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.