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Posted by Joan Smith on February 14, 2006, 11:42 pm In the world of stag-night excess, lad mags and lap dancing, paying for In the past couple of years the horrors of sex trafficking have been Everyone agrees that this modern form of slavery is evil and there are Such stories rightly cause an outcry, but there is something un-settling The answer certainly isn't foreign men. It is time to confront the fact More British men are buying sex; research published last month showed In spite of all this, the old blame-the-woman mentality ensures that Voices are frequently raised to suggest that women and girls know what Far from containing it, legalisation would allow thousands more women Link: http://www.newstatesman.com/200601230006
83.84.50.118
23rd January 2006
sex is losing its stigma and more and more men do it. These "clients"
are responsible for a grotesque crime, yet they get away scot-free. By
*Joan Smith*
graphically exposed. It is now known that criminal gangs, usually from
eastern Europe, offer innocuous-sounding jobs in restaurants and bars to
young women who discover too late that their real destination is a
brothel or massage parlour in the UK.
loud demands for a crackdown on traffickers, such as the Albanian gang
that was sentenced to a total of 63 years in prison at Southwark Crown
Court just before Christmas. Agron Demarku, 22, and his brother Flamur,
34, were the ringleaders in an operation that ran brothels in west
London. One 16-year-old girl from Lithuania was forced to have sex with
up to ten men a day, and the scale of the enterprise can be deduced from
one thing: a single brothel in Hounslow took between £3,000 and £18,000
a day. The Demarku brothers also traded women with other traffickers. On
one occasion, reminiscent of a Roman slave market, they were filmed
selling a girl for £4,000.
about the way trafficking is discussed, as though it were all about
foreign gangsters and their victims. Why do these men (and occasionally
their female accomplices) go to all the trouble of duping women and
girls on the other side of Europe and in south-east Asia, and then
transporting them to this country? How has sex trafficking become the
third most profitable illegal trade in the world, after arms and drugs?
Who, to put it bluntly, are these young women being forced to have sex
/with/ each day?
that, in flats and massage parlours up and down the country, British men
are paying money to be "serviced" by foreign women who live in terror of
beatings and other punishments. In a laddish culture where women are
commodities to be paraded in magazines such as /Loaded/ and /Nuts/,
paying for sex has lost virtually all its stigma; female celebrities
collude in the notion that pole dancing is just a bit of fun, while
visiting brothels has become the natural end to a blokes' night out or a
stag weekend. So acceptable has using prostitutes become that punters
post boastful "reviews" of women on websites.
that the number who admitted using prostitutes doubled between 1995 and
2000. They are a minority - 4 per cent admitted having paid for sex in
the previous five years, and one in ten over a lifetime - but there is
no reason to think the trend has reversed. Research from Sweden tells us
something about the kinds of men involved: there, one in eight adult men
has paid for sex at least once and the majority are or have been married
or cohabiting. In other words, it isn't weird loners who are driving
this modern slave trade, but ordinary men - fathers, husbands, sons and
brothers. And the effect of their behaviour is showing up not just in
the sheer number of people employed in the sex trade in this country -
80,000, according to the police - but in an explosion of sexually
transmitted diseases.
when trafficked women are rescued they still tend to be treated as
illegal immigrants rather than victims of crime. According to Amnesty
International, they are more likely to find themselves on a plane than
in a refuge where their injuries can be treated; this country has just
one such refuge, part-funded by the Home Office, while Italy has 200.
Nor has the British government signed a ground-breaking Council of
Europe anti-trafficking convention that would give victims rights for
the first time (ministers say its provisions, which include a 30-day
recuperation period, would be a "pull factor" for illegal immigration).
they are doing when they start selling sex, that they choose this way of
life and find themselves better off than they were. Such claims ignore
virtually all the facts, which have nothing to do with gilt-and-velvet
Parisian brothels or the "happy hooker" stereotype of the 1960s. The
Poppy Project, which runs the refuge for trafficked women, has found
that there are 730 flats, massage parlours and saunas selling sex in
London alone; excluding Westminster, each London borough has, on
average, 19 sites to buy sex, with between four and eight women per
site. Four-fifths of the women are foreign, mainly from eastern Europe
and south-east Asia. British police carried out 343 operations against
traffickers in the 12 months to last March, arresting 1,456 people and
seizing £4.5m in assets. In effect, the sex trade has been
industrialised, with trafficked women expected to "service" as many as
40 clients a day. The competition from brothels using captive women has
pushed down prices on the streets, which means women are often expected
to provide unsafe forms of sex to get by.Research published in 2001 showed that almost two-thirds of prostitutes
in three cities said their main reason for selling sex was to fund a
drug habit, and the Home Office estimates that 95 per cent of street
prostitutes use heroin or crack cocaine. Most prostitutes in Britain
come from poor backgrounds, more than two-thirds enter the sex trade
before the age of 18, and half have suffered sex abuse at home before
being taken up by pimps. None of this supports the arguments of those
who claim that prostitutes and trafficked women are making a free choice
or that the answer to both problems is regulation - legalising some or
all aspects of the sex trade.
and girls to be drawn into prostitution without any demonstrable
decrease in violence or involvement of criminal gangs. The European
countries that have experienced the biggest increases in numbers are
those where there are elements of legalisation, namely Germany, the
Netherlands, Denmark and Italy; in the Australian state of Victoria,
often cited by campaigners for legalisation, the number of prostitutes
is said to have doubled between 1994 and 2002. (Australia and the
Netherlands also have the world's highest number of sex tourists per
capita, supporting the proposition that legalisation normalises the act
of buying sex.) There is evidence, too, that legalisation acts as a
"pull factor" for traffickers; in 2003 Amsterdam city council decided to
close down its street tolerance zone, the mayor declaring that "it
appeared impossible to create a safe and controllable zone for women
that was not open to abuse by organised crime".
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