An Anthology of English Pros

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

‘According to Hebrew lore, Lilith was the original partner of Adam, the world’s first man. Lilith and Adam argued – some legends say she was too proud to submit to Adam’s wishes – and Lilith departed Eden, where she was succeeded as Adam’s mate by Eve. In other ancient legends Lilith is considered a demon or a mother of demons, and is supposed to haunt desolate places. The name of Lilith is mentioned only once in the Bible, in Isaiah 34:14, where she is listed along with hyenas and jackals as those who dwell in the ruins of God-forsaken Edom.’   Source  

THIS IS the story of an error. Two errors, in fact. But not just any old errors, as we shall see.

Back in 2003, an organisation known as Lilith produced a report entitled Lap Dancing and Striptease in the Borough of Camden (an area within London).

Lilith, along with the anti-sex trafficking Poppy Project, is part of Eaves Housing, the London vulnerable women’s support charity. These organisations receive much of their funding from the Government and London Councils and are generally regarded as being enormously influential in shaping Government policy. Within Eaves, the Lilith Project carries out “research, education, campaigning and training to prevent violence against women.”

By far the most quoted fragment of Lilith’s Camden report are statistics which seek to connect the arrival of four lap dancing clubs to cases of rape and sexual assault in the borough.

“Comparing the rape and indecent assault figures for 1999, before the establishment of Spearmint Rhino and Secrets Holborn, Finchley Road and Euston, and 2002…rape of women in Camden has increased by 50%, …[and] indecent assault of women in Camden has increased by 57%,” it announced.

The story, of course, grabbed the headlines, both in Camden and nationally. Women in the vicinity of lap dance clubs everywhere lived in a climate of fear, and were very likely induced to join the bandwagon of the moral crusade led by Eaves, which finds its goals realised in many ways in today’s Policing and Crime Bill.

The figures, though, were wrong. Indeed, they have been known to be wrong for awhile, but they still sit in the report on the web, and thus continue to be relied on by social conservatives in normally responsible reports and newspapers – often the very newspapers that have published the fact that they are wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

AFTER FIVE YEARS, the secret dodgy dossier behind the Government’s claim of 4,000 ‘sex slaves’ in the UK has finally been revealed.

The figure has been repeated countless times by ministers and is relied on to justify a wave of new prohibitionist laws – such as the plan to criminalise some sex workers’ clients – and to strengthen others, by closing premises housing ‘brothels’ for three months and arresting ‘kerb crawlers’ without warning.

But the means by which it was reached has been a closely guarded secret since it was first estimated in 2004.

Enquiries both in and out of Parliament merely elicited the response that it was in an “internal Home Office document on serious organised crime.”

Even the Joint Committee on Human Rights was unable to gain access, and noted in Paragraph 78 of its report on Human Trafficking, that: “Though [new research] has not yet been published, the Government told us it showed there were an estimated 4,000 victims of trafficking for prostitution in the UK during 2003 at any one time….we have not been able to judge the validity of this figure.”

And we can now see why it wasn’t published.

The figure has been repeated countless times by the media as a definitive indication that the UK’s brothels are teeming with coerced migrants.

Yet the rationale in Chapter 3 of the Home Office’s study could be pulled apart by any reasonably intelligent Year 7 pupil.

To arrive at their 4,000, the Home Office researchers started with three sources: 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.

IN THE WEE hours of the morning here in the UK at present, Channel ITV3  hosts a programme known as ‘Nightwatch with Steve Scott.’ On at least two occasions recently, this has featured the strange shenanigans of the Nottingham vice squad, as they chase around after street prostitutes and punters for loitering and so-called ‘kerb crawling’ in the city’s red light district.

As an example of unctuousness, Scott leaves little to be desired, the whole series being an unquestioning, uncritical endorsement of the fine actions of our boys and girls in blue.

Two police officers – Andy Coles and his partner Dav Singh – steal the limelight in Nottingham, lying in wait in plain clothes in their cars waiting for punters to strike up liaisons with the ladies of the night, then following the couples to catch them in flagrante in parks or down back alleys and render their coitus well and truly interruptus.

“That’s outraging public decency!” they cry, above the sounds of hasty rezippings and background traffic, before blinding their embarrassed captives with references to sections this and that of whatever Act.

This, then, is how Nottingham’s police officers spend their time. And it may go some way to suggesting why this city, once renowned for its lace, is now regarded by many as the crime capital of Britain, recently ranked No 1 in England for murders, burglaries and car crimes by action group Reform.

It has twice the violence of the English average, four times the burglaries, and some three times the sexual offences and car thefts, a position that has predictably left the authorities there in a state of denial.

So let’s ask a few questions that need asking – (as Steve Scott would be the last person on earth to think of them). Read the rest of this entry »