Posts Tagged ‘UKNSWP’
WEB RESOURCES for SAFER ESCORTING
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 »
EXPOSED: THE HOME OFFICE DODGY DOSSIER ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND SEX SLAVES
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.
Home Office Minister Alan Campbell: "The latest estimate is that at any one time in 2003 there were up to 4,000 women in the UK who were possibly victims of human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation."
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 »
Home Office unites feminists in condemnation of itself
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 »
