An Anthology of English Pros

CONTROVERSY continues to surround the Home Office’s plan to subject clients of sex workers to £1,000 fines if the women they arrange sex with subsequently turn out to have been coerced, though the nonsensical “controlled for gain” phrase has been dropped in favour of women who have been “subjected to force, deception or threats” including those “subjected to force by psychological means and the exploitation of vulnerability.”

This followed heated exchanges in the Commons Scrutiny Commitee on the legislation – the Policing and Crime Bill – where MPs queried the fates of many trafficking victims and whether they would continue to be rescued by punters given the prospect of £1,000 fines and resulting publicity.

Among those giving evidence at the Committee was Denise Marshall, chief executive of the Poppy Project, which provides homes and support for rescued trafficking victims, mainly in London. Suddenly at the Committee, she made an astonishing assertion:

Interestingly, in the time we have run the POPPY project, we have had 22 referrals from punters—from those buying sex from trafficked women.

They made the referrals because the women were in an obvious physical and emotional state of distress. That sounds good on the surface until you realise that all the 22 men had sex with the trafficked woman before they phoned us.

These are trafficked women whom we have taken into our projects and whom have given evidence to us in statements. All those men, knowing the women were trafficked, had sex before phoning us to help the women to get out of their situation.

This clearly had a stunning effect on the committee, and was duly quoted by Home Office minister Alan Campbell to Parliament at the Report Stage. Yet the more one thinks about this, the less astonishing it becomes, and the more one studies the subject, the more one has reason to question Ms Marshall’s assertion.

Whereas in society in general, a relationship precedes sex, in a brothel the process is reversed. Sex comes first and a relationship, if it happens at all, develops afterwards. That is what brothels are for: it is their very raison d’être. So we should be less than surprised that the men had had sex with the women at an early stage in the proceedings.

A trafficked woman, furthermore, is unlikely to divulge her story to every punter who comes along. In doing so, she risks the punter taking the matter up with the brothel management and the possibility of reprisals. Imparting her plight to a punter therefore entails a degee of risk and consequently requires the build-up of trust.

Furthermore, many trafficked women have little or no English. This story tells the tale of one woman’s remarkable escape and the lengths that a punter had to go to in order to overcome the language barrier. Read the rest of this entry »

WITH THE incessant fuss over human trafficking of ’sex slaves’ in the UK – the Government having pumped £5.8 million into the Poppy Project alone since 2003 to help them – you’d think the powers that be might have a clue what they’re talking about on the subject.

But no, it seems. The Government can’t quite decide what human trafficking actually is.

The confusion can be found in two very different Commons answers given by Home Office minister, Alan Campbell, to identical questions posed by two MPs 48 hours apart last month.

The question was, what was the Home Office’s ”definition..of a person who has been trafficked?” Read the rest of this entry »