aspects of trafficking

When ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) produced their report about the number of trafficked women in Britain last year, there were criticisms by Eaves/Poppy Project and Amnesty International UK. They felt the figures were too low. I seem to remember a radio interview of someone from Eaves/Poppy Project who said that they work with large number of West Africans, and the ACPO report hardly mentions them.

There could be two reasons for this. It could be that word has got round in the West African community that Eaves/Poppy Project are offering money and accommodation to women who can claim to have been trafficked. Even if it is not true. As I said in a previous post, a woman called Salim Udin was convicted recently of falsely accusing her employers of domestic slavery and of obtaining money and accommodation from the Poppy Project.

The other possibility is that in some communities prostitution is underground and cannot be detected by police. It has been said that pimps need to advertize to make money. Perhaps in some communities information is spread by word of mouth.

End Prostitution Now, an organization funded by Glasgow City ratepayers, says this on their site:-

"prostitution can never truly exist “underground” – if punters can those selling sex, so can the Police and those offering services to help exit prostitution"

There is an error in the statement. They mean 'if punters can find those selling sex'.

I have heard someone from OBJECT say the same thing. Are they willing to bet on that? If they get it wrong they will cause women to suffer. I don't think that bothers them, though.

It's a bit like saying that drug dealing can never truly exist underground; if drug addicts can find drug dealers so can the police. Simply not true.

Where are these West African prostitutes? There are no West Africans in Soho. I don't know of anywhere else that there are any West African prostitutes.

Yesterday two men were jailed for the sexual abuse of teenage girls. This is the tip of the iceberg of the phenomenon of Pakistani men targeting teenage white girls for abuse in Northern cities in England. The reason I am mentioning it is that there have been attempts to link this phenomenon with trafficking and pimping. It is rare, however, for money to change hands. It is coercion and abuse.

It is called 'internal trafficking' which seems a contradiction in terms. Abusers can be of any race, but usually abusers work alone or with people they have found on the Internet. These Pakistani abusers have a subculture of the abuse of non-Moslem teenage girls.

This kind of abuse is forbidden in Islam, and most members of the Pakistani community abhor it. However, if there is a culture where the honour of a man and his family depends on the virginity of his daughters and the chastity of his wife then it can follow that non-Moslems will be thought of as without honour. Non-Moslem teenage girls would be looked down on and regarded as fair game.

These men would not abuse girls from their own community, because they would face violence. A Moslem girl who behaved inappropriately could also face violence from her family or members of her community.

Many people will think that street girls would be like the sort of girls targeted by the type of men jailed yesterday. They think that street girls are typically teenage and from troubled backgrounds. That is not my experience, but different areas may vary.