An Anthology of English Pros

LONDON Mayor Boris Johnson’s sidekick Kit Malthouse did his best to up Olympic 2012 trafficking paranoia this week by again dusting off his nine-year-old anti-carding campaign.

Johnson and Malthouse are anxious to get phone companies to disconnect the mobiles of sex workers. Predictably nobody in the  gullible London media had the bottle to question whether this was wise, given the proclivity of sex workers to get attacked by maniacs (in Canada, for example, the local community gathers up old mobiles to give to sex workers for safety).

Instead, the journos blandly accepted Malthouse’s version, warts and all.

The Telegraph reported that Malthouse demanded that “an agreement must be reached between mobile phone networks and police that sees [the phone numbers] taken out of use as soon as they are identified.”

Adding that there were several “poor girls” operating “behind the number,”  Malthouse proclaimed: “If you are an American tourist and if you walk into a telephone box you would think it was a sex shop.”

A very small sex shop, surely? Typical London politician: sod the British, what will the yanks think?

But it was the scenery in the background in the Telegraph that was the most questionable aspect: “Police have already warned that the Olympics may fuel an unprecedented boom in London’s sex industry,” it said. “Sex workers from across the world are expected to attempt to cash in on thousands of site workers, spectators and athletes.”

Among the errors repeated in papers like the Guardian and the Times was the vague assertion that human trafficking ‘doubled’ or thereabouts at the Athens Read the rest of this entry »

[Evidence to Public Bill Committee on the Policing and Crime Bill]

1 Introduction (Summary) 

1.1 This submission consists mainly of such evidence as I have been able to collate through the web to demonstrate the actual and potential aid given by ‘punters’ to victims of Human Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation (HTfSE) by identifying them to the authorities or aiding their escape.

This, in my submission, would be considerably prejudiced by the Bill in its current form, which would deem a client guilty of a strict liability offence at the point of arranging sex for payment with a sex worker ‘controlled for gain,’ which may well be by telephone or through the internet before he or she has met the sex worker concerned.

1.2 This evidence does not pretend to be comprehensive. It relies in part on local newspaper accounts, several of court cases, with all their limitations, and in part on official reports of various bodies. All net addresses viewed January 22-26, 2009. Read the rest of this entry »