Cracking down on sexual slavery

By Jonathan Roberts / @jroberts82

Being from a tiny rural market town, there was a time when I was an innocent young chap floating through life oblivious to the world of prostitution. It was nice.

It wasn’t until I had dinner with old school friends one night that my eyes began to open. One friend, by then a social worker, explained that our leafy home town had a growing prostitution problem. We all looked on, slightly shocked and ever so slightly intrigued by a juicy bit of local gossip. There were no brothels or knocking shops she explained, but these girls – almost all of European origin – would hang around a local pub, with deals being done via a wink and a nod. It was a problem the police confirmed to me a short time later when I was selected as Parliamentary Candidate for the town.

All these years, and it had been going on right under our noses.

Shortly after I moved to London in 2006, and after a night out with friends in Soho, I was approached by a sad-looking girl, clearly on drugs, who offered me her services. It was something I had never seen before and it was a grim experience. I felt sorry for her but made hastily for the night-bus.

A few years later, again in Soho, I was having an al-fresco lunch with friends and was shocked to see the sheer volume of men coming and going from those creepy stairwells with a ‘model’ sign attached to the door. They were perfectly normal looking blokes paying for sexual services as though they were buying cigarettes from a corner shop.

Then last night, I was having drinks with a friend in a rather swanky London hotel bar. A prim and proper clientele of bored businessmen sipped their single malts in silence, whilst a small number of attractive young ladies worked the room. From time to time, a deal was struck, and off they went.

My social-worker friend opened my eyes; perhaps I wish she hadn’t.

Now, I know that any man writing a piece about prostitution will get a bit of banter come his way, and I’ll live with that, but it is clear that the oldest profession is not only alive and well, but absolutely rife.

The previous Labour government did some sterling work, and Harriet Harman should be commended for ensuring public attention, but where the prostitution debate has gone wrong all these years is that the word ‘prostitute’ acts as a misleading and confusing umbrella term that does not accurately describe what is happening.

To me, the only real prostitutes are the girls who choose to do it, and as far as I am concerned we should let them get on with it. Is it questionable from a moral perspective? Yes, but it is hardly a priority – and perhaps it is time to introduce a licensing regime that can better ensure the health and safety of those involved.

But we also use the word ‘prostitute’ to describe something completely different. Those girls working the streets at incredible risk, drugged up to the eyeballs and often under complete control of their pimps, are not prostitutes. The poor girls illegally trafficked or tricked into the country, later forced to work in backstreet brothels, are not prostitutes either. They are slaves. They do not want to be here and are offering no services through their own volition. They do not have sex with clients, they are being raped by clients – many of whom may be entirely unaware as to the plight of the victim.

Previous efforts to sort the problem have resulted in a scattergun approach, including attempts to outlaw all sex-for-cash transactions, criminalising the working girl in the process and driving the industry further underground where abuse can go unnoticed.

The priority must be to get these women out of the trap – but as far as I can see the Home Office has never published a strategy that deals solely with sexual slavery. A report was published by the police on the scale of sex trafficking last year highlighting 9600 vulnerable women in 7 regions alone, but no strategy relating to the sex industry has been published since 2006.

Of course, it’s not just a job for government. We all have a duty to end this evil of industrialised rape. If David Cameron is serious, I mean, really serious, about the Big Society – where citizens, charities, local groups and government work hand in hand to produce a better society – then this is a good place to start.

I want to see government set up a Big Society Commission to end sexual slavery, bringing charities such as Women Against Rape and, yes, the English Collective of Prostitutes (no, I didn’t know they existed either) together with academics and local organisations to produce a strategy that will actually work across the country. Some will argue we simply do not have the money to invest in such activity, but combating slavery on our shores is not a ‘nice to have’, it is a fundamental basis of a decent, moral big society.