Posts Tagged ‘Vancouver’
STREETS BEHIND: how police kerb crawling drives kill street sex workers
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:
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remove the right to a warning for kerb crawlers
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enable buildings housing brothels to be closed for up to three months, and
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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 »
OFFICIAL: POLICE CRACKDOWNS CAUSE VIOLENCE TO STREET SEX WORKERS, SAYS NEW STUDY
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 »
TRAFFICKING, the OLYMPICS, and the BILL
NEWS broke last week that a Metropolitan Police squad has moved in on the five London Olympic boroughs with a campaign to get down and dirty with the sex industry in the run-up to 2012.
The cost has been put at £600,000 by the Guardian, which informs us that: “As the games draw closer, police believe there will be a huge surge in the numbers of young women trafficked into the boroughs from eastern Europe and Asia by traffickers keen to make money out of the arrival of millions of visitors…”
The origin of this item was a report to the Communities, Equalities and People Committee of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) into the potential for violence against women at the London Olympics, written by the MPA’s Lynne Abrams.
The report uses two selective and, in one case, outdated sources to paint a picture of impending mass rape and carnage unless action is taken to prevent a tsunami wave of prostitution, human sex trafficking (HTfSE) and sexual violence by organised criminals and the male athletes themselves.
It follows calls for a clampdown on trafficking in the Olympic run-up from the Bishops of Newcastle and Winchester at the Church of England Synod last February.
Harking back to the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the dioceses claimed:
“Sex huts” or “sex garages” for prostitution were set up, filled with 40,000 extra prostitutes, while special licences were issued allowing prostitutes to offer sex on the street.
Up to 10,000 men and women, sometimes including children as young as ten, are traded in the UK each year, with each girl worth up to £150,000 a year to those who “own” her.
“Sex huts” or “sex garages” for prostitution were set up, filled with 40,000 extra prostitutes, while special licences were issued allowing prostitutes to offer sex on the street.
Up to 10,000 men and women, sometimes including children as young as ten, are traded in the UK each year, with each girl worth up to £150,000 a year to those who “own” her.
