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.