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.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
mother accused of kerb crawling
A 45 year old woman was accused of kerb crawling by Bradford police. She had parked her car in the 'red light district' to attend her amateur dramatics society. The police sent a letter to her boss making the accusation.
Anne-Marie Carroll said:-
" ... if I were a man I could protest my innocence until I was blue in the face and people wouldn’t believe me."
It is common practice for the police to send such letters to employers. The police don't care about the injustice of men getting sacked from their jobs, relationships being destroyed, children enduring broken homes. The police are supposed to oppose injustice, not create it.
Apparently in modern Britain you are guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. They used to say "if you haven't done anything wrong, then you've got nothing to worry about". That attitude has always been wrong morally, but now it is also wrong factually. Arrest has become a form of punishment in itself.
It wouldn't be so bad if it helped women, but it doesn't. This is the same red light area where Stephen Griffiths killed street girls. I know that the murders in Ipswich occurred after a police crackdown had dispersed street girls from their usual haunts and made them more vulnerable. I don't know if the same has happened in Bradford.
There are two interesting posts on the Harlot's Parlour blog. The first is about the mother accused of kerb crawling. The second is about the safety of women in Bradford.
The police are causing a lot of damage by their attitudes, and are aided and abetted by feminists like Julie Bindel and Polly Toynbee who are leading a propaganda war with their lies. Attitudes seem to be turning against them, though, with more sensible ideas coming from police officers like Deputy Chief Constable Simon Byrne.
Anne-Marie Carroll said:-
" ... if I were a man I could protest my innocence until I was blue in the face and people wouldn’t believe me."
It is common practice for the police to send such letters to employers. The police don't care about the injustice of men getting sacked from their jobs, relationships being destroyed, children enduring broken homes. The police are supposed to oppose injustice, not create it.
Apparently in modern Britain you are guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. They used to say "if you haven't done anything wrong, then you've got nothing to worry about". That attitude has always been wrong morally, but now it is also wrong factually. Arrest has become a form of punishment in itself.
It wouldn't be so bad if it helped women, but it doesn't. This is the same red light area where Stephen Griffiths killed street girls. I know that the murders in Ipswich occurred after a police crackdown had dispersed street girls from their usual haunts and made them more vulnerable. I don't know if the same has happened in Bradford.
There are two interesting posts on the Harlot's Parlour blog. The first is about the mother accused of kerb crawling. The second is about the safety of women in Bradford.
The police are causing a lot of damage by their attitudes, and are aided and abetted by feminists like Julie Bindel and Polly Toynbee who are leading a propaganda war with their lies. Attitudes seem to be turning against them, though, with more sensible ideas coming from police officers like Deputy Chief Constable Simon Byrne.
Friday, December 31, 2010
at last some sense
Deputy Chief Constable Simon Byrne, who acts as the Association of Chief Police Officer’s lead on prostitution, called on the Government to consider overhauling Britain’s various prostitution laws.
The last three paragraphs of this newspaper article say it all:-
Many sex worker groups, however, say only full or partial decriminalisation of the sex trade will dramatically improve safety. They say the anti-brothel legislation which prohibits more than one person selling sex in a single property forces women onto the streets and away from the comparative safety of a group.
"The law as it currently stands makes sex workers vulnerable to the police, criminals and vigilantes," said Catherine Stephens from the International Union of Sex Workers. "We are criminalised if we work together. I know of brothels that are regularly targeted by gangs because they know they won’t go to police for fear of being arrested themselves."
She added: "If we want to make sex workers safer we need an intelligent and informed debate on Britain’s prostitution laws based on evidence and not misinformed stereotypes. The law doesn’t just fail to target violence and exploitation, it actually facilitates it. Would we be safer working together? Yes. Is that legal? No."
I hope that people listen to him.
The last three paragraphs of this newspaper article say it all:-
Many sex worker groups, however, say only full or partial decriminalisation of the sex trade will dramatically improve safety. They say the anti-brothel legislation which prohibits more than one person selling sex in a single property forces women onto the streets and away from the comparative safety of a group.
"The law as it currently stands makes sex workers vulnerable to the police, criminals and vigilantes," said Catherine Stephens from the International Union of Sex Workers. "We are criminalised if we work together. I know of brothels that are regularly targeted by gangs because they know they won’t go to police for fear of being arrested themselves."
She added: "If we want to make sex workers safer we need an intelligent and informed debate on Britain’s prostitution laws based on evidence and not misinformed stereotypes. The law doesn’t just fail to target violence and exploitation, it actually facilitates it. Would we be safer working together? Yes. Is that legal? No."
I hope that people listen to him.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
the undeserving whore
I have often wondered how it is that some people talk about prostitutes as victims and yet they support policies that make their lives more dangerous and unpleasant. How is it that some feminists such as those in OBJECT celebrate laws that further criminalize women? How is it that they have nothing to say when prostitutes are 'named and shamed' and have their names and photographs shown in newspapers or on the Internet? See here, here and here.
There has been a lot of discussion in the media recently about the poor and benefits. Talk of the deserving and the undeserving poor. 'The underserving poor' is a phrase from Victorian times. This discussion has helped me to understand how prostitutes can be treated as both victims and worthy of harsh treatment.
Rich men like David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague say that they want to rescue the long-term unemployed. They say that they are condemned to lie on their sofas all day wathching daytime TV. They want to move people on Incapacity Benefit off benefits and into jobs.
Many more people on Incapacity Benefit will move onto Job Seekers' Allowance (or whatever replaces it) than into jobs. Job Seeker's Allowance is considerably less than Incapacity Benefit. Incapacity Benefit, like the basic state pension, is just enough for people to live on. Job Seeker's Allowance is not.
If people stayed on Job Seeker's Allowance for a short while till they could get a job, it wouldn't be so bad. But there are few jobs available. That's because rich people, especially those in the City, have buggered up the economy. It isn't poor people turning down job offers that is the cause of large-scale unemployment, it is rich people. Millions of people will suffer. Their happiness index will not be high.
In my experience unemployed people don't degenerate on their sofas. They often develop strategies for coping, making use of the fact that although they are cash poor they are time rich. Some of them try to use their time to improve themselves through courses or reading newspapers and books. But if you try to explain that to affluent people they say that they are living the life of Riley.
If you are on benefits you are either a victim who needs rescuing, or living the life of Riley. It's one extreme or the other. They have no sense that people on benefits are just ordinary people trying to make the best of what is available to them. And it's the same with prostitutes. Prostitutes are either victims who need rescuing, or criminal and antisocial. Nothing in between.
There's a fine line between having pity for someone and having contempt for them.
The Policing And Crime Bill 2009 makes it easier for the police to arrest women for soliciting. Also many prostitutes have had Anti-Social Behaviour Orders taken out against them. Not because a member of the community has identified her as an individual, but because the police have decided she is antisocial. You could call this 'objectification'.
It seems that the more they say that someone is a victim, the more it is acceptable for them to make their lives more difficult. It doesn't seem to be any better in Sweden. Jonas Trolle, Detective Superintendent of Stockholm's Police Surveillance Unit said this to the BBC.
"I think it should be difficult to be a prostitute even though it is not forbidden in Sweden. So even though we don't put them into jail, we say OK we will make it very very difficult for you to act as a prostitute in our society, even though we see her as a victim."
Some way to treat a victim. To make her life more difficult and more dangerous. Some prostitutes in Sweden have to work for longer to get the money they need, and do things they wouldn't normally do.
It does seem strange how people can think this way, seemingly believing two extreme opposite points of view at the same time. Or maybe they are saying one thing but acting the opposite. But we have historical examples of this. The Marxists who talk of the poor as victims but as soon as they get into power torture and murder them in their millions. Or the right wing Americans who talk about restricting the power of the federal government but who refer to the President as Commander-in-chief (if he's Republican and white) and think any criticism of foreign policy is unpatriotic.
If you look at the photograph of Michelle Lyn Smith here, she doesn't look like a drug addict to me. Drug addicts usually look thin. She just looks poor. Perhaps she is like 'Vicky' who says here that she has poorly paid work but uses prostitution to make ends meet. It's obvious that they are not a threat to the community.
Michelle Lyn Smith looks like the sort of woman who likes to share a joke and a cigarette with men. She looks like the sort of woman who if an old man smiled at her she would give him a smile and not a frown. The sort of woman that some feminists don't like.
There has been a lot of discussion in the media recently about the poor and benefits. Talk of the deserving and the undeserving poor. 'The underserving poor' is a phrase from Victorian times. This discussion has helped me to understand how prostitutes can be treated as both victims and worthy of harsh treatment.
Rich men like David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague say that they want to rescue the long-term unemployed. They say that they are condemned to lie on their sofas all day wathching daytime TV. They want to move people on Incapacity Benefit off benefits and into jobs.
Many more people on Incapacity Benefit will move onto Job Seekers' Allowance (or whatever replaces it) than into jobs. Job Seeker's Allowance is considerably less than Incapacity Benefit. Incapacity Benefit, like the basic state pension, is just enough for people to live on. Job Seeker's Allowance is not.
If people stayed on Job Seeker's Allowance for a short while till they could get a job, it wouldn't be so bad. But there are few jobs available. That's because rich people, especially those in the City, have buggered up the economy. It isn't poor people turning down job offers that is the cause of large-scale unemployment, it is rich people. Millions of people will suffer. Their happiness index will not be high.
In my experience unemployed people don't degenerate on their sofas. They often develop strategies for coping, making use of the fact that although they are cash poor they are time rich. Some of them try to use their time to improve themselves through courses or reading newspapers and books. But if you try to explain that to affluent people they say that they are living the life of Riley.
If you are on benefits you are either a victim who needs rescuing, or living the life of Riley. It's one extreme or the other. They have no sense that people on benefits are just ordinary people trying to make the best of what is available to them. And it's the same with prostitutes. Prostitutes are either victims who need rescuing, or criminal and antisocial. Nothing in between.
There's a fine line between having pity for someone and having contempt for them.
The Policing And Crime Bill 2009 makes it easier for the police to arrest women for soliciting. Also many prostitutes have had Anti-Social Behaviour Orders taken out against them. Not because a member of the community has identified her as an individual, but because the police have decided she is antisocial. You could call this 'objectification'.
It seems that the more they say that someone is a victim, the more it is acceptable for them to make their lives more difficult. It doesn't seem to be any better in Sweden. Jonas Trolle, Detective Superintendent of Stockholm's Police Surveillance Unit said this to the BBC.
"I think it should be difficult to be a prostitute even though it is not forbidden in Sweden. So even though we don't put them into jail, we say OK we will make it very very difficult for you to act as a prostitute in our society, even though we see her as a victim."
Some way to treat a victim. To make her life more difficult and more dangerous. Some prostitutes in Sweden have to work for longer to get the money they need, and do things they wouldn't normally do.
It does seem strange how people can think this way, seemingly believing two extreme opposite points of view at the same time. Or maybe they are saying one thing but acting the opposite. But we have historical examples of this. The Marxists who talk of the poor as victims but as soon as they get into power torture and murder them in their millions. Or the right wing Americans who talk about restricting the power of the federal government but who refer to the President as Commander-in-chief (if he's Republican and white) and think any criticism of foreign policy is unpatriotic.
If you look at the photograph of Michelle Lyn Smith here, she doesn't look like a drug addict to me. Drug addicts usually look thin. She just looks poor. Perhaps she is like 'Vicky' who says here that she has poorly paid work but uses prostitution to make ends meet. It's obvious that they are not a threat to the community.
Michelle Lyn Smith looks like the sort of woman who likes to share a joke and a cigarette with men. She looks like the sort of woman who if an old man smiled at her she would give him a smile and not a frown. The sort of woman that some feminists don't like.
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