EVER HEARD of a guy called Robert Whiston? I ask because, according to Mr Whiston, the Home Office’s rocketing rape figures are just as contrived as its pumped up sex trafficking statistics.

It appears that Mr W is no ignoramus. He has served on committees attached to the Home Office, the Lord Chancellor’s Department and the Ministry of Justice since 1999, and written briefing papers on sexual offending and rape sentencing tariffs in the UK and abroad.

More of this later in this post, but first, what a few weeks we’ve had since I last posted! Coming back to it all and ploughing through a sea of emails, I feel like those NASA scientists extrapolating results from a lunar impact and concluding that yes, sure there’s boring old water on the moon, but look what else we‘ve found!

Just for the record, for those that have been on holiday, it all started with the demolition of the Home Office Pentameter 2 stats on sex trafficking by Nick Davies in the Guardian on October 20.

The two Pentameter inquisitions, for the uninitiated, were months-long combined operations by all 55 UK police forces (and numerous other odds and sods) throughout the parlours and saunas of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, ostensibly aimed at unearthing alleged sex trafficking networks.

Now ever since the first Pentameter, back in 2006, it had been clear reading between the lines that the boys and girls in blue were not finding the Aladdin’s caves full of sultry sex slaves they had been led to believe existed.

Phrases like “charged with a variety of offences” cropped up in contrast to numbers charged with human trafficking, and it has been clear to those who follow the media that most arrests were for brothel keeping, ‘controlling’ a prostitute for gain, or banking the proceeds (‘money laundering’) rather than for proper crimes with real coerced victims worth police time.

Which is not to say that there were no victims, nor genuine cases of coercion. Just not very many of them.

Not that the UK has actually passed any legal anti-Human Sex Trafficking law, you understand. The UN enshrined the international definition of human trafficking nine years ago in Article 3 of the Palermo Protocol, which determines what human trafficking “shall mean.” The UK Home Office sat on its bum for two or three years and then passed 

a law saying it meant something completely different.

The upshot of this, insofar as adult sex workers are concerned, is that it is illegal for anyone to knowingly arrange or aid their movement into, around or out of the UK if they, or someone else, intend to let them work in their brothel or to ‘control’ them for gain, or breach any of the other myriad offences in the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

This is not what those who drew up the Palermo Protocol had in mind. Nor was it what the nation’s 55 police forces claimed was to be the criteria for human trafficking used during the two much trumpeted Pentameter operations.

Says the Operational Overview written by Dr Tim Brain, Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, who headed Pentameter 2 on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO):

There are several international protocols that cover trafficking and indeed it is from one of these protocols – the Palermo Protocol – that we took the definition of trafficking used during Pentameter.

This had seemed most peculiar from the start – as the definition was completely at odds with that in UK law, how on earth could Pentameter use that definition? Aren’t UK police officers meant to enforce UK law, as distinct from other people’s?

What seems a great deal more likely is that the Protocol definition was used to identify victims of proper Palermo trafficking, as it is only these victims that qualify for support.

Meanwhile, brothel and controlling charges were scattered like confetti amongst those much maligned persons who, whatever their faults, help keep many sex workers off the streets.

Here’s one Pentameter 2 case, in which 56-year-old mother-of-two Yuzhen Li was jailed for eight months after apparently being trafficked into a management role at a Ramsgate brothel, as reported by Kent Online on May 2 last year:

At the police station, Li said she had won a prize draw for a free UK holiday. She arrived on March 18 [2007] on a six months visa but had overstayed.

She said she had lost her passport and a friend had taken her to the address.

Deborah Charles, for Li, said she had two adult children in China. She came to the UK looking for a cousin but then found herself destitute and when offered the job as a cleaner, decided to go along with it to earn her keep.

Her only financial gain was when she was given some money for a haircut.

She would answer the door and take the money but this was collected later by a man.

She said Li suffered health problems and was very desperate and despondent.

Jailing Li, Judge Adelle Williams said those involved in the management of a brothel commit a serious offence.

She ordered 139 days Li has served on remand, count towards her sentence and recommended her deportation when released.

It doesn’t appear to have struck anybody that this ‘defendant’ shows all the signs of having been trafficked into her role, and that she was very likely a victim of human trafficking for labour and domestic servitude, entitled to respite and compensation rather than incarceration and deportation.

She was charged only with “assisting” in the management, so an upper management was accepted as existing. Claims concerning her fortuitous ‘win’ of a holiday in the immediate aftermath of her arrest at the police station and that she had ‘lost’ her passport would be typical if she feared for loved ones at home, as is normal in Triad trafficking operations.

Yuzhen Li had just three and a half months sentence left to serve after waiting for four and a half months for her case to come up because the UK court system is so clogged up with crap like this.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the New Labour legislature would have allowed the judge to lock Li up for seven years! Fourteen times as long as when New Labour took office!

But what happened to the women working in this brothel, or indeed in the hundreds and hundreds of other places raided by police during the Pentameter raids?

The two Pentameter inquisitions ‘visited’ 1,337 premises – mostly raids, but also visits to airports, ports etc. There were said to be 760 arrests (of which 528 were during Pentameter 2), of which 222 were charged “with a variety of offences” at the time of the relevant ACPO vice conferences, when their outcomes were reported to an extraordinarily gullible national media.

The first Pentameter was said to have ‘rescued’ 88 trafficking victims and 100 others, though what from, and what ‘rescue‘ meant, was unclear. The second ‘rescued’ 167.

Nick Davies reports over Pentameter 2:

The analysis reveals that 10 of the 55 police forces never found anyone to arrest. And 122 of the 528 arrests announced by police never happened: they were wrongly recorded either through honest bureaucratic error or apparent deceit by forces trying to chalk up arrests which they had not made. Among the 406 real arrests, more than half of those arrested (230) were women, and most were never implicated in trafficking at all.

Of the 406 real arrests, 153 had been released weeks before the police announced the success of the operation: 106 of them without any charge at all and 47 after being cautioned for minor offences. Most of the remaining 253 were not accused of trafficking: 73 were charged with immigration breaches; 76 were eventually convicted of non-trafficking offences involving drugs, driving or management of a brothel; others died, absconded or disappeared off police records.

Of 86 arrested for trafficking, 67 were charged and of those, 47 never made it to court, reports Davies. Only 22 were prosecuted for trafficking, including two originally reported as victims.

Of these 22, seven were acquitted. Of the 15 convicted, two-thirds did not coerce the women involved, and thus would not qualify as human traffickers outside the deviant world of UK Home Office legislation.

Of the five actual human traffickers remaining: “Two of them — Zhen Xu and Fei Zhang — had been in custody since March 2007, a clear seven months before Pentameter started work in October 2007. The other three, Ali Arslan, Edward Facuna and Roman Pacan, were arrested and charged as a result of an operation which began when a female victim went to police in April 2006, well over a year before Pentameter Two began, although the arrests were made while Pentameter was running.”

Meanwhile, the Home Office’s latest estimate still shows 4,000 women and children sex trafficking victims in the UK.

This figure was boosted to no less than 18,000 by Tim Brain at the Pentameter 2 outcome for reasons known to neither man nor beast.

There are no figures for the number of sex workers left on the streets after Pentameter raids on premises up and down the country, or the amount of their incomes stolen from brothel managements and carved up between the CPS, the police and the Home Office under Proceeds of Crime legislation, or the numbers of sex workers with very little English who had lost those they relied on for support.

It was shortly after reading Nick Davies’ piece that I browsed across Robert Whiston, who older readers may remember featuring in the intro to this post.

A couple of months back, Mr Whiston wrote this post entitled “How the panic over rape was orchestrated.”

He begins his piece:

For years the Home Office and the former Lord Chancellor’s Department have misled the media about rape statistics – and allowed the media to misinform the public.

Anxiety has grown as a result of the apparent increase in rape offences and the inability to successfully prosecute offenders. Women have been needlessly alarmed for their safety, when the actual threat is much smaller than has been pretended…This official misinformation, one suspects, was a deliberate policy choice…to ensure that no matter what the cost, rape and sex crimes would climb remorselessly up the political agenda.

Unlike any other crimes, Home Office rape figures use the “attrition rate” rather than the “conviction rate,” he states. In other words, it expresses convictions as a percentage of the number of crimes reported, not the number that have necessarily occurred.

The conviction rate is the percentage convicted out of those brought to trial. The attrition rate is the percentage convicted out of the number of crimes reported.

Out of 483 rape claims initially reviewed, over half were listed as ‘no crime’ or ‘No Further Action’, he states: “Both categories signify a suspicion that the claimed crime did not occur, or did not occur in the way first explained, and requires that the claimant make a retraction before the police can categorise them as ‘no-crime’ or NFA.”

Instead of 10% or less rapes solved, the true conviction rate figure is around 48-52%, says Whiston, backed up by a probe by the BBC’s Ruth Alexander from Radio 4’s More or Less.

In New Zealand, rape claims fell when a compensation scheme was withdrawn, and rose when it was reintroduced, while many other  factors could also affect the claim rate.

© Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros, 2008-2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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.

But everyone concerned was of age, knew they were selling sex, and there was no question of coercion, deceit or any other interference with volition that is the hallmark of a human trafficking case, as internationally defined.

The quartet’s time working together was short lived, but eventful. One of the new arrivals was immediately despatched to service eight clients – who had likely been waiting in anticipation for her for some time. This she accomplished by midnight, for which she received £160 from Yan Yang plus £40 in tips.

The following morning Yan Yang and the two new arrivals set out on a lingerie purchasing expedition. However, some altercation over payment resulted in the police being called. The rest is history.

Not a soul had complained about Yang’s brothel activities, or, if they had, the complaints were not mentioned in court.

Yan Yang was charged with, and admitted, keeping a brothel for gain. When this offence was first created, by the Victorians in 1885, it carried a maximum three months prison sentence. In 2003 this was extended to seven years.

She was also charged with, and admitted, controlling a prostitute for gain. It is very doubtful whether one could manage a brothel without controlling a prostitute, so this is somewhat tautological.

As she had made money (she’d paid £1,100 into her account on the day of the lingerie incident) she further admitted possessing criminal property, and as she’d sent £8,000 to China, a further charge of sending £8,000 of criminal proceeds outside the UK.

All of which seems a bit much already, considering her brothel had been a brothel (which has to have at least two sex workers) for less than two days at the time of her arrest.

But no. The Crown Prosecution Service had to add the human trafficking offence as well, because she’d arranged the taxi!

The arrangement of a taxi, then (maximum sentence 14 years) is deemed twice as serious as running a brothel. Do consider this next time you book one: in UK criminal justice terms, you could open two brothels for the price.

This silly little adventure by what the Chinese might call the Clown Prosecution Service, is possible due to a team of idiots responsible for drafting what Chris Huhne calls the Government’s “legislative diarrhoea.”

The internationally agreed Palermo Protocol definition of a sex trafficker requires, in the case of the trafficking of adults, that they have used force or other coercion, fraud, or deceit, or taken advantage of vulnerability.

Obviously Yan Yang had done none of these things. But she had ordered the taxi, which makes her sin just as great in the eyes of the UK Government.

Why, you might well ask?

Well, for some reason best known to itself, UK sex trafficking law is purely concerned with moving people into, around or out of the UK. Fraud, coercion, deceit and so forth (and the little matter of whether these people actually want to get to, from and around the UK) are all deemed totally irrelevant. What matters is whether you intend their use in any crime in the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which includes a whole host of possibilities, including, for example, incest and having sex in a public loo, as well as running brothels.

So, where are we?

• Another human sex trafficking conviction’s been added to Home Office stats to mislead Parliament into believing the problem’s bigger than it is and is being dealt with

• Yan Yang’s been incarcerated for 10 months

• Their madam gone and their brothel closed, the three young women she employed have presumably been left wandering around the Ipswich streets made famous by Steve Wright, the UK’s most famous serial killer of prostitutes in modern times.

Is this crazy? Of course it is. It’s completely Marsham Street. But that’s legislative diarrhoea for you.

They really ought to be locked up, these people.

Based on the court report in the Evening Star.

© Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros, 2008-2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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.

Lesson One: the law should leave well alone

First up are Michelle Dasic and Franklin Lynch, former manager and owner, respectively, of the Executive Sauna in Whitchurch Road, Cardiff. They are pictured above outside the court.

It is not clear why the police investigated the Executive Sauna. However, it was raided and Lynch (50) was charged with two offences of living off the earnings of prostitution, while Dasic (27), faced controlling prostitutes for gain charges.

The case is unusual because the judge, John Durham Hall, actually praised the exemplary way in which the brothel had been run.

And it had been. The court heard that the 10-15 sex workers were given clean towels and condoms. A local authority nurse provided regular check-ups, while there were strict rules against the use of drugs and alcohol.

The judge told Lynch:

You ran efficiently and discreetly a fully functioning and successful brothel near the city centre of Cardiff.

You had regard for the safety, health and hygiene of your staff and premises. There was nothing naive, second-rate or particularly sordid about your business.

Lynch and Dasic both admitted the offences. Lynch was fined £5,000 and given a four month suspended gaol term, while Dasic was fined £2,000 and ordered to do two years community rehabilitation (she later returned to life as a sex worker).

The strange thing was that, while it was clear in court that Lynch owned the business and Dasic managed it, no charges of owning or managing a brothel were brought.

This was all back in November, 2004, after which Lynch and Dasic naturally parted company with the premises. It continued life as a brothel under new management, but sadly the new owners were clearly nothing like as discriminating as the old.

A year after the Lynch and Dasic case almost to the day, the venue featured at the same Cardiff Crown Court, but this time in a notorious trafficking case, in which a 20-year-old Lithuanian woman was forced to have sex with up to nine men a day and hand over all her income to Albanian traffickers who beat her and threatened her life.

The premises occupied by the Executive Sauna, pictured here, are now used by First Choice Leisure.

So the prosecution of Lynch and Dasic achieved what, exactly?

Coming next: the brothel madam now exiled through helping police over trafficking.

© Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros, 2008-2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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: Abigail Stepnitz of London’s Poppy Project, claims mechanisms such as debt bondage, threats to families back home and the reputations of their domestic police forces forced the 166 to leave the safety of the UK police.

Academics, such as Belinda Brooks-Gordon of Birkbeck College, London, on the other hand, point to increasing evidence that the vast majority of migrant sex workers are acting voluntarily, and that significant numbers of these “trafficking victims” may not be victims in the conventional sense at all.

Certainly many are known to have returned to the sex industry, whatever their reason.

This, though, raises the interesting question of what the UK deems sex trafficking. For almost uniquely, in UK law, no coercion, force or deceit is required for someone to be deemed a sex trafficker of adults: anyone knowingly aiding an adult sex worker’s trip into, around or out of the UK causing them to work in brothels is deemed a trafficker. In certain circumstances, one can even be deemed a sex trafficker for taking a person to a public toilet, even if they want to go there.

Little wonder, then, that few such persons regard themselves as ‘victims’.

For a very refreshing view of trafficking, consider this extract from a transcript of a broadcast by Elena Jeffreys (right), of the Australian sex workers’ union Scarlet Alliance, a while back. Sex work is decriminalised in large parts of Australia:

The vast majority of migrant sex workers in Australia are from an Anglo background, from the UK. The second largest demographic would be from New Zealand and America. And yes, there is also a demographic of sex workers from South East Asian countries, Thailand, South Korea and China, and other countries around the region as well.

Most of the women that are coming into Australia for sex work are accessing visas independently. Some of the women coming in to Australia for sex work are accessing visas through migration agents, or third-party contracts where they will agree to have all of their flights paid for, their accommodation paid for and generally their food paid for, and a lot of their transport paid for when they get to Australia. And they have a place of work when they get here. And in return they will work for a period of time paying off the debt contract to the migration agent that has helped arrange their visa and their travel and their transport.

Those debt contracts, the overwhelming majority of those debt contracts, are trouble-free and arranged in a way that both the sex worker and the person arranging the visa are happy at the end of it, and have a good relationship, and the person has a great time working in Australia, pays off their contract, stays and earns some money, sends money home, saves up some money while they’re here, and…has an amazing story to tell their grandchildren about the time that they travelled to Australia, and how much fun and how interesting it was.

Some of those debt contracts have been arranged in a situation where people have taken advantage of the vulnerability and the perceived lack of rights that an individual who’s coming in to Australia for sex work may have, and some of those contract fees are ridiculously over-priced. This is when situations arise that we understand as human trafficking. When a person has been deceived, when their freedom is being curtailed, when their income is being withheld, and when they’re basically in slave-like conditions, where they don’t have control over their labour in a slave-like situation, with the person who has arranged their contract.

And that, I think, is what most sane people regard as trafficking. Sadly though, sane people don’t work at the UK Home Office.

Futher questions thus arise: what are the implications for the Policing and Crime Bill, now in the Lords, as trafficking paranoia underpins the Government’s proposals on sex work in it?

And if the welfare of these 116 persons is what we have at heart, how has this been improved by depriving them of their workplaces? After all, innumerable studies show that sex workers are far safer indoors than on the streets, even if English is their first language. And what of the other women who have lost their workplaces in these 1,300 premises “visited”?

Yet it is on the streets where the Home Office seems to have left them, having prosecuted innumerable persons who were giving them shelter among the diverse “variety of offences” that were not trafficking but were charged after the Pentameter inquisitions to make the paperwork look at least a little better.

The question of whether the Pentameter raids created more victims than it rescued will, I suspect, never be answered.

In Kicking down the door,” Andrea Ritchie, Director of New York’s Urban Justice Centre’s Sex Workers Project, said:

Anti-trafficking efforts should be community-based, led by people familiar with sex work and other sectors where there is vulnerability to trafficking, such as domestic work, agricultural labour, and service sectors, people who have experienced trafficking, social service providers, and immigrants rights advocates. This kind of approach would not only be more effective, but would build community and empower people who have been trafficked rather than subjecting them to the additional trauma of raids, arrests, and detention.

© Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros, 2008-2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

LATER THIS YEAR, a new law is due to come into effect which will criminalise those who arrange a liaison with a sex worker subsequently discovered to have been coerced.

The offence will be New Labour‘s 3,601st since 1997, contributing the latest instalment of what Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne (right) has described as an attack of “legislative diarrhoea.” 

Other clauses in the Policing and Crime Bill, now in the Lords, will:

• remove the right to a warning for kerb crawlers

• enable buildings housing brothels to be closed for up to three months, and

• introduce three compulsory sessions of rehabilitation for street sex workers caught persistently soliciting (as an alternative to a fine), with persistently defined as just twice in three months (it is now a week).

But it is the new client offence which has caused most jubilation among some feminists, and vehement opposition from others. Cheerleaders for the new moves are, predictably, Eaves Housing and Object. Their new campaign, Demand Change, is in the vanguard of the movement to use the new law as a thin end of a wedge towards their ultimate goal of criminalising all who hire sex workers, or, as the prohibitionists would put it, buy prostituted women. 

But just before we rush headlong to sign the petitions, dust off the banners and jump aboard this moral crusade’s bandwagon, let us pause and mourn the fallen from previous conflicts. Soldiers die in crusades, but the casualties in this war are unlikely to include many representatives of the socioeconomic groups A, B and C1, who throng launches and campaign meetings in the salubrious surroundings of Portcullis House.

Among those women who will be unable to join, for example, is one Amanda Walker (pictured).

Amanda, 21, was a Leeds street prostitute who left her two year old son at home with his father in the Rawcliffe area of the city to seek work in London as a result of income lost through a local ‘kerb crawling’ drive by West Yorkshire Police ten years ago.

The police initiative was held in conjunction with an experiment by Leeds Metropolitan University, to whom it supplied ‘kerb crawlers’ for the UK‘s first ‘john school’ - an establishment where street sex workers’ clients are taught the supposed errors of their ways -  run by Julie Bindel (since a consultant to Eaves‘ Poppy Project).

According to Hillary Kinnell and her excellent work Violence and Sex Work in Britain, the university and those involved in the course had already been warned their action could drive street sex workers away from their home areas and into places where they were unfamiliar with either the territory or the local violent clients. Yet the “experiment” progressed.

Thus, on April 24, 1999, Amanda Walker worked not in the red light area of Leeds, but that of Paddington, where she was arrested for soliciting in Sussex Gardens. Released from the local police station, she made her way back to the patch and met David Smith (left), known to the local sex workers and their support project as dangerously violent and an ’ugly mug’ (as they term such persons) to steer clear of – knowledge of which Amanda was unaware.

She could have stood little chance against the 43-year-old, 19 stone, 6’3” lorry driver, nicknamed ’Lurch’ after the Addams Family character. The following day her blood-stained clothes were found dumped in an alley in Hanworth, west London, and her body was eventually found in a shallow grave in Wisley, Surrey, the next month.

Smith, jailed for the offence in the December, had had an appalling record of violence against women.

• Back in 1976, aged 18, he had raped a woman at knifepoint in front of her children and was jailed for four years.

• In 1987 he received a two-year suspended sentence for attacking a woman in a car – she only escaped by kicking her way through the windscreen.

• A sex worker attacked by him with a knife in a hotel room a year later was too frightened to give evidence and an attempted murder charge was thus dropped.

• His later acquittal of the 1991 killing of Sarah Crump, whose body had been mutilated in the same manner as Amanda Walker’s, had been followed by a police statement that they were not looking for anyone else.

Yet amazingly, Smith was not independently monitored by the Metropolitan Police: instead, precious resources were dispersed catching sex workers and ‘kerb-crawlers,’  presumably thus sending the local working girls of Paddington fleeing to the four winds where the local violent punters would not be known to them, either.

That police crackdowns on both buyers and sellers in street prostitution cause increased risk to already vulnerable street workers has long been observed by projects striving to reduce risk, not only of violence but also of the transmission of HIV/Aids and other sexually transmitted infections.

Recently, however, a new study has been published following 18 months of work amongst a community of street sex workers, which has actually measured the increase in both physical and sexual violence resulting from criminalisation and enforcement-based approaches, the latest instalment of which lurk in the Government bill.

Although the study took place in Vancouver, the Canadians have very similar laws to the UK over sex work, with both brothels and street soliciting illegal. Its enforcement procedures are similar, too.

While the Home Office brandishes its ill-thought through Coordinated Prostitution Strategy with its liberal use of phrases such as ‘multi-agency’ and efforts to “disrupt” the market, the police at grass roots level often find themselves the pariahs among those – often in the NHS, the voluntary sector or social services – whose job it is to minimise violence, risk and infection.

The boys and girls in blue (or plain clothes) arrive and, like fleas in a barrel of nitro-glycerine, dispense kerb crawling arrests here, soliciting warnings there, apparently oblivious to the fact that the resulting dispersal terminates relationships between vulnerable persons and outreach workers that have often taken months or even years to establish. Looked at from the outside, the so-called coordinated strategy can but nurture aspirations to achieve the coordination one might associate with a rabid millipede.

An excellent example can be found in the UK oil capital of Aberdeen following the abandonment of a tolerance zone after recent Scottish Parliament legislation. The local Quay Services support group was reduced to scrabbling around to find numbers to text sex workers about violent clients – using phones that would cease to function, incidentally, if Westminster had its way.

Too often the debate in the Commons on the criminalisation of clients descended into the playground politics of the ’we’ve been blaming the girls all along and it’s the boys’ fault all the time’ variety.

But what matters to drug addicted street sex workers is their fix and their families – more criminal sanctions will merely exacerbate the problem, irrespective of the role of the consenting adult in the dock.

In Parliament, the question of whether the criminal law has any part to play in adults’ sexual choices, irrespective of gender, has gone unasked.

Yet the politicians march on, lemming-like, addicted to the moral high ground every bit as much as the street sex worker her fix, ignoring warnings that the summit is crowned with sinking sands.

The answers to the real needs of street sex workers, highlighted in the Canadian study,  lie not within the remit of the Home Office at all, but more often in access to effective drug rehabilitation and appropriate accommodation.

Lack of either was also identified in Canada as leading to increased risk of violence. It is high time the Home Office ceased exacerbating the problems, and learnt that its proper place in this equation lies not in alienating the police from all and sundry, but in bridge building to enable sex workers and their clients to feel comfortable contacting the police when something serious – such as coercion, violence or trafficking – occurs.

Sadly, it appears much more than three sessions will be required to rehabilitate Marsham Street, however.

Meanwhile, back at Westminster, this latest instalment of legislative diarrhoea should be returned gently back from whence it came.

© Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros, 2008-2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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.

Said Lord Brett:

If a brothel is under observation and it is suspected that prostitutes are being trafficked, primarily because they are being moved between different cities, which is quite a common occurrence, the place will be kept under observation for a number of days.

People will be seen going in and coming out, prostitutes will be seen going in and coming out and the movements of the people running the brothel will be seen. At some point, sufficient evidence will have been gathered to make arrests. They will be made in the light of those observations. 

Meanwhile the ‘victim support’ page of the police ‘Blue Blindfold’ anti-trafficking site has been ‘coming soon’ now for over two years.

Two nationwide hunts for sex trafficking victims involving all 55 UK police forces discovered only 255 persons trafficked, well under the 4,000-strong Government estimate and less than a third of 1 percent of the UK‘s estimated 80,000-strong population of sex workers.

Giving examples was “always dangerous,” said Lord Brett.

© Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros, 2008-2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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 AthensOlympics in 2004. Doubled from what to what, exactly, was conspicuously absent. From the previous week/month/year in Athens? From the Sydney Olympics in 2000? From the previous Athens Olympics in 1896?

To repeat the facts, an extract from a previous post here:

There was a 95 percent increase (from 93 to 181) in all human trafficking victims – including for labour and begging – detected in the whole of Greece in the whole of 2004, but as for the Athens Olympics themselves, they are not associated by researchers with any increase in sex trafficking, but with an actual decrease in child trafficking for begging on the streets of the capital.

The International Organisation on Migration observed: “It can…be stated that neither the 2004 annual report on Organised Crime in Greece by the Greek Ministry of Public Order, nor the IOM Athens case data in the IOM CTM [Counter-Trafficking Module] database referred to instances of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation during the 2004 Olympic Games.”

Though the IOM was present and assisted seven human trafficking victims in Athens in 2004, “individual case analysis… revealed no reference to human trafficking for…exploitation during the Olympic Games.”

There is an obvious, simple and constructive answer to the Olympics dilemma: to have card placement and removal recognised as an Olympic sport, and to carry out heats frequently throughout the games. Furthermore, this would cost nothing in terms of extra infrastructure. However, Boris and Kit are both Londoners, so it will take until at least 2020 before it dawns on them.

Meanwhile, back to carding phone boxes. The  carding game is a speciality of certain UK cities, notably London and Brighton, in which the two sides try to outdo each other and keep fit at the same time by seeing if BT and the local councils can take down sex workers’ calling cards in phone boxes as quickly as the carders can put them up again.

It has many fulltime players, including some in the print industry, which it keeps gainfully employed. Over 13 million cards are said to arrive in the boxes annually. BT alone takes down 150,000 a week. The average day rate paid to carders is said to be £200.

In one eight-week period, more than a million cards were removed, which would have cost the ladies concerned £150,000 to print – the girls are not quite so ‘poor’ girls as Malthouse would have us believe, it seems.

Malthouse’s vendetta against the carders began in 2000 and last surfaced in 2005, when he led a campaign which gave out 20,000 mock cards printed with the numbers of the CEOs of mobile phone companies to Oxford Street shoppers (the mobile operators now dominate the business since BT unwisely started disconnecting sex workers’ numbers in response to Malthouse’s demands). The mobile bosses’ reaction at the time can be gleaned here.

So well established is the practice of carding now that it has museum collections devoted to it. One such is at the Wellcome Library on Euston Road, where by arrangement you can peruse the 17 18 boxes of cards collected by enthusiast Stephen Lowther, and gathered from phone booths in the Kings Cross, Warren Street and Baker Street areas.

The practice appears to have began shortly after the privatisation of BT in the mid-80s, from which the collection’s earliest cards date. Since then, the collection illustrates the development of widely available high definition colour printing (the first colour print was collected on January 23, 1992) and the increasing ethnic diversity of migrant sex workers in the London scene, which the collection dates from about 1994.

See also:

Icons.org.uk

Londonist.com

© Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros, 2008-2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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 victimsin South Wales, what’ll happen to them? Will they end up like her, living in fear as an exile from her own country in Cyprus, waiting for the long arm of the law to arrive with its arrest warrant to demand £2.6m she hasn’t got? [more on this in a later post]

Whadaya think of the Home Office’s Coordinated Prostitution Strategy now, Dave?

 Update (September 7): Dave seems to have made some progress, by the way.

(see also: Who dials 999 in a brothel?)

 

A NEW STUDY of street sex workers confirms higher levels of violence against them during police interventions such as kerb crawling clampdowns and arrests for soliciting.

The study, published by the British Medical Journal, is believed to be the first to quantify the greater violence levels in the outdoor sex market caused by the enforcement of anti-sex industry laws.

Homelessness and an inability to access drug intervention programmes – street workers are often class A or B drug users – were also linked to higher levels of violence, says Kate Shannon, who led the team of academics studying the issue in Vancouver, Canada.

The small street sex industry – believed to represent only 10 or 15 percent of the overall numbers of UK sex workers living from prostitution – has long been known to suffer much higher levels of violence compared to its larger indoor counterpart.

It has been the traditional hunting ground of serial killers from Jack the Ripper – whose 1888 murder spree was helped along by the UK ban on brothels three years earlier – through to Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and Ipswich murderer Steve Wright.

Studies of street sex workers have previously observed the effects of criminalisation and enforcement-based approaches by police. These cause displacement of the sex workers, sometimes to areas they are unfamiliar with; sometimes to working at different, often more antisocial hours – during which they have to work longer to make the same earnings; and occasionally displacement to real crime, such as shoplifting or handling stolen goods. (More in my posting here.)

Police intervention also breaks up networks of street workers – which form an important informal safety mechanism – further jeopardising their wellbeing.

But this is the first in-depth study to actually measure the increased violence level and link it to police action.

An analysis of various policing approaches to street sex work, together with their downsides, can be found on this American policing site.

For the UK Government, the new study could be bad news for its infamous Policing and Crime Bill, now in the House of Lords. The Bill is likely to boost the street sex worker population by closing brothels for up to three months, and also includes moves to sharpen kerb crawling drives by denying drivers warnings, and to force street sex workers to undergo ’rehabilitation’.

All this is on top of its most famous proposal – to criminalise men who arrange sex with a sex worker who subsequently turns out to have been coerced.

The new study has the somewhat frightening title of Prevalence and structural correlates of gender based violence among a prospective cohort of female sex workers.

© Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros, 2008-2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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:

A GANG of men threatened prostitutes with guns and knives while robbing a brothel three times in a week.

The manager said a string of girls have quit their jobs amid fears for their safety as police hunt the culprits – and believes the gang is targeting brothels across Redbridge and east London….

The boss, who asked to remain anonymous through fear of reprisals, said: “It was the same bunch of guys every time. They kick the doors down and say they will use weapons. Even though we couldn’t see any, who wants to take that risk? Each time they took money, the girls’ mobile phones and laptops. Luckily I don’t keep large amounts of cash on-site.”

During the first raid the robbers screamed ‘armed police” as they burst in.

The manager…said: “The police have been really good with us, but they are worried these men will burst into people’s homes by mistake. They have helped us improve locks and we have also fitted CCTV and employed security guards.”

The gang – unmasked black men aged between 18 and 25 – are rumoured to have carried out similar raids across Barking and Dagenham, as well as Romford.

The boss said: “They are really quite aggressive and scary. I have been left very shocked by all of this and people are terrified of it happening again.”

A Redbridge Police spokesman said: “With regards to the robberies taking place in brothels, I first have to state that these businesses are advertised as massage parlours, which means they are legal premises. When a crime is reported it is dealt with in exactly the same way as any other crime. There has been an increase in massage parlour robberies and we are asking the businesses to ensure they report any crimes, such as robberies, to the police. The crime prevention team visits such businesses and replaces locks to reinforce the security of the premises.”

Perhaps the first thing to notice about this report is its language: to the public, the journalists of the Ilford Recorder, the manager and the sex workers within them, these places are brothels. Only the police have to massage the language with the legal nicety of ‘massage parlours.’

The problem does not stop at rape and robbery. The academic Hilary Kinnell established 118 UK murder victims as sex workers between 1990 and 2006, and though more than three-quarters worked the streets rather than indoors, Kinnell believes the present laws hamper sex worker safety and that Home Office anti-prostitution policy “denies sex workers safety from violence.” 

It doesn’t take a genius to appreciate that brothels have long been seen as soft targets for criminals, but under New Labour, the problem has become considerably worse. The Victorians, with their prudishness and moral fervour, introduced a modest three month maximum prison term or £100 fine for owners and managers when they first banned brothels in 1885. But under New Labour, the penalty has risen to no less than seven years.

Not only that, but brothel management has been declared an Orwellian ‘life style crime’ under Labour’s new Proceeds of Crime Act. All assets deemed arising from the brothel can be seized and shared among the police and the rest of the criminal justice system, while the new Policing and Crime Bill would enable premises used as brothels to be closed for three months.

All this, of course, signals a huge green light to rapists and thugs to do as they please with brothels and those within them.

Who dials 999 in a brothel? 

Those in the cases above, perhaps, but they are very much the exceptions to the rule.

A study in Leeds, Glagow and Edinburgh by Stephanie Church  and others published in the British Medical Journal in 2001 showed that although brothel workers suffered far less violence than street sex workers, only 18 percent of violence victims in brothels reported the incidents to the police, compared to 44 percent of those on the street.

And that was BEFORE Labour’s changes came into effect.

Cases like those that began this posting, along with venues like the Dagenham brothel in Essex featured in Channel 4’s A WI Lady’s Guide to Brothels, where the police had kitted out the venue with panic alarms, reveal the Alice in Westminsterland world of Home Office ministers and illustrate the lengths to which tomorrow’s inhabitants of Marsham Street will need to go to regain any shred of credibility in this area.

So preoccupied are the politicians with that strand of radical feminism who seek the ‘eradication’ of prostitution on ideological grounds that all sense of duty to preserve the safety of those involved, and all recognition of the need to battle real crime and real criminals when it arises, is lost. Happily, that cannot be said for all police forces.

In the strange hidden subculture of the Home Office, though, the present strategy aims to ’disrupt’ both the indoor and outdoor sex markets. Dr Teela Sanders, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Crime and Deviance at Leeds University, is one of numerous academics highly critical of the Government policy. She says:

Historically, there are several accounts of how the laws against brothel keeping and advertising have not been enforced but instead the indoor markets, where there have been no causes for concern, have been left to their own devices. Accounts also indicate the receptionists, sex workers, owners and managers have a functional relationship with the police acting as informers for other crimes and being warned when raids were to take place. However…the tolerance attributed to well managed massage parlours may now be changing as the (Prostitution) Strategy aims to ‘disrupt the sex markets’.

Already, there have been several clear cases of the Home Office looking ridiculous by chopping off its head to save its nose.

There was the case of Jennifer Schott, who sobbed throughout court proceedings at Kingston Crown Court after starting a brothel to escape the violence on the streets. After police found a man and woman in bed at her premises and her takings – just £130 stuffed in a cushion – she was banged up for 15 months: five times the maximum sentence the Victorians would have given her.

The police had known about her brothel but had turned a blind eye until one day when they were pressured to act by the Inland Revenue when she tried to pay her tax.

Then there was Diana Jones, who owned and managed several brothels mainly in South Wales, who was prosecuted and narrowly escaped prison when she was foolish enough to report to police that two of the women working voluntarily in her establishments had been trafficked.

Evidence given in court gave the lie to police assertions that they had known nothing of the enterprises before the case. Having acted, as the BBC put it, for others’ safety, the latest reports suggest she’s now in Cyprus, trying to avoid the payment of £2.6m claimed as the proceeds of her so-called ‘life style crime’ - probably on the basis of maths like these.

So what kind of nightmare is the Home Office trying to create with its so-called ‘Coordinated prostitution strategy‘? Millipedes with multiple sclerosis display better coordination.

Do we want a world in which real victims of real rapes and robberies feel they can approach the police, even if this disturbs the radical feminist idealists?

Or do we want one in which those who pay their tax and do everything possible to combat human trafficking wind up incarcerated or living in exile, fleeing from the law?

We had best decide.

Clearly the politicians at Her Majesty’s Home Office have no intention of doing so.

© Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros, 2008-2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Stephen Paterson and An Anthology of English Pros with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.