An Anthology of English Pros

THINK OF HUMAN  sex trafficking and you think of young, usually migrant women forced into prostitution against their will by villains.

Often, though not always, they are attracted to the UK with promises of vanilla jobs, and then imprisoned and forced to service men, paying all their earnings to traffickers who see them as nothing but cash cows.

This horrendous practice takes place throughout the world. And this includes the UK, though the numbers here are clearly far less than often painted – hundreds, rather than the 4,000 once (very badly) “estimated” by the Home Office but still quoted on occasions.

It is, of course, a very serious offence, for which one can spend up to 14 years in prison. Which is why one should be angry when it is used gratuitously against someone who clearly does not deserve the label.

Such a person is Yan Yang (right), a 50-year-old woman gaoled for 10 months at Ipswich Crown Court this week. Her “human trafficking” offence was to arrange a taxi from the local station for two young women who had come from London to work for her.

Let’s make no bones about it – Yan Yang was setting up a parlour (aka brothel) in Ashmere Grove in the town. She already had one young woman in her employ, and the two arrivals from London had responded to an advertisement she placed for masseuses in a Chinese newspaper. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a story, the first of three I’m planning, on victims in the UK sex industry.

A little like Amanda Walker, these are victims, not of traffickers, but of Her Majesty’s Home Office and its bizarre laws. And I believe each to be a lesson in failure by the criminal justice system.

Unlike Amanda, however, the victims in these cases worked not as street prostitutes, but at various levels of management in the sex industry – people many would call ‘pimps’.

The variations in their income for this task were extraordinary. They range from the pocket money required for a single haircut for many weeks’ work at one extreme, to – reportedly – millions of pounds at the other.

The penalties they suffered at the hands of the law varied too – from eight months’ prison at one extreme to a community service order and a fine. And, as this is Bizarre Britain, it was, of course, the one who only earned the haircut money who wound up behind bars. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

THIS IS the story of Belinda and her friend of many years standing, Wendy, who live nearby one another in Wolverhampton.

Wendy, now 41, was a sex worker. As such, studies show she was vulnerable to potential assaults and stigma once the word gets out in her local community.

Happily, however, she had Belinda. Neither were  too well off and together, they rented a flat well away from Wolverhampton, in Worcester, where Wendy could do incalls. Between December, 2007 and last May, the pair would commute daily to Worcester, where Wendy would ply her trade with the security of knowing Belinda was in an adjoining room should things go awry. Besides acting as security, Belinda took calls from customers and banked the takings, which were shared between the two of them. Few, if any, knew of this arrangement back in Wolverhampton.

Business was brisk on occasions at the ground floor flat in Malvern Road, St Johns, where the pair had up to 10 satisfied clients a day, each paying up to £80. Wendy’s “massage” service was advertised in a local magazine.

Sadly, however, the neighbours – or at least some of them – were not amused, and contacts were established with West Mercia Police.

It was not long before the flat, unbeknown to Belinda and Wendy, was monitored by a network of spy cameras to establish clients’ comings and goings. There were two clients present when police finally pounced on May 29.

It has taken more than nine months for the case to come to court, which it finally did this week.

The pair were charged with keeping a brothel and Belinda was charged with controlling a prostitute for gain.

Both denied the brothel charge and were found not guilty – premises do not become brothels unless at least two sex workers are involved. But Belinda admitted the controlling charge and was fined £500 with £500 costs. She has a month to declare her assets, from which any profit she made from her venture will be seized and dispersed under the Proceeds of Crime Act to, among others, West Mercia Police, to enable them to continue to live off immoral (as they’re stolen) earnings.

Now the case of Belinda and Wendy is not a particularly sensational one. It is fairly run of the mill, which is, or should be, a matter of great concern.

Notice that Wendy, the sex worker herself, walks off scot-free. It is the person who provides her security who is penalised, even though this is a perfectly happy non-coercive relationship.

Under the new Policing and Crime Bill, as Wendy has been pronounced ‘controlled for gain’ , both the clients found on the premises during the raid and any identified from CCTV coverage and traced would face fines of up to £1,000 – NOT because they had hired Wendy – but because of Belinda’s involvement.

The Government is in a state of denial that cases such as that of Belinda and Wendy exist. But the fact is that it provided no definition of ‘controlling’ in ‘controlling for gain’  in the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, thus the courts make of it what they will.

Witness the statements of Home Office minister Alan Campbell to the Commons scrutiny committee:

…we do not believe that a prostitute who employs a receptionist to arrange her appointments will be considered controlled for gain, as some have suggested, nor do we consider that a prostitute who arranges for a security guard to protect her will be controlled for gain. That does not accord with the ordinary meaning of “controlled”.….the measure is not directed at the receptionist, the maid, the security person, or any other woman working with another prostitute, where they are working together for reasons of safety. It is difficult to envisage a situation where a madam…would fall under the definition of “controlled for gain” that this offence would be based upon. If we are talking about someone who arranges the appointments, shares the venue, ensures that the prostitutes are safe—the things that we are talking about that we are confident are not covered by this offence—we believe that the definition “controlled for gain” would not extend to include….”

Ah, but it does, doesn’t it? The Government’s confidence is clearly misplaced, as a glance at any one of a large number of court cases would show. We blame their teachers.

Mr Campbell, to do him justice, went away from that committee meeting with a pledge to look into the situation. That was some weeks ago, and came on top of a Bar Council offer to look at the wording of “controlled for gain.” But needless to say, the wording of the Bill remains unchanged.

Meanwhile, however, our courts are still no closer to a definition of controlling which even vaguely resembles what the Government continues to proclaim it to mean.

There’s not much flying on this – just the safety of some 80,000 UK women and the potential criminalisation of about a tenth of the UK male population, so we really can’t expect Parliament to spend much time on it, much less get it right…

JUST FIVE and a half months late, the Government has finally ‘responded’ to the 734-signature Sex Workers’ Petition on the Downing Street site.

The petition called on it to reject calls to criminalise clients of sex workers and thus avoid the problems associated with driving prostitution even further underground. Instead, it urged decriminalisation  in line with Royal College of Nursing and National Association of Probation Officers policy, and the empowerment of sex workers with the limited rights recommended by the Council of Europe.

Predictably, whichever tea lady (should that be tea person?) accorded the task of responding on behalf of the PM merely regurgitated existing dribble and known facts, failing completely to address the questions raised by the petition. We blame the Home Office staff’s teachers.

Among the justifiably irritated signatories is Professor Anthony Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, who wrote to the PM‘s office:

Your response to this petition simply repeats the proposals that we are petitioning against: you have done nothing more than to iterate the points against which the petition was raised in the first place. Your reply is accordingly a paradigm of evasion, and makes a mockery of citizen response to projected legislation. As this is a wholly unacceptable reply we ask that you think again, and respond again. 

Well done, Professor! But as it took them nearly six months to respond the first time, forgive me if I resist the temptation to hold my breath.

Successive Governments since Victorian times have lost all traction on the issue of prostitution, and the yawning chasm between de jure and de facto is poised to become even wider thanks to the Home Office’s new Policing and Crime Bill, which shows our legislature drifting off further and further into cloud cuckoo land, with less and less grip on reality, presumably fuelled by massive quantities of confiscated Class A drugs financed by dubious expenses claims for second homes.

“Never mind the quality, feel the width” seems to be the Government’s motto, as the Home Office’s new toy frogmarches its way through the parliamentary process to add to the 3,600 new criminal offences New Labour has created since 1997, at a rate not far off one a day.

Help needed for new Home Office Coat of Arms: How does one write “If it moves, imprison it” in Latin? Or maybe we’ve got the onus wrong? Perhaps we Brits should be born in prison and just allowed out for good behaviour?

The new Bill includes a measure allowing courts to send street prostitutes for compulsory rehabilitation sessions instead of fining them, because so bad have things become that the measure had to be dropped from the last Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill when it had to be rushed through to prevent a strike by officers in our much overcrowded prisons. Things may seem bleak now, but Britain, it seems, has a glorious future as the Alcatraz of Europe.

Despite notable attempts to talk some sense into the Home Office, notably by Dr Evan Harris of the Liberal Democrats at the committee stage, it looks likely that clients of prostitutes who turn out to have been ‘controlled for gain’ (nobody has come up with a satisfactory explanation of what that actually means since the Government invented the phrase in 2003) will face a fine of up to £1,000, irrespective of whether they knew of the control or not, and irrespective of whether any sex has actually happened.

This is expected to result in even fewer victims of sex trafficking being rescued, as punters (unlike the Home Office) currently form an important source of intelligence – somewhat less likely if they or their friends are going to find themselves in court and thus on the front pages of local papers.

“The Government has a Co-ordinated Prostitution Strategy,” claims the Government’s response to the petition. That’s a laugh for a start – any follower of the Pentameter anti-trafficking drives will know the Government’s strategy is about as co-ordinated as a millipede with multiple sclerosis.

Our only hope must lie with the fleet of Noble Lordships to attempt to restore sanity, not for the first time.

Meanwhile, we in the provinces must give up our habit of selecting the worst local undesirable who hasn’t actually been imprisoned or sectioned yet and sending them to Westminster for four or five years at a time.

AS PARLIAMENT debates how to criminalise clients of trafficking victims and others ‘controlled for gain’ in prostitution, a Crown Court case last week has further revealed the stupidity of the Home Office plan.

  

A 29-year-old Thai mother of two was rescued from a life of misery in a Plymouth brothel and taken to the police by a punter, who would have faced a £1,000 fine for his trouble if the planned law was in effect.

 

 

Six Malaysian and Thai nationals have so far been put away for a total of 17 and a half years for the human trafficking case, with another two facing sentencing on February 17.

 

 

As the Plymouth Herald reported of the victim:

Ordered to service one more [punter]…she took a risk and begged the client, a Danish man known in court as Mr K, to rescue her using a mixture of Thai and sign language to explain she had been trafficked into prostitution.

He had left, spoke to his ex-wife who was visiting Plymouth and together they hatched a plan. He called back the next day, claimed he was a police officer and grabbed the woman. He and his ex-wife then used a electronic translation machine, typing in the question “prisoner?” which when shown in Thai caused [the victim] to break down sobbing.

Judge [Francis] Gilbert said Mr K’s conduct was to be “highly commended” and investigators said it was his bravery which not only saw [the victim] freed from sexual slavery, but also lit the fuse which saw those involved in the evil trade brought to justice.

[UPDATE February 17 - the two fellow defendents were jailed for nine and a half years between them.] 

It is only the latest of many such cases revealing the crucial role of clients in aiding trafficking victims – a role played despite everything the Home Office can do to prevent them – witness the department’s “Walk in a punter, walk out a rapist” posters, inferring (wrongly) that a client is a rapist if the woman he has a liaison with subsequently turns out to be a trafficking victim.

 

Since my memorandum to the Parliamentary committee scrutinising the proposed Bill, the Poppy Project (which rescues and cares for sex trafficking victims in London) has revealed to the Committee that even it itself has received 22 referrals from punters. This must have been like pulling teeth, as the Project is renowned for its enthusiasm to see punters behind bars.

 

 

Denise Marshall, Poppy’s CEO, said 

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 sudden remarkable turn around in the state of the Project’s records should not go unnoticed. Only last August it published Routes in, Routes Out based on the case files of 118 carefully selected women it had helped. Paragraph 5.4 has a table that reveals that it then had no idea how some 26 of these women escaped their captors. Nine of the 118 were known to have escaped with the aid of punters, who also may or may not have provided the initial intelligence  responsible for a score of other women escaping through police raids.

 

 

Suddenly, five months later, Poppy can now reveal to the committee of MPs not only that 22 women escaped with the help of punters, but that in each and every case the punter had sex with the women, not only before saving them, but after knowing they were trafficked. A veritable revolution in record keeping appears to have taken place.

 

 

“All those men, knowing the women were trafficked, had sex before phoning us to help the women to get out of their situation.”

 

 

Really? Hmmm….

IT WAS a collection of people one would not normally put together unless one aimed to start World War III.

In the one corner were representatives of the English Collective of Prostitutes  and the UK Network of Sex Projects, in the other the Poppy Project  (which rescues London’s ’sex slaves’) and ‘Object’  - the Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells etc’s campaign against lap dancing clubs. All of them females, I imagine all feminists, together epitomising the division in feminism over something the rest of the world knows as prostitution, but which, even with UN help, they could not possibly get as far as even agreeing the terminology for.

That was the scene for the first session of the parliamentary committee inquiring into the  Home Office’s latest perpetration, known as the Policing and Crime Bill. Read the rest of this entry »