An Anthology of English Pros

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 

Read the rest of this entry »

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 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 »

I was delighted the other day to discover I have been flattered over this site by Amy, a young and very articulate Scarborough escort and an ally of IUSW activist Catherine Stephens.

So much so that An Anthology of English Pros has been added to

Amy’s blogroll on her Adore Amy blog (which I see has already made the papers). As she hopes to add other sites of use to the world of escorting, I thought I’d do a bit of a Kate Russell from the BBC’s Click, and tell you a few of the sites that I don’t think the BBC bosses would be too pleased if Kate publicised (so maybe she stashes them away in her private favourites?)

The net is overflowing with sites for sex workers to publicise their services, some of them charging a fee, many others free. This post, however, concentrates instead on other links that may be useful – good links for health and safety, law, tax, and general advice and support, none of which charge people a penny, and some of which are funded via the NHS or, in the case of UKNSWP, the National Lottery. 

Health and Safety

One of the more important skills for escorts is personal risk management, to reduce the risk of illness or injury, no matter at what level they work.

On the web there are, for example, advice on safer ways than others to get into clients’ cars for street workers, and proper procedures for checking clients (or themselves) for sexually transmitted diseases, if one knows where to find them. There is help over optimally designed clothing to wear for safety, jewellery advice, free personal alarms etc, all available to those who know where to look.

Many of the best sites are outside the UK , but here the UK Network of Sex Work Projects (UKNSWP) is catching up fast and a good first port of call would be their excellent guide Keeping Safe. It scores heavily on minimising risk of violence, Read the rest of this entry »

POLICE IN ‘protective clothing’ rammed the door of a suspected Plymouth, UK brothel on Wednesday morning, handcuffing two Thai women – one in her nightwear – and placing them in separate rooms while they used a dog to search the premises.

The women, in their thirties, were later interrogated at a police station using an interpreter. Police have not yet explicitly mentioned human trafficking, but according to the Plymouth Herald, a 47-year-old man was later detained having arrived at Heathrow following a business trip to the Far East on suspicion of money laundering and Consumer Credit offences.

Furthermore, along with immigration officers, the raid squad boasted members of a new ‘South West Illegal Money Lending Team’ – which would be consistent with debt bonding suspicions, a common feature of trafficking.

The Plymouth raid is far from alone – during their two national Pentameter operations targeting human trafficking in the sex industry, the UK’s 55 police forces conducted no less than 1,337 raids, largely on people’s homes and massage parlours, yet discovered a mere 255 victims – a tiny fragment of the Home Office’s albeit dubious 4,000-strong estimate of the numbers supposedly trafficked for sex in the UK.

But the police action could come strait out of the Guide on How Not to Handle Human Trafficking Incidents, according to a recent report from the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Centre in New York.

 The study said the centre found that

raids can be counter-productive to anti-trafficking efforts by further traumatizing, intimidating and sometimes violating the rights of people who have been trafficked, making them less likely to seek help. Read the rest of this entry »