in the UK, but above all, of course, for the film company.

MSNBC?….duh….

Salvation Army van ad

So spoke Major Phillip Maxwell of the Salvation Army following a short run-in with the sex workers’ organisation Scarlet Alliance. The occasion was the publication of an advertisement telling of the Sally Army’s rescuing of a boy after he left a message in one of its vans. But sex workers took offence, and the Salvation Army was savvy enough to respond.

“The potential was that [the advert] could seriously damage the relationship that we have in providing services,” Maxwell told ABC News. The ad was promptly pulled.

The incident, two years back, was not big news in Sydney, but to imagine such a speedy retraction and apology to sex workers by a ‘rescue’ organisation in the bear-pit of London’s gender politics today requires a vivid imagination indeed. The event is pertinent now as the Salvation Army takes over the UK Justice Department’s trafficking aftercare portfolio from radical feminist organisation Eaves/Poppy.

A posting last September by sex worker Jasmin, who blogs as indiandelightlondon, starts to illustrate the polarisation that exists between the ‘rescuers’ of the Poppy Project and those among the capital’s sex workers who seem highly resistant to compulsory victimhood.

Here she tells the story of her perhaps naive but nevertheless brave attempt to achieve more balance in Poppy’s research and reporting by agreeing to an interview with Helen Atkins:

…I had kept up to date with all the uproar on how almost all prostitutes are trafficked (it’s what Harriet Harman would have us believe anyway)….I felt it was important for my voice to be heard as I was speaking from the other side of the fence. The side where women are NOT trafficked and are VERY happy in the work we do.

I gave Helen a little peek into the lifestyle I have as an escort. How incredibly caring and protective of me you gentlemen are. How you spoil me rotten. All the holidays I have been on with you gents. All the lovely (sometimes very expensive) gifts I am constantly showered with. How my confidence has shot through the roof since I started working as an escort.

I told her I had no plans to leave this work. You see, the Poppy/Eaves project is all about helping women LEAVE prostitution by providing a safe path, advice, housing etc.

At the same time, Poppy/Eaves project have been campaigning hard for many years to make paying for sex illegal.

Why? Because prostitution does not sit right on their tongues? Is this why they will have you believe that almost all prostitutes/escorts are working against their will? I am one very strong individual. I do not get pushed into things. I’m stubborn …I knew exactly what I wanted out of this path I took and I have never lost sight of that.

I was asked lots of questions ie Had I ever taken drugs? Do I drink? Did I have a difficult childhood? etc etc. Of course my answers to everything was no. It came to a point where she said: “These questions are irrelevant to you because I know its going to be no.”

Once the important stuff was over, she asked if she could make an audio recording of the next part. “Yes, sure.” I was in full mode, yapping away about my experiences with you boys. It was just general stuff. I can honestly say I did not have a single negative thing to say about escorting or the gentlemen I have met to date.

She adds in the comments:

Out of the 100 sexworkers they interviewed, only eleven of us were independents. The rest were streetworkers. Independents are simply not willing to talk to EAVES [Poppy].

Absolutely no way can a report be balanced based on the above. It will, however, be very interesting to see how the eleven of us are quoted.

Whether Jasmin’s very positive view of sex work life will survive Poppy’s notorious ‘editing’ process we will apparently discover in June, but the interim report’s here (PDF) and, would you believe, there’s not much sign of it.

Another publication in which the alienation between London’s sex workers and Poppy surfaced recently was in an excellent work by the capital’s x-talk project, which helps migrant sex workers with their English among other things, entitled Human Rights, Sex Work and the Problem of Trafficking (pdf), of which more anon. Referring to their study group of migrant sex workers, they state (page 30) that whereas such workers had never heard of support services:

….many maids interviewed had heard of the Poppy Project, and most were suspicious or disparaging of the service and claimed they would not refer anyone there. 

Meanwhile, Eaves/Poppy freely exchange hateful remarks with those attempting to represent the interests of UK sex workers – organisations like the IUSW and the ECP.

Therein lies the central dichotomy for Eaves/Poppy. How do you win trust among those whose way of life you are intent upon ‘eradicating’, whilst relying upon a subculture that could be criminalised as a result of referrals?

What was it the Salvation Army’s Major Maxwell said again? Oh yes:

“Our priority is to look after the needs of people and we gain nothing if we marginalise or distance ourselves from the very people we desire to serve.”

Quite.

According to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, 156 persons were confirmed as sex trafficked in the UK (pdf) in the 21 months to last December 31, or about seven or eight a month.

So across the entire UK, less than 90 actual sex trafficking victims a year are found – the sort of number that could easily be housed in a reasonably modest hotel. Find some such hotel in a pleasant location with extensive grounds, provide it with appropriate security and counselling services, and enable its inhabitants to communicate with the authorities, lawyers, folks back home and embassies: job more or less done, you might think.

One victim is one far too many, of course, and individual cases can be appalling, but this is hardly the pandemic of the gargantuan proportions routinely ascribed to it by certain politicians and NGOs.

Less people probably fall down disused mine shafts, but not a lot less, and we’ve no such kerfuffle about them.

On the face of it, more sinister is that 54 of the 156 victims (or two or three a month) were under 18, of which only 30 were over the age of consent (though none prepubescent). However, the international criteria for child trafficking is different and much broader than that for adults, and one would expect such cases to be prioritised.

Nor were all those confirmed trafficked – adult or child – necessarily subjected to any sexual abuse in the UK: a significant proportion will have been detected at ports and airports by specially trained Border Agency personnel on arrival.

But let’s not be over simplistic. These final figures are the end product of a big exercise to separate out the deluge of false claims from genuine. There were no less than 537 claims of sex trafficking referred to the National Reporting Mechanism, averaging over 25 a month, during that 21 month period, of which only 296 (14 a month) got past the first hurdle of persuading the authorities that:

a reasonable person would be of the opinion that…there were reasonable grounds to suspect the individual concerned had been trafficked

…which entitles the applicants to board and lodging for 45 days reflection. This suggests many spurious claims are referred, despite referrals only being made by the UK Border Agency, the police, social services, the UK Human Trafficking Centre or a very limited number of NGOs.

Of the 14 claims a month that survived that initial stage, more were weeded out on a more detailed examination, so eventually less than 30 percent of the original referrals have been confirmed trafficked. The report is silent over those awaiting processing.

Maybe that hotel needs to be significantly larger to accommodate the exercise of separating out false claimants. And perhaps we’ll add a crocodile-infested moat to the security provisions. But while we’re about it, let’s wipe away the crocodile tears pouring from the faces of Poppy Project devotees.

Now I’m sure the Poppy Project has done wonderful work administering to the needs of women trafficked for sex. Sweet fanny adam for men trafficked, whether for sex or not, not a lot for women trafficked for labour, but if you were a woman trafficked for sex (or, more recently, domestic servitude), Poppy has been fine. At least, in London it has. But then, so it should have been, given the millions upon millions poured into it by the last Government. (Whatever did happen to trafficked men under Labour?)

Nor, as I understand it, did Poppy deal with children. Which is quite a shortcoming, as they appear to make up about a third of confirmed victims. 

Poppy has not been quite so fine, though, when it’s overstretched itself and appeared in the vanguard of propagandist campaigns to further outlaw commercial sex – an extremely complex and emotive area, the history of which is crammed with unintended and often fatal consequences, and an area best left to experts rather than the dilatants of either Poppy or, it seems, the Home Office.

The problem for Poppy is that it is tasked to deal purely with victims, so its staff effectively deal with the emotional equivalent of Groundhog days, if you can imagine them set as bonfire nights in an A&E department in which all the victims are members of one sex. Given the added culture of an all-female staff, it has, of course, been a wonderful breeding ground for radical feminism. Indeed it would have been astonishing if it was not, it’s probably all that’s kept those working there sane.

All this would have been containable had it not started to seriously influence Government policy, not in the field of the care of trafficked women – in which Poppy had appropriate expertise – but in the field of criminal justice policy, in which it did not.

Poppy knows little about sex work and appears to know even less about criminology.

Nevertheless, this did not stop Poppy investing money (not the taxpayers’, we have been assured) in dodgy research leading to some very dubious publications indeed. Whilst barely aspiring to contain the academic rigour of a comatose dormouse, these documents were nevertheless taken as gospel and used vigorously by certain influential Labour MPs, such as Harriet Harman, Vera Baird and Fiona Mactaggert, any one of whom could have been elected – judging by their behaviour on this issue – precisely to confirm the archetypal male chauvinists’ fantasy of what women would do given power. Only Jacqui Smith – who was, thank God, Home Secretary – seems to have stood in the way of every male in the country being dragged out forthwith and drowned in the Thames.

A bit like the cast of MASH suddenly taking over Congress and telling everyone that war’s dreadful and should be criminalised, Poppy’s cry to adopt the Swedish practice of criminalising all men who purchased sex was understandably well received in certain quarters that were unfamiliar or uncaring or both over either the history of legislation in this area or the likely consequences.

Poppy’s outpourings culminated in the notorious Big Brothel report, which mysteriously disappeared from its website some months ago. Ostensibly a survey of brothels in (you guessed it) London, Big Brothel’s methodology was crammed with childish blunders, scattered between the now familiar emotive, unattributed quotes, supposedly from disillusioned and damaged sex workers or, in this case, brothel bosses, that have become the organisation’s stock in trade, complete with a policy dedicated to emphasising extremes rather than informing the reader.

On Poppy‘s downside, to these works we can add a tendency to phone their lawyers at the merest hint of public criticism.

And all this is sad, because one gets the impression that despite all its dodgy dossiers, pseudo-research, claptrap and love of lawyers, there is an extremely good team at Poppy doing some excellent work for women who were never – and have no intention of being – sex workers, some of whom have been deeply traumatised as a result of their experiences. If only one could find this team beneath the noise. A better case for a rebranding exercise I have yet to discover.

Those anxious to dip into their pockets to find the £450,000 that Poppy is currently seeking, supposedly to keep itself afloat, would do well, however, to do two things.

One is to bare in mind this story from Washington’s Village Voice. It’s not about Poppy, and whether there are any parallels to be found, I’ll leave entirely up to you.

The other is to look at the list of charities and other UK organisations devoted, in whole or in part, to the lot of trafficking victims. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Soon, one feels, our 90 sex trafficking victims a year will have one each if they haven’t already. Even if you add those who were victims of other forms of trafficking, such as for manual labour or domestic service.

So, having paid our millions from the tax pot to the Sally Army, dig deep (and oh so wide), please, and all aboard the gravy train for: CHASTE; Stop the Traffik; UK Unseen; Eaves/Poppy; the NSPCC; Barnados; LAST (Leeds); CCAT (Croydon); The Madeille Trust; ECPAT UK; The Scottish Refugee Council; The Church of Scotland; Amnesty International UK; The Church of England; STOP (Trafficking UK); City Hearts (Sheffield); LOVE146 (Bournemouth); The Helen Bamber Foundation; City Light (Brighton); ATLP (the Anti-Trafficking Legal Project); BAWSO (Cardiff, Newport, Wrexham etc); Anti-Slavery International (London-based); Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance (Glasgow); Act Against Injustice (Manchester/Merseyside); the Human Trafficking Foundation (London); Housing for Women (London); Aphelia (Worthing); Leeds Women’s Aid; Afruca (Africans Unite Against Child Abuse, London and Manchester); CARE (London); Beyond the Streets (Southampton-based network of 50 projects); Kalayaan (migrant domestic workers, London-based); Migrant Helpline (for potential trafficking victims, dial 07766 668781); Migrants Rights Network; Rights of Women (London); Safe and Sound (Derby); ACT London Forum; The Children’s Society; Unchosen; The AIRE Centre; the Wales Strategic Migration Partnership; the Welsh Refugee Council; Ashiana (Sheffield); the Womens and Girls Network (London); the International Organisation for Migration (offices in London, Bristol, Glasgow and Leeds), and Her Equality, Rights, Autonomy (HERA, London).

So there we are. Forty-six support organisations for 186 victims of all forms of trafficking found per year in the UK, or an organisation to themselves for every four victims. Not counting little things like SOCA and the UK Human Trafficking Centre, and divers private sector clamber-aboards-and-let’s-be-seens like the Body Shop. My apologies to the many I’ve undoubtedly left out, cyberspace being finite.

The duplication of effort and reinvention of wheels among that lot must be enormous. 

As Dr Brooke Magnanti states in her new Sexonomics blog:

…funding for studying trafficking is enormous – in 2009, it was funded worldwide to the tune of nearly a billion US dollars. This is a total greater than the amount of grant money awarded to study lung cancer, which of course, is also devastating, and affects far more people. And spending on trafficking since 2000 has dwarfed the grant awards on such important international health concerns as malnutrition, malaria, or tuberculosis – conditions that kill millions of people worldwide every year, and affect hundreds of millions more.

Now, given that the above assembly of NGOs may be able to cope with our non-existent deluge of trafficking victims (as well as sink the Queen Mary beneath their weight), I’ll just draw your attention to one non-judgemental organisation that doesn’t deal specifically with trafficking or abuse the issue to fill its coffers, but I suspect spends a lot of its time trying to deal with the consequences of the nonsense poured forth and endlessly recirculated between many of the above.

The aim of the UK Network of Sex Work Projects is

To promote the health, safety, civil and human rights of sex workers, including their rights to live free from violence, intimidation, coercion or exploitation, to engage in the work as safely as possible, and to receive high quality health and other services in conditions of trust and confidentiality, without discrimination…

The UKNSWP recognises and supports the rights of individual sex workers to self-determination, including the right to remain in sex work or leave sex work.

I’m sure it could use extra funding, and it can be found here

Photo: Channel 4

That’s the conclusion I’ve come to after viewing last night’s episode of ‘The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Slaves’, which finishes tonight at 9pm.

Yet the programme makers have remained silent on the means by which Lily escaped the clutches of her captors.

Throughout the two programmes to date, victims’ testimony has been interposed with footage of raids causing viewers to link the two. Careful viewing, however, reveals Eastern Europeans among the women interviewed after raids on Thai brothels.

Channel 4’s ‘Lily’ is the same person referred to as Sue in this story by Carl Eve in the Plymouth Herald, published in February last year.

She was rescued by a Danish punter with the aid of his ex-wife shortly before the passage of new legislation which could have seen him fined up to £1,000 for having arranged sex with the trafficked woman.

Lily/Sue’s testimony is known to have led to the capture and successful prosecution of the trafficking gang, including Mee Wong and her daughter Lim Grace, who ran the Plymouth brothel from which she escaped. Both they and Vithool Gomart – who ferried women around the country – featured in police custody in last night’s programme.

They were among eight foreign nationals from Thailand and Malaysia sentenced to a total 26 years in February last year for their parts in the affair, in two court sessions reported by the Herald here and here.

Raids elsewhere, notably in the United States, have been found to further traumatise trafficking victims, complicating attempts both to aid them and to bring traffickers to justice. Less than one in five sex trafficked women dealt with by London’s Poppy Project arrive as a result of raids.

The Pentameter 2 raids themselves resulted in the convictions of no sex traffickers who forced anyone into sex work, according to Nick Davies in the Guardian.

Update [September 7]: See also Nathalie Rothschild’s excellent piece in Spiked On Line.

C4 publicity pic: Their mission: to boldly wear ill-fitting M&S suits that had never been worn before

Its opening words produced the first gaff : “In the first operation of its kind…”

For Pentameter 2 – the combined operation by the UK’s 55 police forces whose story it purports to tell – was not the first operation of its kind.

The original Pentameter began in 2005, with its operational phase between February and May 2006, discovering 88 trafficked ‘sex slaves‘.

For God’s sake, this is a simple question of fact.

The gaffs were to continue, notably when the off-camera female narrator announced that it is believed that 80% of the women in Britain’s brothels are foreign, a statistic once attributed to London’s brothels alone and generally accepted as being way, way above the national average, which is currently placed by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), no less, at a rather generous 60% and by TAMPEP, the organisation of outreach, day centres, clinics and other professionals working with sex workers at closer to 40%.

In the hurly burly rush of putting a daily paper to bed, such mistakes can perhaps be understandable. But there can be little excuse in a documentary series based on footage of an operation that finished on March 31 two years ago, which should have given Channel 4 time to deliver a copy to every household in the nation with every frame hand painted in oils.

The age shows. During a briefing, police are told there are an estimated 4,000 trafficked sex workers in Britain. At the time of Pentameter 2, that was the official guesstimate – rightly much mocked by anyone who’d read the rationale (if one can call it that) behind it. But the new estimate for England and Wales is less than 2,600, and even that is questioned by many.

Unquestioning assurances were given that raids were often the only way to discover and prosecute traffickers. No mention of publicly available information that less than one in five UK sex trafficking victims escape as a result of a police raid.

Quote of the piece was from the officer in charge of a briefing, however, who announced to his throng of officers that, insofar as the sex workers are concerned: “we will accord them victim status and treat them as victims as long as they co-operate.”

How were they treated if they didn’t co-operate? Sex workers in brothels commit no crime, only those managing the brothel or knowingly owning it do so. It is not only the traffickers, it seems, who have vays of making you talk.

And what of those who did not consider themselves victims? Did they want victimhood thrust upon them? They were certainly going to get it from this crew.

Two or three foreign women who more clearly fitted the frame of trafficked – or who at least were clearly unhappy in their role – were interviewed, of course, but what of the rest?

An ACPO report has just informed us that 230 out of 254 brothel sex workers they checked recently (210 of them foreign) were not trafficked. What did these sex workers – many of them migrants with non-existent or often poor English – think of Gloucestershire Constabulary (or anyone else’s constabulary) suddenly arriving and closing their workplaces, confiscating the takings and arresting their bosses?

How more vulnerable were they thus rendered?

But oh no, this Channel 4 crew slept through the story.

Meanwhile, the old, stereotyped message is reinforced – young foreign women are uniformly naïve, pretty little things totally incapable of taking care of themselves in the big, wide world, and their proper place is back in their homelands with mum and dad.

And I think I’m right in saying that never, throughout the whole hour of The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Slaves, did the D word crop up. Though many of Pentameter’s “sex slaves” were ultimately either deported or pressurised to voluntarily return home under threat of deportation.

I wonder if the D word will crop up tonight or tomorrow, when Channel 4 is threatening to perpetrate the remaining, remarkably predictable, instalments? I very much doubt it. No mention yet of even the Border Agency, which seemed as fixed to police raiding parties in Pentameter raids as Siamese twins.

Is it me or is there not something distinctly uninvestigative about modern UK TV documentaries when they follow police matters? It’s almost like the early days of black and white BBC TV, when political interviews consisted of charming ladies and gentlemen from Aunty turning up to have tea and crumpets with ministers and their wives and discussing nothing more political than fashion and cricket. Like Steve Scott’s unctious Nightwatch dribble.

Do none-journalists have to be trained to not ask questions, I wonder? Maybe they’re paid by competing channels to sabotage audience figures?

Anyway, we know the outcome of Pentameter 2. By last October, two years after its launch, when award-winning journalist Nick Davies wrote a piece on it, it had failed to result in the convictions of a single trafficker who had forced anyone into prostitution in the UK. So The Hunt for Britain’s Sex Traffickers strikes me very much as Channel 4 making the most of a poor investment.

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