The Hunt for Britain's Sex Traffickers

I watched the final episode of Channel 4's The Hunt for Britain's Sex Traffickers last night. The testimony of the trafficked women, and one in particular (Lily), was very upsetting. There is no doubt that trafficking to Britain does exist, and that when it happens it can be horrific. We can argue about the numbers, and whether the numbers are increasing or decreasing, but we can all agree the police are doing a good job in stopping these slave traffickers.

The facts of trafficking are concerning enough, and I wonder why it is that programme makers feel the need to say things they must know are untrue, use information selectively and imply things that they probably don't believe. Why do they feel they have to use sound effects, background music and jerky blurred images to create a mood? Call me old fashioned but I like a documentary to present me with the facts and let me decide how I want to feel about them.

There are not 4,000 sex slaves in Britain, as stated in the programme. That's an old figure from 2006 that was not true then. Even if that statistic was believed in 2007 when Pentameter was in operation, the programme should have stated what we know now. They could have used the recent ACPO figures. They could have said that the 4,000 figure had no basis in reality.

If it was really true that there are 4,000 sex slaves in Britain today, which the programme makers seemed to be saying but may not have meant, on what basis do they insist that the problem is getting worse? If it was 4,000 in 2006 and it is 4,000 today that would mean that the problem is not getting worse.

They seemed to think this was a very important thing to say. At the beginning of episode 2 the narrator - Helen Mirren - said October 2007. The Government tasks Britain's 55 police forces to tackle the growing number of women trafficked into the country - for sex.

This was immediately followed by a police officer who said Forget drugs, forget cash, forget anything else. Human trafficking is becoming one of the biggest crimes and one of the biggest cash earners for organised crime groups there is.

This was followed by a sequence of images and sounds. They had this in each of the 3 episodes after the first minute or so. One of the images was a strange image of 2 rows of naked girls all in a foetal position and all facing the same way like sardines in a can. I guess the purpose of this was to suggest vulnerability. Another image was of a child's cot, with rumpled sheets and a teddy.

One of the sounds was someone talking about 25,000 sex slaves. Did the programme makers want to imply something that they did not mean? The MP Denis MacShane had said there were 25,000 sex slaves but this figure was discredited. The programme makers didn't think they could get away with saying 25,000 but thought that they could get away with 4,000. If someone pulls them up on it they can say they didn't actually say that. I expect they would say that they are just reflecting media concern at the time, but it doesn't help viewers to understand the issue.

On my video recorder I can look at a recording frame-by-frame. When I did this to the fast-cut sequence of images shown towards the beginning of each episode I noticed that many of the images were of only 1, 2 or 3 frames. To me they look like subliminal messages. You can't get shorter than 1 frame. I thought this was illegal, but apparently it is not. It is certainly manipulative, and designed to create a mood. They want to horrify, and perhaps to titillate too.

The makers of this programme want people to believe that the problem is getting worse, even though there is no evidence for it. They want people to believe the problem is large scale, even though there is no evidence for it. There are several reasons they might want to do this. It makes for a better TV programme, with more concerned people talking about it and wanting to see it. It makes people think that particular police actions are justified. And it changes people's attitudes towards prostitution, with fewer people thinking it should be legalized. This programme obviously had an agenda.

Lily was not rescued by operation Pentameter. She was rescued by a punter. Yet there was no indication in the programme that this was the case. Most people watching the programme would assume that the police smashed down the door of a brothel and rescued Lily and other girls. They made the decision that men who use prostitutes will have to be portrayed as callous bastards. The police have to be portayed as heroes rescuing vulnerable girls from nasty traffickers and punters.

If we don't get to the truth of issues we will never be able to make things better. In fact, we will often make things worse. Would the punter who rescued Lily have been willing to do so if the law had existed then where he could have been prosecuted for having had sex with Lily? I would also like to know if Devon and Cornwall Constabulary's Serious Organised Crime Investigation Team (SOCIT) would have been able to prosecute the traffickers had Pentameter never happened. They probably would have. So to present Pentameter as a great success is wrong.

If you want to find out more about Lily then you can look at the 3 articles covering the issue on the Plymouth Herald website, where they call her Sue.

Sex trafficking gang jailed for 17-and-a-half years 05/02/09
Sordid world of sex slavery 06/02/09
Long jail terms for brothel pair 17/02/09

Only one of these articles even mentions operation Pentameter, and that's just a paragraph tacked onto the end of the article. They do mention the punter (and his wife) who rescued Lily/Sue. So the Plymouth Herald have made a better job of reporting what happened. I found the links on Stephen Paterson's blog.