even more about brothel raids

Since my last post I have read two newspaper articles which show even more the dishonesty of police performing raids on brothels. These two articles say that in the trial of Carl Pritchett, convicted of running Cuddles brothel, the police withheld evidence that prostitutes were not coerced.

Stourbridge News: "At Wolverhampton Crown Court, Judge Michael Dudley said paperwork suggested police had not disclosed a witness statement to Carl Pritchett that suggested prostitutes were working at Cuddles voluntarily. The judge said: “There is information in there undermining the conviction, that the police were in possession of a statement revealing people were working in these premises voluntarily 16 days before the raid took place.” He said police had stressed the raid was an organised operation to rescue women who had been trafficked into the United Kingdom to work in the sex market."

Express & Star: "A judge said he was "greatly distressed" by the claim that officers did not disclose a witness statement in the case of Carl Pritchett, which suggested prostitutes were working at the Cuddles Massage Parlour in Bearwood voluntarily."

Judge Michael Dudley also said it is 'blatant non-disclosure'. The police told the judge that they had rescued women, which is not true.

Carl Pritchett was given a two year sentence in 2006 for running Cuddles. In 2010 he was sentenced to another seven years because he could not hand over two million pounds. This is the amount that Pritchett is supposed to have made from running the brothel. This answers the question that I asked in a previous post of mine. Sandra Hankin and two men ran the 'Sandys Superstars' brothels in Manchester. She was told to pay two hundred thousand pounds. I asked what would happen if she couldn't pay. Would she go to prison?

The Express & Star article said that Cuddles brothel had an average of 490 clients per week. If there were 19 sex workers there that means each had about 26 clients per week. If they worked 5 shifts per week that means about 5 clients per shift. That's completely different from "submitting to sexual abuse from 30 strangers a day" which is what Catherine Bennett wrote in her article. Another Guardian article stated that migrant sex workers are "made to have sex with up to 40 men a day". This is what the police are telling journalists. They are not rescuing women though, just the opposite, that is a lie.

The only legal basis for removing the 19 women from the premises was assessing their immigration status. They were not doing anything illegal by being prostitutes. To pretend that they needed to be rescued was wrong. The police detained 6 of the women for deportation and later withheld evidence that the women worked there voluntarily.

These are the two articles quoted in this post:-

Stourbridge News Jailed Black Country vice boss may be freed 14/07/2011

Express & Star Evidence withheld over Cuddles brothel case 13/07/2011

These are the four articles quoted in my previous post:-

Guardian Raid on brothel smashes prostitution ring 30/09/2005

Independent Joan Smith: The ugly truth about 'Cuddles' 17/09/2005

Irish Times Women put under protection after raid on brothel 01/10/05

BBC News 19 women rescued from 'brothel' 30/09/05

This is the Catherine Bennett article in the Guardian

Guardian It's all very well condemning the sex traffickers, but what about the punters who keep the trade going? 20/10/2005

Emily Kenway's book is called The Truth About Modern Slavery

more about brothel raids

In my previous post I reviewed Emily Kenway's new book The Truth About Modern Slavery. I compared what Emily wrote about the police raid on the brothel Cuddles to what Catherine Bennett has written about it in the Guardian.

According to Catherine, the police freed 19 women who had been trapped in the brothel. According to Emily the police detained six of these women so they could deport them. So, who is doing the trapping? Who is doing the imprisoning? The police, of course, but aided by gullible or malicious journalists. The journalists stood outside the brothel as the police brought each woman out and photographed them. As can be seen in this photo the women were desperate to hide their identities and keep their privacy. This is violence against women.

this is violence against women

And they, the police and the journalists, are pretending that they are treating these women as victims. Catherine doesn't say anything about the deportations and doesn't say anything about the perp-walk.

In this post I want to compare what Catherine Bennett has written in her article with what others have written in their articles. It can be seen that Catherine went over the top to justify the raid and went much further than other journalists.

It is quite clear that Catherine wishes her readers to believe that the 19 women worked in the brothel and slept there too, never being let out. She used the word "immured" which means never let out. She wrote "What kind of person lives in a house like this?"

Yet the Guardian (in a different article), the Independent, the Irish Times and BBC News all write that they lived somewhere else apart from the brothel. The journalists were told by the police that the police think that the women were locked in a house. I don't believe that. I'm sure that the brothel and the house had sufficient security and like every house had locks, but that most probably was to keep people out not to keep people in.

Catherine writes "an electric fence stopped anyone trying to escape from the back of the building". By 'building' she means the brothel, she doesn't mention the house. None of the other journalists write this. The nearest is what the Irish Times wrote: "Detectives think the women may have been held against their will behind locked doors and an electric fence".

The Guardian said 'It was reported that the back of premises, on Hagley Road, was protected by an electric fence'.  The Independent didn't mention the electric fence.

So this is pure speculation on the part of the police. Or lies. Did they really think that or are they just trying to distract people from the reality that they are the ones holding the 19 against their will? There was no electric fence at the house where they supposedly all lived, and the electric fence at the brothel was probably to keep people out not keep people in.

Emily Kenway writes that some of the women 'asked for their passports to be kept in the safe to secure them from robberies'. All of the journalists - apart from Catherine Bennett - suggest that this is evidence that they were kept captive.

None of the women came from Romania, Moldova, Albania or Kosovo. They all came from Latvia, Poland, Japan, Hong Kong, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. None of these countries are desperately poor.

from the Cuddles raid

I have made a list of the rubbish that these newspapers have stated in their articles about the police raid on Cuddles, writing about what the police have told them about trafficked women in general.

• they are "expected to have sex with between 20 and 30 men a day" (Independent)
• they are "made to have sex with up to 40 men a day" (Guardian)
• forced to offer anal and unprotected sex at cheap rates damaging their health
• tricked into brothels when they thought they would be waitresses, au pairs or dancers
• raped, beaten and forced to work as sex slaves
• all the money they earn is taken from them
• they have to work to pay off inflated or invented debts
• told their families would be murdered if they ran away

Let's take the first two statements. There were 19 women in the brothel when it was raided. That means that there would have between 380 and 760 men turning up on the doorstep of Cuddles each day. That's like one every minute of a 12 hour shift. You can prove for yourself that that is nonsense by just waiting for an hour outside a brothel. They really do not have that many customers.

I'm not saying that none of these things have never happened. Emily gives an example of sexual exploitation in her book - that of 'Eva'. I'm saying that it is rare in Britain. It is not the reality of prostitution in Britain.

review of The Truth About Modern Slavery by Emily Kenway

I have read 'The Truth About Modern Slavery' by Emily Kenway. Her belief is that exploitation exists and we need to combat it but current methods are counterproductive. Chapter 3 is about prostitution and trafficking. It has helped me to understand why there used to be many brothels in Liverpool but few now.

She writes that the police shut down many long established brothels in the mid-2010s. She spoke to Niki Adams from the English Collective of Prostitutes.

"So loads of brothels that were long term and had really good security systems, regular clientele, were expert at dealing with troublesome clients and so on, suddenly they were bust up, so they moved to new premises and didn't feel secure, and then the police would come and make them move on."

This explains what happened with most of the Liverpool brothels, and also Sandy's Superstars in Manchester, but not why most Manchester brothels survived. The crackdown seems to have started in 2005 though.

"The 2005 raid on Cuddles 'massage parlour' in the West Midlands is regarded by sex worker activists and academics as pivotal, marking the start of a distortion in media coverage regarding sex work and a shift from tolerant to interventionist policing, all legitimised under the banner of anti-trafficking. Women found inside the brothel were marched out in front of the media, their faces exposed in the press in what has been likened to an American 'perp-walk', despite the fact that they were supposedly victims."

6 of the 19 women taken away by the police 'were detained under immigration powers and scheduled for deportation'. Catherine Bennett writing in the Guardian in 2005 doesn't mention deportations though (It's all very well condemning the sex traffickers, but what about the punters who keep the trade going?). This is what Catherine Bennett wrote:-

"In the recent raid on Cuddles, the Birmingham massage parlour where 19 women were immured, police had to use battering rams to knock down locked internal doors, windows had been boarded up, and an electric fence stopped anyone trying to escape from the back of the building. What kind of person lives in a house like this?"

The answer is nobody. Prostitutes don't live in brothels, not unless they are held captive, and I'm pretty sure this was not the case. I don't believe that there was an electric fence to stop women from escaping. Someone, perhaps Ms Bennett, invented this to try to drum up support for brothel closures. Three of the women working at Cuddles were part of the ECP.

Emily writes about police raids on Soho walk ups (in 2013 and 2016), in Newquay in Cornwall and in Redbridge in London. The media stated 'police rescue 15 women from pop-up brothels during Redbridge raids'. Emily made Freedom of Information requests and found that none of these 15 women had been referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM). This means the women did not consider themselves victims of trafficking. What's more, no Duty to Notify submissions were made. This means that the police did not consider them possible victims of trafficking either. She gives more examples of this happening.

These women were not prisoners in brothels and did not require rescue. Instead of being rescued many will have been detained for deportation or prosecution for brothel keeping. Not rescued from imprisonment but imprisoned.

Part of chapter 3 is her assessment of the Nordic Model. This is the final paragraph of her assessment.

"In sum, this legislative model provides no concrete evidence of combating trafficking but does provide conclusive evidence of creating vulnerabilities which may lead, at best, to more poverty, more abuse, riskier working conditions and, at worst, to severe exploitation itself."

The final paragraph of chapter 3 says this

"The 'radical feminists' and religious interests that promote models which harm women want us to think we have to take a side; against sex work entirely and therefore exploitation, or for it entirely and therefore comfortable with exploitation. This in totally untrue. In fact, we can be against exploitation and support those in sex work, recognising sex work as work and recognising trafficking for sexual exploitation as abhorrent and wrong."

Emily Kenway is a writer and activist. As a former advisor to the UK's first Anti-Slavery Commissioner she was at the heart of modern slavery action. She has written for a variety of publications including the Guardian and TLS. This book will have a place on my bookshelf alongside 'Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights' by Molly Smith and Juno Mac and 'The Sex Myth' by Dr Brooke Magnanti as essential reference works on this subject.

In Catherine Bennett's article she suggests:-

"Perhaps the language barrier explains why so few of the men who are using - effectively raping - women who have been trafficked in this way never wonder if their young, obliging Moldavian, Lithuanian and Estonian companions might not prefer to be here as au pairs, or even to be back home, instead of submitting to sexual abuse from 30 strangers a day."

I have often wondered if Eastern European sex workers would have preferred to stay at home or to do menial work. Fortunately we have their words to answer that question. I will repeat my quote from the biography of the 6th Duke of Westminster who paid for the services of many of them. None of them have 30 clients a day. This is what a reporter who was watching the Duke told the author of the biography after questioning many sex workers emerging from his flat.

"They told me that it was either being an escort girl or doing cleaning jobs, which paid almost nothing and were often degrading. One said, 'If I had stayed at home it was poverty - no job, no life, no fun. In London I could live like a princess but only working as an escort girl. I could have been a cleaner or worked in a coffee bar for the minimum wage so I had to choose. I thought it would be better to sleep with the super-rich - even if they were old and boring and sometimes ugly!'"

So, I am not a rapist. But you, Catherine Bennett, do not know what you are talking about. There are good journalists, investigative journalists like Nick Davies, but you are not one of them.

vote for Police and Crime Commissioner

I've just been to vote. There were three sets of votes. One was for the Merseyside Police and Crimes Commissioner. I had no information about who the four candidates are. I can't remember who I voted for but now I've done a bit more research it looks as if Emily Spurrell for Labour is the best bet.

Emily, who was among the speakers, said: “Women who are involved in sex work are at risk of extreme violence and abuse every day. These women are often vulnerable and we must protect them and do what we can to end the marginalisation they experience.

“I’m proud to say that Merseyside Police has led the way in prosecuting and securing convictions against those who commit offences against sex workers, in large part by being the first Force in the country to recognise these crimes as hate crimes and through the skill and care of our specialist sexual offences Unity Team who have been able to successfully prosecute violent individuals.

“This work has also been supported by the development of the Red Umbrella project which aims to support these women to ensure they get the help they need, ideally so they can exit this type of work but, for those who remain, to ensure they are better protected and are able to work free from violence, abuse and exploitation.

As part of this project, a dedicated police sex worker liaison officer has been appointed to build trust and give sex workers the confidence to report incidents of violence to the police. Funding is also being used to improve the gathering of intelligence on those who inflict violence on sex workers.”