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.

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.