vote for Police and Crime Commissioner

I've just been to vote. There were three sets of votes. One was for the Merseyside Police and Crimes Commissioner. I had no information about who the four candidates are. I can't remember who I voted for but now I've done a bit more research it looks as if Emily Spurrell for Labour is the best bet.

Emily, who was among the speakers, said: “Women who are involved in sex work are at risk of extreme violence and abuse every day. These women are often vulnerable and we must protect them and do what we can to end the marginalisation they experience.

“I’m proud to say that Merseyside Police has led the way in prosecuting and securing convictions against those who commit offences against sex workers, in large part by being the first Force in the country to recognise these crimes as hate crimes and through the skill and care of our specialist sexual offences Unity Team who have been able to successfully prosecute violent individuals.

“This work has also been supported by the development of the Red Umbrella project which aims to support these women to ensure they get the help they need, ideally so they can exit this type of work but, for those who remain, to ensure they are better protected and are able to work free from violence, abuse and exploitation.

As part of this project, a dedicated police sex worker liaison officer has been appointed to build trust and give sex workers the confidence to report incidents of violence to the police. Funding is also being used to improve the gathering of intelligence on those who inflict violence on sex workers.”

murder of Sarah Everard

Sarah Everard was last seen near Clapham Common at night. I used to live in South London and I know that street prostitution occurs on Clapham Common at night. So I can't help wondering if her murder was anything to do with street prostitution. Was Sarah targeted by a man because he thought she was a street girl?

Street girls go to Clapham Common and Tooting Bec Common at night because if they went there in the day they would be arrested. They would be in breach of their ASBO. At night it's easier to hide from the police. If you go alone without a friend it is easier to hide from the police. This makes them very vulnerable to any man who wants to harm women. Some of these men are punters and some aren't.

I don't want to use the death of a young woman to promote my opinions, unlike some people in the media. Also I could be completely wrong: it might be that the murderer did not see drug-addicted street-based sex workers as a better option for a murder. It might have been random. Or he might not have intended to murder.

Street girls are always dressed scruffily, just as Sarah was that night.

Sarah, also seen wearing a white beanie hat and Covid mask, walked across Clapham Common before coming on to the A205 South Circular Road.

brothel raids

There is a press release and two newspaper articles that I have read recently that offer an insight into prostitution in the UK.

1. A press release from the Metropolitan Police about brothel raids last year
2. A Manchester Evening News article about the prosecution of brothel owners two years ago
3. A Belfast Telegraph article about a young woman arrested in Northern Ireland last year

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1. Officers visit numerous addresses in modern slavery operation
Last month in London the Metropolitan Police said they had visited 18 brothels. A total of 46 women were spoken to and offered support. Of those, five were identified as potential victims who displayed indicators of modern slavery. One man was arrested on suspicion of controlling prostitution but released 'under investigation pending further enquiries'.

On the face of it modern slavery seems uncommon in brothels. They didn't discover any slaves for sure, and only 5 out of 46 were thought to be potential victims. One man was arrested but may not even have been charged.

They recognize that other forms of money-making can be equally problematic: 'victims have been found working in construction, domestic servitude, agriculture, cannabis factories and in places you use yourself, such as car washes, barbers and nail bars'.

I can't help wondering if any of these women were arrested and deported. The Met don't say but perhaps they are hiding what they are doing. They say they treat the women as victims but that helps them to deflect criticism. 'Often they do not see themselves as potential victims of sexual exploitation'. Maybe they just want to be left alone.

There is a lot of talk about coercion. 'Physical and mental abuse is common'. What is the evidence for that? It obviously happens sometimes, as in other forms of money making, but is it true that it is common?

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2. The married couple behind Sandys Superstars who built a multi-million pound brothel business charging punters £50 for sex
Former escort Sandra Hankin was the 'big cheese' of a business that was known to the police and the local authorities - and made a 'very high profit'. She and her husband ran two brothels, one in Prestwich/Bury (north Manchester) and one in Northenden (south Manchester). The police took no action against them for 14 years because there were no underage girls, no trafficked women, no suggestion of coercion, the business wasn't used as a front for other crime and it did not affect the local community.

The women were all British. "Many bought homes, had saving bank accounts, and were real providers for their families for the first time. All aspects of the women’s health and well being was provided for."

Sandy had worked as an escort. She didn't like that, finding conditions unsafe and unpleasant. She changed to 'parlour' or 'sauna' work. There were problems there too. The owner of the place she was working left, leaving her in charge. She and her husband transformed the place.

"The bedrooms were changed, they implemented rooms with showers, changing rooms and complimentary towels were offered to every woman and client. The rooms were decorated, CCTV was later installed, there were double lock entry doors."

Adrian Burch ran their website. He was prosecuted too.

"For many years he considered Sandys Superstars were working in partnership with the working women, they supported the women that they cared about and he is devastated for them, to see many of the women who have had to leave Sandys Superstars, at least 13, have been attacked as a result of the conditions on them working on the street. He takes extremely seriously the responsibility for them and feels he is no longer able to protect these women."

"The impact on his family has been significant. Officers came into his family home when his 13 year old daughter was asleep, with machine guns as part of an armed raid, and the impact of that day for his daughter has been traumatic and she is receiving her own mental health support."

"Further to observation, they ran the premises as legitimately as expected, the women were of adult age and appropriate to work, the premises looked after their safety, they were often searched by the Manchester City Council and had regular communication with HMRC. Bizarrely, customs officers knew about what was taking place, and they accepted the tax payments. The defendants worked with public health."

Sandra Hankin was said to have benefited by £200,000, Christopher Hankin by £150,000 and Adrian Burch by £110,000 - all three must repay it within three months under the Proceeds of Crime Act. What happens if they can't pay the money? Do they go to prison? They should have been left alone to provide a service to the clients and the sex workers and pay their taxes.

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3. Prostitution suspects fined after drugs are found in sex trade raid
Does this woman look like a trafficker? Her name is Andreea Cristina Cojucura. She is a sex worker but has been arrested recently for 'human trafficking and controlling prostitution' in Northern Ireland. She was also arrested for having cocaine. Her cocaine was taken away from her and almost £2,000 in cash. Why is a sex worker being arrested in Nordic model Northern Ireland? I thought that under the Nordic model sex workers are decriminalized.

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In other countries terrible things happen when people pretend to want to help 'victims' but in fact harm them. This is from Between Victim and Agent: A Third-Way Feminist Account of Trafficking for Sex Work by Shelley Cavalieri. It is about a brothel raid in Thailand.

"The coalition of organizations effected what they termed a “rescue” of the women in the brothel because of the believed presence of children. What followed was a human rights debacle. Twenty-eight women and girls, most of whom were, by all accounts, adults, were involuntarily detained beyond the period of time that victims of trafficking may be confined under Thai law. They were not arrested or charged with crimes, but detained, according to the authorities, because they had been rescued from a situation of human trafficking. They were deprived of access to their belongings and saved earnings, which were locked inside the inaccessible brothel under police control; they never regained ownership of these possessions. After a lengthy period of time, the government deported many of these women to Burma. All of these actions, which the women experienced as both harmful and alienating, occurred under the guise of rescuing them from the brothel in which they worked.

According to social services workers who interviewed four women who escaped from the brothel as the police arrived, all of the women were ethnic Shan from Burma and were at least nineteen years of age at the time of the raid. Prior to immigrating to Thailand, their status as members of the Burmese Shan indigenous group rendered these women subject to summary detention and rape at any time at the hands of officers of the Burmese junta. Faced with the option of abuse by the authorities in a region of Burma overwhelmed by poverty, many Shan women chose, and continue to choose, to cross the mountains that demarcate the Thai-Burma border and move to a Thai city to work in a brothel. This choice has a certain logic, as forced labor, forced relocations, and food shortages remain an endemic problem in Burma. For many, work in a Thai brothel presented the opportunity to escape the repression of the Burmese junta and to send adequate money home in order to support families, educate children, and maintain households. From the perspective of these women, that they at times paid people to facilitate their passage to Thailand was merely incidental."

more about webcam

In my last post I told you about webcam performers. I have been finding out more about them. One mystery for me was why the words Lovense and Lush kept coming up. Why did so many of them have this strange looking sex toy and why is it that strange mauve colour?

What I have learned since then is that there is a company called Lovense that makes sex toys. The second version of a particular toy - called Lush 2 - seems to have become popular. It's speed can be controlled remotely.

If you pay money you can increase the speed of vibration of the Lush 2 when it is inserted into an orifice of a webcam performer. Call me old fashioned, but I much prefer the fucking machine that I am familiar with. A few of them - like eve_evans - were using a fucking machine. She was wearing stockings so maybe it's kind of retro? I mentioned them in my previous post.

Another thing that I have noticed from looking at the pictures downloaded to my cache is that some of the women had pubic hair (cathleenprecious and pavlovacolucci both do). People like Jenni Murray say that they have looked at porn and none of the women have pubic hair. It's not true but they want to criticise porn, saying that it has a malign influence on the young.

Lots of women in porn have pubic hair. It might be neatly trimmed but many have it. In Japanese porn half the women have pubic hair - and Japanese porn is very popular. In the pictures some of the men were very hairy. So men these days don't feel they have to shave their chests. Not all the people were thin.

I still haven't worked out what they mean by the 'goal'.

a whole new world

I have a laptop but I don't have wifi at home. It's rare for me to use my laptop for the internet. When I do I like to look in the cache to see what it has downloaded. If you're not familiar with the cache it is folders where files are stored that you haven't chosen to download but will be related to searches you have done or sites you have been looking at.

I only found out about it by chance when I came across a pornographic photo I didn't know was on my laptop. I found folders full of pornographic pictures. It's best to clear browsing data/delete browsing history to get rid of them. I thought I had done that recently so I was surprised when I found hundreds of pictures. I remember that I had done a seach on webcams. This is where someone performs sexually in front of a camera.

It's possible to interact with them by sending them a message which they can read and then may do what you say. You have to pay for this. I have never looked at live webcams but I have seen recordings of some of the best sessions. It seems that 28 pictures from each of a large number of webcam performers were in my cache. Most of them were of women, some were gay men, and a couple were trans women (they had penises and were masturbating).

They were an odd assortment of people. Some were nice to look at and some quite ugly. Some seemed to enjoy what they doing but many looked bored, often looking at their mobile phones. Some looked like student girls. Some looked like they were in poor countries. Some of them showed a lot. Some were having sex with other people, heterosexual or homosexual. One young blonde woman called shycinderella just sat/lay with her legs apart showing her pussy, looking bored. A pretty latina woman called Patricia Lopez (yourlittlepervert) showed mostly closeups of her face.

Another latina-looking woman called missniley was attractive with enormous breasts and a tiny bikini top. She took it off in a couple of pictures. A young brunette girl called pavlovacolluci cavorted around naked in a room full of sparkly balloons. A classy brunette woman called eve_evans lay on a bed in stockings with a fucking machine up her bum (it's a machine that moves a dildo up and down, in and out of a pussy or bum). Apparently the viewer can control the speed of the machine, make it go faster by paying more money.

cathleenprecious danced around naked covered in baby oil. bunnylia was a pretty blonde but her body was very thin. Lots of them were very thin. The best one was Pamela Shinee (pamelashineebb) who was very pretty, doing different things including masturbating and seeming to enjoy herself.

Pamela Shinee

bunnylia

pavlovacolluci

Patricia Lopez

missniley

None of them held any great attraction to me. I think what I would like to see are five women sitting around a private swimming pool. Sometimes they would swim naked underwater and there would be an underwater camera.

If Pamela Shinee has found a suitable way to finance her way through uni instead of waitressing then good for her. She can earn the same amount in a much shorter time. So more time for studying and more time for fun. If missniley has a baby and prefers to spend time with her baby instead of working eight hours a day with her baby in a creche then good for her. She's not working in a minimum wage job and spending most of her earnings on creche fees. Also they are safe, in the way that sex workers aren't anywhere in the world apart from New Zealand. Apparently there's a relatively new site called onlyfans.com that makes it easier for them to do it.

Here are a few more blonde studenty types.

lalli_milla

ashlyeroberts1

agnetta_love

The last one looks as if she has received an improper suggestion and she's thinking "You want me to do what? ... I'm not going to do that." I think Pamela would have done it. She looks as though she might.

cabotegravir

In a previous post this year I wrote about the HIV preventing drug PrEP. I said it might change the nature of prostitution. Now there is something even better. I have copied-and-pasted below what it says about it on the BBC site. You can listen to the radio programme Health Check.

In the week of World AIDS Day, Health Check looks at what's being described as a milestone in the prevention of HIV infection in women. It is a form of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) - an injection every 8 weeks of a drug called cabotegravir. A clinical trial has been comparing it to a daily PrEP pill which is already known to be effective at preventing HIV infection. The injection regimen was about 90% more effective at shielding women from the virus than the daily tablet.

photo essay about Soho sex workers

Someone sent me a link to the work of a photographer, Sasha Achilli. It is called Working Girls Central London. I think it is a very fair representation of what it is like for sex workers in Soho. Unlike the work of a different photographer that I came across years ago that said things which aren't true.

In the photo essay it says that one sex worker saved enough money to buy a tapas bar in Spain, where she is now.

The photo essay also says that one sex worker in Soho is in her sixties. She is now a 'Madame' but on certain days has sex with 'loyal clients'. Some people use the word 'madam' which is the female equivalent of 'pimp'. Sasha Achilli uses the word 'Madame'. There are no pimps in Soho though, so I always use the word 'maid'. This is the word that was always used when I visited the Soho walk up flats.

The photo essay also says that many sex workers do not enjoy their job. Some do though. Most knew when they came to the UK that they would be sex workers. That suggests that some were deceived, but it could also mean that they tried different jobs in the UK. Only then did they decide to try sex work. Some have tried a 'normal job' but most haven't.

It gives the impression that they don't get many customers. Sometimes they wait hours. Television, the internet and the phone occupy their time. They can spend over 12 hours a day in the flat, but we know from other forms of work that migrants often choose to earn as much as possible in as little time as possible so they can return to their home countries earlier.

There will be some Soho sex workers who will be much busier than that. Some will have 20 customers each day, maybe more.

I have only seen costumes hanging in the window, as in one of the photographs, at 70A Berwick Street. I wonder if 'Petra' is Lisa. The only other Czech one I met was Laura/Katy at 1 Bateman Street and 70A Berwick Street. Laura made a couple of porn movies.