review of The Wisdom of Whores

review of The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani

Elizabeth Pisani is an expert in AIDS and has advised governments. She has a lot of knowledge about prostitution in many countries.

The most interesting chapter for me was chapter 6. She was working in East Timor for the health ministry. She was on a flight to the capital Dili and she decided to talk to two Chinese women who she suspected were sex workers.

"I found out that a local businessman was offering girls three-month stints selling sex to the Chinese community in Dili. 'We were really lucky to get in,' said one girl. They got the nod from a friend who had done the run six months earlier. 'She bought a car when she got home.'"

She goes on to write that most women sell sex for the same reason they do other jobs, to make money. Sex work though can earn them sixteen times more. It varies from country to country. Slavery is 'relatively rare'.

"For many women, selling sex is a job with a fair degree of freedom and for some there's job satisfaction, too. Many clients want far more than just a quick orgasm. They want companionship, advice on how to cope with girl trouble, pampering to help them forget a lover's death or a business deal gone wrong. They want their confidence boosted or their scars healed, they want to learn new tricks in bed or they just want a massage or a cuddle. A skilful sex worker will read and fulfil her client's needs, and many will be well rewarded for doing so."

When she was talking to sex workers in China, even though she was talking to women from the Bai ethnic minority who are 'on the bottom rung of the prostitution ladder', she found that they turned away many clients because they didn't offer them enough money.

"The 'all sex workers are trafficked' ideologues may damn me for saying so, but these ethnic minority women, working at the bottom end of the sex trade in one of the poorer areas in China, did not seem to be driven by desperation.''

Conservative Christians in the United States find this impossible to accept. Brenda Zurita for example stated 'Prostitution and sexual trafficking are inextricably linked and abolition is the only answer to end the horrors of both.'

Brazil did well in its fight against AIDS, but they were refused funding by the US because they wouldn't sign the loyalty oath against prostitution.

"The loyalty oath is based on the belief, no, the absolute conviction, that anything that improves work conditions for prostitutes serves only to bind them to slavery. The High Priestess of this view is a US academic named Donna Hughes, who pontificates on the evil of commercial sex from every available pulpit. In an op-ed titled 'Aiding and Abetting the Slave Trade', she railed at a programme that taught Cambodian sex workers to negotiate condom use with their clients."

This programme helped reduce new HIV infections in Cambodia from 42,000 a year to 6,000 a year.

"'The Bush administration needs to ... shut down unethical "interventions" with women and girls in brothels. Those who lack the moral capacity to know that slaves need freedom should never get funding again,' preached Hughes."

Pisani goes on to write about the International Justice Mission. They are an Evangelical Christian NGO that raids brothels to free slaves (as they see it). The women who are 'rescued' end up deported or detained. They often try to escape. They don't want to make T-shirts for small change, which is the sort of alternative offered to them.

This book was published in 2008, and it seems that IJM has changed its methods since then.

In chapter 4 Pisani writes that some sex workers have 5 or 6 clients a night, but most have fewer than that. In Thailand, Cambodia and some Indian states they averaged 20 clients per week - although it is lower than that now. This is more than in East Timor (3 per week), the Philippines (2 per week) or China and Indonesia (5 or 6 in a good week).

There are people who will tell you that sex workers are raped 20 or 30 times a day. Some of these people are Christian Evangelicals, some of them are Radical Feminists. There are others who should know better but who have been told lies by the Christians and the Radical Feminists. I don't believe them, I believe the experts such as Elizabeth Pisani.

the reality of trafficking

Recently I participated in an internet forum about prostitution (ukpunting.com) where a thread was entitled 'Trafficking'. The man who started the thread began with "Should we report suspected trafficking to the police? Is that a moral dilemma for punters? How do you define it?".

What surprised me was the level of ignorance of most of the other contributors. They really do seem to be confused about the issue. This confusion has led to a great deal of harm to women.

I tried to explain that you have to be very careful what you report to the police. It can result in arrest and deportation for the women concerned. There were two different responses to that. One was to say that they don't believe that women will be deported. If the police don't find evidence of abuse they will leave the women alone. The other was that if they are deported it will be because they shouldn't be in this country anyway. So what's the problem?

Both responses are ignorant, but the second is also callous. When the police find women from abroad they will deport them when they can. There is lots of evidence that this is happening. When Britain was part of the EU women from Romania (for example) were entitled to live in Britain. They were deported anyway. So it's not just people who shouldn't be in this country anyway.

I'm not sure what the situation is now that we have left the EU. What I expect is that women on tourist or student visas will be deported even if they haven't overstayed.

On page 80 of Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith they say this:-

"Police Scotland put out a press release noting that they had refused entry at the border to more than a hundred people as part of their anti-trafficking work - offering as an example a Romanian woman who had 'previously worked as a prostitute in Glasgow'. The BBC reports, 'She was refused admission at Glasgow in May 2017, then again at Liverpool in July 2017 and was encountered recently at Belfast docks attempting to get to Scotland. She was removed to Romania."

They go on to write about another Romanian woman whose sex worker colleague was murdered in her presence. The police 'deported her while claiming a humanitarian anti-trafficking mantle'.

This also happens in Nordic Model countries where they (wrongly) say that women have been decriminalised. On the Nordic Model Now! site Luba Fein writes in the Has the Nordic Model worked? What does the research say? page about Nordic Model countries:-

"While there is no clear evidence that the police are violent towards those engaged in prostitution, they do tend to target undocumented migrants and report them to the immigration authorities for potential deportation. Clearly this is unacceptable and states need to provide better support and assistance to foreign nationals who have been used and abused in the sex trade within their territory."

Most people who support the Nordic Model seem to think that prostitution should be eliminated by any means necessary. They don't care about the women who are harmed. However, Luba Fein believes that it is clearly unacceptable to deport prostitutes.

So even she - a Nordic Model supporter - has compassion for deported women. It surprised me when so many people on the forum didn't have this compassion. It is also a contradictory attitude to have. You want to report a brothel to the police because you think that coercion might have occurred - presumably out of compassion for the women there. Yet if the result of your actions is for women to be deported then you say it doesn't really matter.

You have to question people's true motives. Someone says he wants to free women yet if he knew that the women had not been coerced or deceived but had been deported he says he doesn't care. It sounds like the real motivation is dislike of immigrants.

If you ask what proportion of Brazilian or Chinese nationals working as prostitutes in Britain are trafficked, the answer has to be nearly all of them. They are trafficked because someone will have organised their flight, organised their accommodation, and organized their customers. It's very unlikely that someone who doesn't speak good English will be able to organize themselves.

If you ask what proportion of Brazilian or Chinese nationals working as prostitutes in Britain are coerced or deceived, the answer has to be hardly any. There are many reasons why we know this. You can read what investigative journalist Nick Davies has written in his article Inquiry Fails to Find Single Trafficker Who Forced Anybody Into Prostitution. Read what Emily Kenway has written in her book The Truth About Modern Slavery.

Section 14 of the Policing and Crime Act 2009 says that a man who pays for sex with a woman who has been coerced or deceived is committing a crime, even if he didn't know that. 81% of police forces in England and Wales have never used it. The remaining ones seem to be using it for something other than for what it was intended.

It is clear that trafficking and coercion are two different things. Most non-European prostitutes will have been trafficked, and few will have been coerced. People don't seem to be able to distinguish between these two things. They say they will report their suspicions to the police, and if later there are prosecutions for trafficking they feel vindicated.

If a man decides to make money by recruiting women from Brazil for prostitution, he may feel that because they don't have bruises and don't look miserable then nobody can accuse him of trafficking. He will be prosecuted though, and they will be deported.

I was asked on the thread what I would do. I wrote that there should be welfare officers independent of the police. People could give information to them, and the welfare officers could pass on to the police information if they thought that it was in the interests of the women.

I was then told that there are already people like this. There are Dedicated Liaison Officers or Sex Work Liaison Officers. These however are not independent of the police. It doesn't seem that they can be can be contacted by members of the public. That's not what they are for.

I wrote that instead of the police deporting any woman that they can, it would be better if the police or a welfare officer interviewed them. First to find out if they have been coerced or deceived. If, as is usually the case, they haven't then each woman should be asked why she came to Britain. If she says that she wants to stay 3 months, earn £20,000, then go back to China to start her own small business then she should be told she won't be deported if she's out of the country in 3 months time.

She should be told that if she's not out of the country by then she will be found and deported. She will have a black mark against her name because the Chinese government keeps tabs on all its citizens. She may find it difficult to get a job or the sort of job that she would like, and may have problems with custody of her children. That's why I would hesitate to report a brothel to the police, I wouldn't want that on my conscience.

I tried to tell them about the Palermo Protocol but they weren't interested. The Palermo Protocol defines trafficking and was adopted by the UN in 2000. It says that trafficking has to include coercion or deception if the person is over 18. If there is no coercion or deception then it isn't trafficking. That definition was changed in the US and UK. Under UK law now it doesn't have to include coercion or deception. This is where the confusion comes in.

As Nick Davies wrote a while ago in The Guardian:-

"And, from the outset, that word was a problem. On a strict definition, eventually expressed in international law by the 2000 Palermo protocol, sex trafficking involves the use of force, fraud or coercion to transport an unwilling victim into sexual exploitation. This image of sex slavery soon provoked real public anxiety.

But a much looser definition, subsequently adopted by the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, uses the word to describe the movement of all sex workers, including willing professionals who are simply travelling in search of a better income. This wider meaning has injected public debate with confusion and disproportionate anxiety."

I was accused of trying to confuse people. People like me try to confuse people about trafficking. I replied that there are people who want to confuse, people whose interests are served by confusing the issue. I said who these people are. Christian Evangelicals and Radical Feminists in the UK and US. They didn't believe that.

Instead I was told that it is 'UK pro-decriminalisation advocates' who are trying to confuse people. Someone suggested that I am a pimp. That could be the only reason in his mind why I would be reluctant to help the police to raid brothels. I told him that pimps aren't going to support decriminalisation if they understand the issue because in New Zealand pimps have gone out of business. There are far fewer pimps in New Zealand now than before decriminalisation.

It is true that New Zealand has its problems with migrants. I have explained this in a recent post. It's because of section 19 of the PRA which those who campaigned for decriminalisation never wanted and are trying to remove.

Then I was accused of being political even though it wasn't me who raised the issue of decriminalisation. Now I have been banned. That doesn't bother me because there's no point in having a forum if people don't understand how to have a discussion.

2 new films about sex work

There are two new films that are about sex work. Both are positive about it. The first is Good Luck to You, Leo Grande starring Emma Thompson. The second is How to Please a Woman starring Sally Phillips. Both are well-known comedians.

I found out about the second of these on Woman's Hour this morning. The presenter had no criticism of this film. Someone contacted the show and said how hypocritical they are in saying that men objectify women through prostitution and yet they accept the objectification of men. In both films the sex worker is male. I don't mean trans women, who the Radical Feminists regard as male.

I can see how the Radical Feminists are going to be critical of both of these films. Objectification means different things to different people. It meant one thing to Radical Feminist authors such as Catharine A MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. It means something different to the majority of Radical or Revolutionary Feminists. It means something different again to ordinary people.

To ordinary people it seems to mean having a sexual attraction to someone outside of the context of a relationship. The idea is that a man is incapable of appreciating a woman's personality if he is lusting after her. This is an idea that goes back thousands of years.

If I have casual sex with a woman, let's say on holiday, am I objectifying her more than if I play a game of tennis with her or a game of chess? Why would sex have that special attribute, different from other activities? If I pay for sex with a woman, am I objectifying her more than if I pay for a taxi driver or a waiter? You can say that sex is different from playing the usual sort of game or working the usual sort of job. That's not answering the question though.

We use people all the time. We meet people briefly, do something with them, and don't want to get to know them further. Casual sex or paid-for sex could be seen as harmful to women, but that is at the very least an overgeneralisation of women. Not all women are the same. Treating all people in a group as if they are all the same is one aspect of objectification, according to philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

The weird thing is that Emma Thompson has had a lot to say about prostitution over the years. She has signed up to Princess Eugenie's organisation to fight trafficking. We all want to fight trafficking, if by that we mean coercion. However, most prostitution does not involve coercion. Some other forms of work also sometimes involve coercion.

Other organisations that have associated with Princess Eugenie's crusade are the International Justice Mission, who say they want to release the captives. However, their hidden agenda is to try to stamp out prostitution anywhere in the world, no matter how many women they harm. They are an American Evangelical Christian organisation.

In the past they have called for and participated in brothel raids in countries such as Cambodia and Thailand. Women are arrested and kept against their will. Most of these women have not been coerced, and so their first experience of imprisonment is in a so-called rescue centre.

episode 3 of Taken

I watched the third episode of Taken: Hunting the Sex Traffickers last night. The oddest thing about it is that the deported sex worker Sylvia decided she wanted to return to Britain to be a sex worker again. Towards the end of the episode they showed her at the airport.

She said she wanted money for university. In the first episode they implied that these migrants are street sex workers. In an earlier post I said that few of them will be street-based sex workers but some will want money to go to university.

"For example if they're doing sex work on a street in Brazil, then they are happy to come and do sex work in a relatively controlled environment in the UK, that doesn't mean they're not exploited and that doesn't mean bad things won't happen to them here."

The justification for what the police do is that women will want to come to Britain to do sex work but they can't allow this to happen because women are getting raped and robbed. However, the police are raiding brothels. They have closed down the well-run brothels where nobody gets raped or robbed.

Sandra Hankin ran two brothels in Manchester called Sandys Superstars. Nobody was raped or robbed there. The police closed her down. So they have created this situation.

They said women are treated as commodities. Let's say that I brought Thai women to Britain to work as masseurs. Nothing sexual. Would I not be just as much treating women as commodities? What's the difference?

Rosana Gomes got ten pounds every time one of the sex workers got a customer. Is that exploitation? It doesn't sound as if she controlled them in any meaningful sense. Instead she was the interface between men enquiring about Brazilian sex workers and the sex workers themselves. She answered the phone and got ten pounds for each punter.

There is a Daily Mail article about all this that is very inaccurate. Sylvia wasn't the victim of a violent human trafficking network. Viner and Gomes weren't violent to her. She didn't escape to Brazil. She was deported. Viner and Gomes were not her captors.

episode 2 of Taken

I watched the second episode of Taken: Hunting the Sex Traffikers last night and there wasn't anything in it that has changed my opinion. What they seem determined to do is to deny agency to sex workers.

They know these women are not coerced but they need to show that they are victims. Throughout they have said that the women are exploited. That is a matter of opinion.

In last night's show they had a man talking about Learned Helplessness Syndrome. While he was talking they showed footage of street sex workers in Madrid, although I don't know how that is relevant to the subject of the documentary which is Brazilian women in Britain.

Learned Helplessness is not a syndrome. It is a theory not a fact. You can't just diagnose Learned Helplessness when someone does something you don't want. He said that the women are not threatened with having their families attacked. The manipulation is more subtle than that.

Mark Viner had relationships with some younger Brazilian women. The idea is that he psychologically manipulated these women into thinking that he loved them. I don't believe that. They say he had a million pounds. Do you not think that was the attraction for them? They lived the high life for years and then moved on.

I'm not trying to denigrate the women. I admire them. I'm not trying to blame the victims because I don't believe they are victims. They are just trying to make money and sex work allows them to do that. For themselves and their families.

Some of the women were raped and robbed. This happens because they have closed down all the well-run brothels. Such as Sandys Superstars in Manchester. And arrested women who work together. They have created this situation just as they have created the situation in which heroin addicts die of overdoses.

Then they say "Look how terrible prostitution and the drugs trade is, we must crack down on them". Give us more power. It's not working. It will never work.

In Cambodia and other countries women who are detained by anti-traffickers often run away. The anti-traffickers cannot accept that the women didn't want to be 'rescued' and instead say they are incapable of deciding what is best for them. It's called 'false consciousness'. See running from the rescuers.

There is a word for denying the agency of women: it is called objectification. I don't believe in the theory of objectification but if you do - or at least Martha Nussbaum's version - you can see that women are being denied the ability to choose for themselves. Not just the ability to choose, the very idea that they are capable of choosing sensible actions for themselves.

Taken liberties

I worked out why the documentary on trafficking that I talked about in my last post is called 'Taken'. There's a film about trafficking called Taken, 'about a retired CIA agent attempting to rescue his daughter from being sold into prostitution'. So they are trying to associate themselves with people who rescue women and girls, when we know that they end up getting deported.

That's not all. These women have their earnings taken away from them. I can't express it better than Molly Smith and Juno Mac have in their book 'Revolting Prostitutes'.

"As a result, the theft of sex workers' money in police raids on brothels is routine and goes beyond the mere confiscating the occasional eighty pounds. In October 2016, when the police raided massage parlours in Soho and Chinatown, London, and took seventeen women to deportation centres, they also removed thirty-five thousand pounds. They even took money from individual women's lockers. Sex worker Janice had thirteen thousand pounds taken from her in a brothel raid and it was never returned to her, even after she was found not guilty: 'They even tried to take my home. I was left with nothing after a lifetime of hard work. I'm not young anymore and don't know how I'll manage. My life has been turned upside down.' Anti-prostitution policing thus becomes legalised theft."

How dare these police officers pose as rescuers and do this? The public don't know about it and Channel 4 aren't interested in telling the truth. I will do everything I can to expose these thieves and liars. I think that someone should do some Freedom of Information requests to find out how much money was Taken from these women. I am happy to interview any of the women involved if they wish to contact me.

Taken: Shafting the Sex Workers

Taken: Hunting the Sex Traffickers

On Monday there was an interesting documentary about trafficking on Channel 4 called 'Taken: Hunting the Sex Traffickers'. I don't know why the first word of the title of the documentary is 'Taken' because it is quite clear that none of the sex workers had been coerced.

They didn't explain that the internationally accepted definition of trafficking as stated in the Palermo Protocol involves coercion. According to this definition none of these women were trafficked. I am aware that British law says something different. Documentaries like this don't intend to inform the public about trafficking, just make good TV.

Women from Brazil come to Britain on tourist visas. There are three set-ups (this was news to me). The first is that there is a 50-50 split between the sex worker and the management in the money handed over by the client.

The second is that the management get £10 for every client sent to the sex worker (or is it 10%, I can't quite remember). That's for answering a phone call and directing a client to the flat. The rest of the money she keeps for herself.

The third is that the sex worker pays rent then the rest of the money she keeps for herself. Even if the money from the first three clients goes in rent she will still be making lots of money. 10 clients a day is the figure mentioned.

None of these scenarios seem like exploitation to me. A police officer said that it may seem a good deal to a Brazilian street girl to come to Britain but it is still exploitation. She's in a bad situation and this is a bit better. However, very few will be street girls.

British street girls are usually drug addicts and are not accepted in brothels. It could be different in Brazil though. It could be that they are just poor. If that's true then working in Britain could be a permanent step up for them. Many of these women will be other types of sex workers and many of them will be ordinary women wanting to save money for a special reason, which could be paying for university.

Do you not think that for an 18 year old the prospect of coming to Britain on a tourist visa and making a lot of money having sex with men is an attractive one? Yet if the police find them they deport them, then pretend they are treating them as victims.

We heard the words of 'Sylvia' who was one of these women. I don't think it said in the documentary that she was deported back to Brazil. 'Sylvia, who now lives in Brazil after being deported, has given up sex work.' it says here.

Sylvia said “I was robbed by men with knives, which was very traumatic and left me with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder." Sex workers are not allowed to work together. So whose fault is it that sex workers are robbed by violent men? The clients? Men like me? Or people who stand in the way of any change in the law which allows sex workers to work together? I'm quite prepared to believe that Sylvia suffers from PTSD. They say that sex workers often do. If that is true then it's because of robbery, rape and other violence against them. All of it easily preventable. None of it a necessary part of sex work.

Sylvia was raped by a man without a condom who then told her he had HIV. She had to go to hospital and take drugs for 28 days. This could not happen in a well-managed brothel or a Soho walk up where there are always two women in the flat.

“We can’t let vulnerable people be put into dangerous situations. These are lives being ruined. We have to stop this and the way you do that is to take out people like Mark Viner.” says Detective Inspector Peter Brown (not his real name). No. It is the law that puts vulnerable people into dangerous situations. Stop prosecuting women who work together for safety.

He also said “We all know drug dealing is a crime but a lot of trafficking takes place much more in the public eye, not just in brothels but in nail bars, car washes or the exploitation of workers in food factories,”. Does he intend to 'take out' the owners of nail bars, car washes and food factories? Why not help the workers in nail bars to work for themselves - without deporting them.

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.

my recent pages

I've created a number of pages recently on this blog. They can be seen on the right of this post. The reason why I have done this is because there are issues that I want to deal with in detail. They are reference for people who need to know facts about these issues. I want to keep posts more for my own experiences although since the lockdown I haven't had many of those.

I have been finding out about prostitution in developing nations (the Global South). This has been reflected in recent posts, 'behind the veil of vice', 'sex in the cities' and 'prostitution in developing nations'. I have put the important information in a slightly more coherent form in the page 'trafficking'.

Most of the information I have copy-and-pasted from various sources so sometimes there might be inconsistencies. I have referenced some of this but if you wish to find the source then copying sentences and Googling them will usually let you see where they have come from. I have divided the pages into different sections using horizontal rules. They will be updated when I get new information.

'trafficking' shows how this issue has been used by evangelicals and especially George W Bush to try to stop sin. What they are doing to poor countries needs to be exposed.

'brothel-keeping' is about how a simple change in the law can make life better for many sex workers.

'public opinion' is about how the Swedish government has manipulated the opinion of people in a sinister way.

'the reality' is about the true nature of most prostitution in both affluent and poor countries.

'Dworkin' is about how one or two people managed to change public opinion for the worse.

'MacKinnon' is about how an American legal expert influenced the law in Sweden.

'Ireland' is about how the Nordic model is working out in Ireland, both North and South.

'Rachel Moran' is about the so-called survivor whose book says something different from what the prohibitionists believe.

'more about the Nordic model in Sweden' is about how the Nordic model seemed to start working after about ten years and why. The police were given more resources then but also there was the financial crisis. We now know there was a drop in the amount of prostitution in Denmark too about the time of the financial crisis. So the drop can't be explained by the policy of arresting punters, because that didn't happen in Denmark.

behind the veil of vice

I am reading Behind the Veil of Vice by John R Bradley which is filling in a lot of the detail about what Evangelical Americans are doing in developing countries.

"The opponents of sex traffickers are an unlikely alliance of evangelical Christian and salvationist feminist groups. Their cause was given a huge boost, both in terms of publicity and funding, by George W. Bush, at the expense of funding for groups fighting AIDS, combating poverty, and promoting women's autonomy. This was in 2003, the year that the Iraq invasion was launched. One of the biggest beneficiaries of these faith-based initiatives, receiving tens of millions of dollars, is the International Justice Mission, a militant evangelical outfit that employs hundreds of Christian lawyers and moral cops, and even advocates vigilante raids on brothels. This and other evangelical groups are drawn into a mutual embrace with the salvationist feminist organizations, despite their ideological differences, because they believe that it is primarily prostitution that creates human trafficking, so banning prostitution will largely put an end to it." page 31

If you look on the Wikipedia page for the International Justice Mission it is quite disturbing. They instigated raids on nightclubs and brothels in Thailand which resulted in Burmese women being deported. 'About half the group subsequently escaped; some apparently feared deportation to Burma.' It seems many were from the Shan ethnic minority who faced persecution from government forces in Burma.

When Thai organization Empower raised questions about a televised brothel raid, Empower staff say International Justice Mission accused them of supporting pimps.

In Cambodia they invited an American TV show to film a brothel raid. At least 12 of the detained women escaped from the 'safe house' they had been taken to. A number returned to the brothel.

In the Philippines a number of the women housed in a government-run facility following rescue missions escaped.

Google donated $9.8 million to them. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $5 million. To combat trafficking, which they want people to understand means coercion of women and underage girls.

In 2016, Holly Burkhalter, IJM's senior advisor for Justice System Transformation, said that within 10 years of working with the government in Cambodia, less than 1 percent of victims of sex trafficking were minors.

Another thing that I learned from Bradley's book is that there is little evidence that trafficking exists on any scale. He mentions the Nick Davies 2009 Guardian article 'Inquiry Fails to Find Single Trafficker Who Forced Anybody Into Prostitution'. I knew about this and commented on it in this blog.

What I didn't know was that there was another important piece of investigative journalism, the Jerry Markon 2007 Washington Post article 'Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence'.

It says that in 2000 Congress passed a law, triggering a little-noticed worldwide war on human trafficking that began at the end of the Clinton administration and became a top Bush administration priority.

"He [Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary] said that the president's passion about fighting trafficking is motivated in part by his Christian faith and his outrage at the crime. 'It's a practice that he obviously finds disgusting, as most rational people would, and he wants America to be the leader in ending it,' Fratto said. 'He sees it as a moral obligation.'"

"Feminist groups and other organizations also seized on trafficking, and a 1999 meeting at the Capitol, organized by former Nixon White House aide Charles W. Colson, helped seal a coalition. The session in the office of then-House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) brought together the Southern Baptist Convention, conservative William Bennett and Rabbi David Saperstein, a prominent Reform Jewish activist."

"Bipartisan passion melted any uncertainty, and in October 2000, Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, significantly broadening the federal definition of trafficking. Prosecutors would no longer have to rely on statutes that required them to prove a victim had been subjected to physical violence or restraints, such as chains. Now, a federal case could be made if a trafficker had psychologically abused a victim.

The measure toughened penalties against traffickers, provided extensive services for victims and committed the United States to a leading role internationally, requiring the State Department to rank countries and impose sanctions if their anti-trafficking efforts fell short."

'Anti-trafficking' means 'anti-prostitution'. If America wants to help developing countries they should give them money for development. America should not sanction countries that don't cooperate in their futile effort to stop sin. There are more important things, such as fighting AIDS. That's especially true of Cambodia, who America practiced terrorism against from 1970 to 1973 and wrecked their country.*

What is it with these Christians like George W Bush? They talk about weapons of mass destruction and trafficking as an excuse to harm people in other countries. They want everyone to believe that most sex workers are coerced and many are underage. Then they have their excuse to stop sin. They can't stop most promiscuity but they can try and stop men like me from fornicating. It doesn't even work, it just harms sex workers.

Bradley went to Damascus and tried to find underage prostitutes. He couldn't find any. Nobody else could either.

"A nun from the local Good Shepherd Convent claimed that girls under her care had "suddenly disappeared" - most likely "taken out of school, she believes, to earn for their families." There is a dark hint here, but again no clarification is subsequently offered in relation to what the nun was specifically referring to. Perhaps the girls just could not bear to stay another day in the Good Shepherd Nunnery, and had instead decided to sell ducks and chickens with their mothers in the local market? At least there they might get to flirt with the local boys without provoking a lecture on sin from the mother superior." page 35

Or, it could be that the parents of these girls did some research and found out that the Good Shepherd Sisters ran Magdalene laundries in Ireland. Perhaps they watched the film The Magdalene Sisters and it made them think (in the film three girls run away from a Magdalene laundry after being abused by nuns). The nuns see wickedness everywhere but they can't recognize their own wickedness.

Bradley talked to sex workers in different Moslem countries. One typical example was a 26 year old Chinese woman, who came from a small city in China where she had been working in a garment factory since leaving school. She moved to Shanghai and did sex work then moved to Bahrain. She was with other Chinese women, living in a hotel where rent and food were cheap. She made $4,000 in a good month, planned to stay a year then return to China and open a small business.

They had not been trafficked against their will. 'The reason why those working there by choice are doing so is obvious enough: They are earning at least ten times, and sometimes much more, than they ever could in their own countries working in a dead-end job (if they can find one).' page 175

Evangelicals, Catholic nuns, Radical Feminists and Communists should think about that when they advocate sanctions on poor countries or prohibition. These women don't want or need to be rescued. Not unless they have been captured and interned in a 'safe house'. Then they need rescuing from the prohibitionists.

situation of sex workers in Olympic boroughs

This morning I listened to Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4. Jenni Murray was talking to Georgina Perry and Julie Bindel about the possibility of increased numbers of foreign women coming to London to work in the sex industry during the Olympics. Georgina Perry is manager of health services for sex workers across three London boroughs .

Georgina said that sex workers in east London are suffering because of a police crackdown in the run up to the Olympics.

"The problems that we are seeing at the moment in relation to the Olympics are already happening in terms of safety for sex workers. Because of the juggernaut of publicity around sex trafficking, around increases in sex workers, we are already seeing an increased number of brothel raids. This is actually happening now. And as a result of this, what we are seeing is women who have been working off-street, safely, now on the street selling sex in a much less safe environment. We are also seeing women who are unable to report rape and sexual assault. This is absolutely untenable. It is about women getting access to public health services and also access to the police (I couldn't quite hear the end of this sentence because Julie Bindel started talking over her)."

There have been a number of gang attacks against sex workers in east London. This recent article states that victims who reported knifepoint robberies said they ended up being threatened with prosecution.

Sex workers are facing violence every day, but also the conditions are there for a serial murderer to be able to kill women. When are we going to learn the lessons of Ipswich? We need not only to enable women to work from flats but work together from flats. Sex workers should have the same protection from the police as anyone else. They should have good access to health services. Nobody has the right to stand in the way of that.

Ross Kemp on trafficking

Last night on Sky 1 there was a documentary about human trafficking. I didn't see it but yesterday I read the article in the Mirror newspaper. Before I read it I thought it was going to be the usual sensationalist rubbish but in fact it was more reasoned than most.

He wrote that we don't know how many people have been trafficked into the UK illegally. He didn't use false statistics as have so many commentators on the issue. He didn't condemn men who pay for sex, as long as it is consensual. He wrote about other forms of trafficking apart from sex trafficking. There were a few paragraphs about Vietnamese teenagers locked into marijuana factories. There was a mention of domestic servitude.

Farmers come in for some criticism "There are a lot of farmers out there, as well as others in the agricultural sector, who need to take a good, hard look at themselves and the things that they do." A bit harsh on farmers, you might think, but if you have read about exploitation of workers in the agricultural sector he has a point.

Most people think that Eastern European farm workers in the UK have a 9 to 5 job. If your read what Felicity Lawrence has found out about it, you find that they might have to work 12 hours one day and then not get any work for the next 3 days. And they have to pay rent on substandard shared accommodation whether they are given work or not. That's not the worst of it - read Felicity Lawrence.

Ross mentions the Chinese cockle pickers who died in Morecambe Bay in 2004. At least 21 people died. They had all been trafficked. "Some bosses believe they can't afford to employ someone legitimately - so they employ them illegally."

I have written in previous posts that I suspect that in some communities in the UK such as the West African community prostitution can be underground. This is an important point because some radical feminists believe that prostitution cannot be driven underground, by banning it or banning advertisement of it.

It can never be truly underground they say because if punters can find prostitutes then so can the police and outreach workers. As I said this is not true of drug dealing so why would it be true of prostitution. Drug addicts can find drug dealers but the police find it more difficult.

Ross seems to understand this. "Language and cultural barriers make it very difficult to get inside many communities, particularly those from Nigeria, China and south east Asia." It suspect that in some communities prostitution is not advertised but spread by word of mouth.

The one thing I do think is incorrect about Ross's article is when he says "Some of the girls have sex with 40 men in a day, sometimes more". From what I know of prostitution, brothels just don't have that many customers, especially since the recession. The busiest prostitutes in the UK would be the ones in Soho. They might have 20 customers a day if they're busy, probably double the number of ones in suburban brothels.

Trafficking and coercion do happen, in the sex industry and in other industries. It happens with children, teenagers and adults, as Ross says. In the sex industry coercion is infrequent with adults, even less frequent with teenagers, and happens hardly at all with children. That doesn't mean we should be complacent. We should strive to eliminate coercion. However, trying to criminalize punters would be as stupid as trying to criminalize people who want to eat cockles.

You might not think that a soap opera actor would not make a good journalist. However, he seems to make a better journalist than some professional journalists like Kirsty Whalley. She has a hidden agenda; she wants to ban prostitution and is using false statistics and the issue of trafficking to try to attain that goal.

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.

sinister journalist uncovered

Kirsty Whalley is a reporter for the Croydon Guardian, one of two free weekly newspapers in my locality. She has written a number of articles about trafficking. On the 20th of last month she did another one Police sex ads stance wins council approval. She's been running a campaign to get adverts for sex establishments banned from newspapers, principally her rival newspaper the Croydon Advertiser and its free edition the Advertiser Midweek.

The Croydon Advertiser had run a front page story Sinister brothel uncovered next to charity office. The Croydon Guardian criticised the Croydon Advertiser for carrying an advert for the same brothel the Croydon Advertiser had 'exposed'. The Croydon Guardian in turn scored an own goal when they had a picture of the offending ads in an article without having obscured the phone numbers. See here.

Kirsty wrote in her article 'It is estimated that 4,000 women a year are trafficked into the country, many of these pass through London forced to work as sex slaves against their will, seeing up to a dozen men a day'.

I sent her an email where I wrote 'I was interested to read your article about adverts for sex establishments in newspapers. You use the statistic of 4,000 women a year trafficked into Britain. Are you aware that this statistic is false? Do you think it is important to get the facts right?'

She sent an email back to me where she wrote 'Thank you for your email. The statistic quoted in the story is the is based on published research carried out by the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police Authority. If you have access to more recent, solid academic research on this I would be happy to receive it and use those figures in future stories. In the meantime I'll rely on the facts availble to me.'

I replied to her 'I have been to the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police Authority websites and I have not found the statistic that 4,000 women a year are trafficked into Britain. Last year Nick Davies wrote an article in the Guardian which says that in 2006 Home Office minister Vernon Coaker said "There are an estimated 4,000 women victims". That's 4,000 in total, not 4,000 a year. If you read the article you can see that there was no basis for this 'estimate'. I have included the URL below.'

This was last month and she hasn't replied to me. There are two possibilities here. Either she doesn't care enough about the issues or the 'victims' to get her facts straight. Or she knowingly stated something she knew to be false in order to manipulate public opinion. Either way she's not doing her job as a journalist. Nick Davies, however, is a proper journalist. I know she attended the 2010 annual meeting of CCAT (Croydon Community Against Trafficking) but I don't know if she is a member. She's obviously biased.

If it was really true that there were sex slaves in Croydon, who are raped up to twelve times a day, then the police would be smashing down doors to get to them and rescue them. I would be too. But whenever the police do something like that they don't find any. You may say that the police have identified victims, but many of them end up prosecuted by the police or deported or they disappear. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it is rare. Exploitation goes on in the domestic and agricultural sectors too but we don't ban them.

Would it not be more sensible for newspapers to ban adverts only for those sex establishments where trafficking is more likely to have occurred? Or for some kind of vetting process? Looking at the latest edition of Advertiser Midweek I can see two escort agencies advertized. They're not going to be anything to do with trafficking. I can also see two independent sex workers, Laura and Shakira. There are several brothels, but it's the oriental brothels where any trafficking is more likely to have happened.

Quite apart from not taking away the living of escorts and independent sex workers, a compromise would mean that punters would have less motivation to go to unwilling or unhappy prostitutes. If their needs are catered for by willing prostitutes then they aren't going to want to see unwilling ones. I don't think that people like Kirsty want compromise though, any more than they want dialogue. Even if it solves the problem they say they want to solve. People like Kirsty will never be happy until all prostitution is banned.

Kirsty has been working with CCAT and the police in her campaign to to get adverts for sex establishments banned from newspapers. Editors could be prosecuted for publishing sex ads. Vice squad detective inspector Kevin Hyland told the Croydon Guardian "It is an offence to advertise for prostitution. If newspapers do run adverts there is a possibility of prosecution. The legislation we are thinking of using is aiding and abetting offences of controlling prostitution for gain, offences of trafficking under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and possibly money laundering."

Money laundering? A newspaper editor prosecuted for aiding and abetting money laundering? Whatever next? I wonder if our MPs knew when they were debating money laundering legislation it would end up being used in this way. We all know what money laundering is, and this is not money laundering. It seems any business that breaks the law can also be accused of 'money laundering'.

This blog is not anti police and it is not pro trafficking. It is anti trafficking. It's just that my ideas are more likely to result in success than the ideas of people in organizations like CCAT. Their ideas are counterproductive, which is not surprising when you consider their real agenda.

When are people going to wake up to the fact that politicians are always trying to erode our rights, and will use external threats to make us compliant? It's not terrorists or paedophiles or traffickers or people on benefits who are the biggest problem in society, it's the politicians who want to take away rights and those who aid and abet them like Kirsty Whalley.

I don't like people with hidden agendas. I don't like people who say all they want is to rescue the victims when it is they who stand in the way of real progress. I don't like people who think that only people like them can see the truth and that they can tell lies to manipulate the public. I don't like people who campaign for laws that they know damn well are going to be used for something other than their stated purpose. These are the sinister ones.

some interesting photos

When I saw this picture I recognized it as 61 Dean Street, a walk up in Soho. It was the only walk up with a big yellow sign saying MODEL. This sign is no longer there. I have written about 61 Dean Street before. The police tried to close it down but failed to do so.

The Home Office are using this picture as part of a campaign to discourage men from using prostitutes. It's ridiculous because a man isn't going to be convicted of rape if he goes to 61 Dean Street, or anywhere else that I know of. He's not even going to be convicted under the new law that was introduced last year. Nobody has been convicted under this law. All this campaign and this law will achieve is to scare off the best customers - the more law abiding ones - of the women who work in these places.

A couple of days ago Clayton Littlewood was back on the JoAnne Good show on BBC London. He talked again about how he got to know the women working at 61 Dean Street. He had a shop underneath. He knows that they are not coerced. I found this photo here.

When I saw this picture I recognignized it as one of the walk ups in Greek Street. I found it on the POPPY project site. This walk up could be one of the sleaziest in Soho. Nice shade of blue though. I have written about it before.

What amuses me is that there is nothing on the web page to say that this is a walk up (or brothel, as they are often termed). I'm sure there are some people who look at this page and think that this is the entrance to the offices of the POPPY Project itself.

This was an image that could be seen as part of a series of images (some of them apparently subliminal) at the beginning of each of the 3 episodes of the C4 television documentary 'The Hunt for Britain's Sex Traffickers'. It is used by a few anti-trafficking blogs or sites. It is intended to get people to think that vulnerable girls are being treated like meat. The sex industry needs 'fresh meat' so that it can continue, punters can be kept happy and pimps can continue to make profits. This kind of propaganda is not going to help people to understand the issues and come to sensible decisions about how to help those women who are genuinely trafficked.

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.

Are the prohibitionists in retreat?

Many people who would like to see prostitution banned seem to have changed tack recently. Instead of saying that the majority of women involved in prostitution are coerced in one way or another, with large numbers of women trafficked, they are now saying that it doesn't matter how many women are trafficked. They are not admitting that their statistics are false but as these statistics are discredited they are starting to say they are unimportant.

However, it seems to me that their entire argument is based on their false statistics, which is why they have always stated them so frequently.

The MP Denis MacShane had said that 25,000 women had been trafficked into Britain. After a poor performance on Newsnight where he was heavily criticised, he is now talking about 'a futile war of statistics'.

A new Association of Chief Police Officers report shows that the number of women trafficked is less than thought. Last year Dr Nick Mai produced research that showed some migrants prefer to work as sex workers because they earn more money and work fewer hours. It has recently been revealed that no men have been convicted and only 3 men cautioned since the introduction of the new law in Britain banning men from paying for sex with a coerced woman. The recent Pentameter 2 police operation failed to convict anyone of trafficking.

In October last year Nick Davies wrote two articles in The Guardian Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution (about Pentameter 2) and Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic that seem to have caused quite a stir in the anti-trafficking world. The second one shows how the statistics on trafficking have been grossly inflated by some feminist and religious groups. Politicians such as Harriet Harman and Jaqui Smith who have used these false statistics to support bad legislation have now been removed from power.

Amid all the bad news for the prohibitionists was something that at first sight might seem a boost. In July of this year Julie Bindel wrote an article in The Guardian Legalising prostitution is not the answer that says a new report on the effectiveness of Swedish anti-prostitution laws shows that banning men from paying for sex is a good thing. The report said that the number of women involved in street prostitution in Sweden has halved whereas the number of women involved in street prostitution in Denmark and Norway have seen a 'sharp rise'. However, Norway has very similar laws to Sweden, so how can such laws be regarded as a success?

Now it turns out that the figures for Denmark are false. There has not been a sharp rise in street prostitution in Denmark.

The fact is that if we introduce a law to criminalize men who pay for sex in this country it could result in a sharp rise in street prostitution as it has in Norway. The best that could be hoped for is that half of street prostitutes will abandon their traditional red light districts. That is the message of the report on Swedish law.

Also, I would expect the number of women involved in street prostitution to have decreased by a lot more than just a half before the law could be judged a success. Just because street prostitutes aren't seen in their traditional red light districts doesn't mean they aren't still working. I have written more about this on my 'the issues' page on this blog.

Julie Bindel doesn't mention that Norway has similar laws to Sweden. She seems triumphant, but I think she is trying to bluff it out. She says there is no evidence that prostitution has been forced underground in Sweden, but it seems obvious that the lives of Swedish prostitutes has become more unpleasant and dangerous.

Looks like the 'academic consensus' of opinion on the subject that Bindel writes about in her article was correct after all.

To take the emotion out of the issue, it would be good to compare sex slavery to domestic slavery.

If it was true that most women who work as child minders or cleaners were trafficked into the country and coerced into doing this type of work, then it would make sense to ban people from having having child minders or cleaners. The people who use them could be criticised for encouraging a trade that causes misery. We know that there are some trafficked women in domestic slavery and yet it would seem absurd to want to ban people from having domestic help.

Much better to regulate it. This would be the best way to avoid abuse. To want to continue to criminalize many aspects of prostitution to help a tiny minority is wrong for two reasons; not only does it stop lots of women from being able to feed their families but it doesn't help coerced women. In fact it harms the coerced women. The prohibitionists are harming women. So to say that we need to continue to crack down on prostitution to help a tiny minority is wrong.

If you did believe that most women involved in prostitution are coerced, then it would be the traffickers and the pimps who make the profit from the sex industry. Cracking down on prostitution would harm their profits and make Britain less attractive for traffickers. Trafficking would decrease, and in time possibly stop.

If you believe that it is the women themselves who are making the money then cracking down on prostitution means they have to work harder for the money they need; working longer hours, having sex with more men, doing things they wouldn't usually do and don't want to do - such as oral sex without a condom.

That is why it does matter how many women are trafficked. It does matter what proportion of prostitutes are working for much the same reason as most of us are working or coerced into doing it. If you get it wrong, you harm some of the most vulnerable people in society and increase their problems, making worse the things you say you want to cure.

If you are opposed to prostitution, in the past it was possible to say only that you are opposed to trafficking. Who could have a problem with someone being opposed to trafficking? No one likes to think of sex slaves being raped 30 times a day (prostitutes don't have sex with 30 men a day - brothels just don't get that many customers). If prostitution=trafficking then you will get a lot of public support. They know that most people don't want prostitution banned. That is why their false statistics have always been so important to them.

Some people have an ideological opposition to prostitution, even if it occurs between consenting adults. Some feminists and some religious people. Ideological opposition is usually an attempt to justify a visceral hatred. Some feminists and some religious people have a visceral hatred of paid for sex just as some religious people have a visceral hatred of homosexual sex. I think that feminists should think very carefully about who they ally themselves with.

There was a very amusing article in my local free paper this month. Another local paper had had a front page article with a headline something like 'Sinister Brothel Uncovered'. There is an organization called CCAT - Croydon Community Against Trafficking - that pointed out that the paper had been advertising this brothel. This to me shows that concern can be manufactured by the media and politicians to get publicity and support for themselves.

The paper advertises lots of brothels and independent sex workers. CCAT, described as 'an anti-sex trafficking charity' have campaigned against 'adult advertisements'. They are an alliance of feminists and 'church groups'. They call for a boycott of this paper, saying that it is 'making a profit from the exploitation of women'.

I don't know what they are hoping to achieve, men will just look on the internet to find women. I'm sure that CCAT would call for the internet to be censored. Harriet Harman has already called for the PunterNet site to be closed down. That's how dangerous these people are. They want to censor the media and deny freedom of speech. No doubt they would love to be able to censor any attempt to expose their deceptiveness.

They don't care about truth, all they care about is getting their own way, by fair means or foul. All they care about is their weird obsessions yet they pretend they care about the vulnerable. In many countries of the world these types have the upper hand, now they seem to be on the run. That makes me happy.

final episode of Vice Squad last night

Five must have lost interest in this series because the last two episodes have been delayed and the final one (number 6 of 6) was shown at 4 am today. It's not so surprising because it had become quite repetitive. I think that they were hoping that it would attract the same sort of viewers who like to see footage of real car chases and drug busts by police. Despite the dramatic music it fails to thrill.

I went onto the Five site today but unlike usual they did not have any details of this particular episode. I am only interested because I want to see what the attitude of the authorities towards prostitution is now. It is quite disturbing to see what happens when the left-wing fundamentalist feminism of women like Harriet Harman in the Labour government meets the right-wing puritanism of men in the police force.

These two final episodes confirm what we know already. Harriet Harman and people like her would like to ban prostitution. They know from surveys that most British people don't want prostitution to be banned. So they pretend that most women involved with prostitution are forced into it. They pretend that they want to rescue victims. Then they try to stop prostitution by any means necessary. I'm sure they think that the ends justify the means.

I like to think that most people in this country are sensible enough to realise that if you try to ban prostitution you merely force it underground. This makes it more likely that women will be killed or injured. I have no objection to 'unannounced brothel visits'. If brothels were legalised then this would be easier and the few numbers of real victims could be helped.

This episode started with the issue of prostitute advert cards in phone boxes. It was said that these are connected to organised crime and trafficked women. I have no idea if this is true but I doubt it. They showed a man being arrested for putting these cards in phone boxes. He was grabbed by a police man, his arm was held high up behind his back and then he was made to kneel. He was hand-cuffed before being taken away. This seemed totally unnecessary to me. It seems that it was done to inflict fear and pain so as to deter these people. Remember, 'the ends justify the means'.

The next part of the episode was about brothels. It started with footage of men in Oxford Street who were selling an Eastern European woman for a few thousand pounds. I'm sure that this does happen. They went into different brothels/saunas near Stratford in east London.

They were talking about women forced to work in brothels, servicing 30 to 35 men a day. Now I think that in brothels there are never that many customers. Even before the recession I doubt if any woman in a brothel can attract that many customers.

A police officer told a story of a woman who was made pregnant by a client, was forced to have an abortion in the morning and then was forced to continue working within 3 hours. If this really happened then it is disgusting, but I doubt it.

In one place they went to they arrested an oriental woman. It was difficult to tell how old she was. They arrested her for suspicion of controlling prostitution and suspicion of money laundering. Apparently anyone who makes money from something illegal and uses some of that money to continue in their illegal activities is a money launderer. I wonder if our MPs discussed the possibility of the law being used this way before they voted for it. Or did they think it would only be used for gangsters. Now it is used for anyone the police want to stop, and if they want to stop prostitution then 'the ends justify the means'.

They took the woman to the police station and formally charged her with 'conspiracy to control prostitution for gain' and 'controlling prostitution for gain'. They didn't find any trafficked women. They talked a lot about 'immigration issues'.

The next part of this episode was about 'nuisance kerb crawling'. They have done this in several of the previous episodes, always in East London near Stratford (Romford Road/Dyson Road). Not Whitechapel as I had previously thought.

In the previous episode they said that ordinary local mothers with toddlers in pushchairs had been propositioned by kerb crawlers. I don't believe this has happened. I remember that a few years ago there was a report on Tooting Bec Common that said fathers with toddlers in pushchairs had been propositioned by street girls. In all the years I have been going to Tooting Bec Common I have never seen this, and I don't believe it ever happens.

What I think can happen is that in these areas a local woman on her way home could be stopped by police and searched on suspicion that she is a prostitute. I would imagine that would be quite upsetting, to say the least. In the last episode they showed women being stopped by police and searched. The police were quite rude and condescending to the women, treating them like dirt.

That episode said that women were given a caution and if they had several then they were arrested. One woman was arrested and became distressed because she had to get home to her daughter.

At the end of last night's episode they said that because of their 'zero tolerance' policy "the lack of customers could mean that street prostitutes move on, making the area a safer place to live".

So they are saying the zero tolerance policy COULD mean that things change for local residents, but then it might not. If the street prostitutes 'move on' they presumably will move on to somewhere else and nothing will change overall. Then that particular area will become a 'safer place to live'. Really? They had not said that residents are less safe because of kerb crawlers. Safe for whom? Not safer for the prostitutes themselves (some of whom will be local residents), in fact it will be much more dangerous for them. So much for 'rescuing the victim'.

I'm glad this shabby little series has ended. I'm not surprised that Five lost interest in it and hid it away. It started as propaganda for moral crusaders and the American style zero tolerance policies of sly dishonest politicians like Harriet Harman and Jacqui Smith. That has backfired on them. Most viewers can see it for what it is. It leaves a nasty taste in my mouth and a lot of people will agree with me.