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Extract of a briefing by the Safety First Coalition Trafficking – the JUSTIFICATION for an increase in deportations and a moralistic crusade against prostitution 1. The public’s understandable concern for victims of trafficking is being exploited to promote a moralistic and dangerous crusade against prostitution. “ . . . anti-trafficking measures are still being used to justify a raft of measures which are aimed at suppressing sex work in general.”[5] It has lead to proposals to criminalise men who buy sex, along the lines of Swedish law. All these measures would push prostitution further underground thus making sex workers more vulnerable to violence.
2. Prostitution is the consensual exchange of sexual services for money. It is not illegal. Those who advocate the criminalisation of clients claim that it is “uniquely degrading” and equal to rape. Sex workers, like any other human being, have always distinguished between the sex they consent to (for money or not), and that which violates their bodies and their will. While many would prefer another job, they also point to the fact that sex work is often better paid than most of the low-waged jobs women do.
3. Anti-trafficking legislation is primarily being used to target immigrant sex workers for raids and deportations. Trafficking is not about prostitution but about poverty, immigration and asylum. Many women from poorer countries come to work in the UK in the hope of improving their and their children’s lives. Others are asylum seekers fleeing war or persecution who have been left without support yet prevented from working legally. How can they survive except by begging or working illegally, including in prostitution? The debt immigrants incur in order to get here and the destitution asylum seekers face, combined with the fear of deportation, lays them open to exploitation. Whether in the sex industry, agricultural, domestic or other service work, exploitation is rife.
4. Trafficking is forced or bonded labour, abduction, kidnapping, false imprisonment, rape, grievous bodily harm, extortion. Existing laws cover all these offences and could be used to prosecute the assailants of women and children, whatever work they are being forced into.
5. Unlike offences of trafficking for non sexual exploitation, [6] legislation on trafficking for prostitution does not require “force, threats or deception” to be proved to convict someone for trafficking. This is contrary to the UN definition of trafficking which is used by most countries. This exceptional treatment reserved for the sex industry has allowed unfounded claims about the size of the problem to go unchallenged. A person who “intentionally arranges or facilitates the arrival in the United Kingdom of another person” is considered to be a trafficker. Anyone who has helped someone who works in the sex industry to come into the UK, leave the UK or travel within the UK can be arrested, convicted and imprisoned. One Brazilian mother in our network was convicted of trafficking and imprisoned for three years for running a working flat where other immigrant worked. Yet the judge agreed that “none of these women was, in fact, coerced by you into acting as a prostitute . . . you treated them in a kindly and hospitable way”. All her possessions, built up over many years of hard work, have been confiscated and she faces losing custody of her seven year old child. Her British citizenship has been withdrawn despite living in the UK for 25 years and she now faces deportation. Her partner was convicted of “trafficking within the UK” for picking her and another woman up at the airport.
6. The statistics on the number of trafficked women in the UK are false. The commonly cited figure that 85% of women working in the sex industry are victims of trafficking (used by Solicitor General Vera Baird on Woman’s Hour), derives from a report 'Sex in the City' (2004) by the Poppy Project. On the basis of a phone survey by a male researcher posing as a client, the report concluded that 80% of women working in “brothels, saunas and massage parlours” were “non British nationals”. This research was condemned as having “serious methodological limitations”[7], yet it is widely quoted as “proof” that most sex workers have been trafficked.
Such a claim has no base in fact and should be exposed. Many industries have seen an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the past few years – agriculture, building, catering, etc. But when it comes to the sex industry no distinction is being made between immigrant women who are working to support themselves and their families, and women who are being held against their will. Why? Why are assumptions being made and figures being misused?
The Poppy Project receives £4.5m from the Ministry of Justice to “assist victims of trafficking”. It is based on the false assumption that prostitution and violence are one and the same. The Poppy Project has a vested interest in promoting “sex trafficking” as a huge and growing problem. So do the police whose trafficking budgets have gone up enormously. While there is much coverage of raids on premises aimed at “liberating” victims of trafficking, the results are rarely covered. Yet most raids have not yielded victims of trafficking but immigrants or asylum seekers who are here of their own free will and are then deported. Concern has been expressed at the “abuses committed in the course of raids .“[8]
The police have refused to say what happened to the 84 women arrested under Pentameter I, but the evidence we have gathered suggests that most have been deported. The press hailed the rescue of 19 victims of trafficking in the 2005 raid on the Birmingham massage parlour Cuddles, but the Home Office later admitted “at no point did any of the women indicate that they were trafficked into the UK.”[9] At least seven were deported.
The “Fagin’s urchins” raids in Slough are a recent example of grossly inaccurate police claims and media hype. Within a day they were exposed as a sham, and the only charges brought against anyone involved were for theft and immigration offences, triggering an official complaint by the Romanian embassy.
Whatever the true numbers of trafficked women may be, they are nowhere near the number of rape victims whose rapists have not been convicted. But despite women pressing for justice and protection from rape, we are not aware of any comparable increase in budgets to improve the police and CPS response to rape or sexual assault, including the rape of sex workers. (On the contrary, funding to anti-rape organisations and services has practically disappeared.) Why? Is it because trafficking has become a smokescreen for immigration raids and deportation?
7. Genuine victims don’t get help. Most women who are victims of trafficking won’t go to the Poppy Project because they work in partnership with the Home Office, the immigration authorities and the police.[10] Others are ineligible for help because of restrictive entrance criteria which specifies that the woman must be “willing to co-operate with the authorities” or must have been forced to make money for others in prostitution in the UK in the previous 30 days. Women Against Rape has been contacted by a number of women who wanted to report their traffickers but the police either refused to take a report or dismissed the report without any investigation on the grounds that it contained insufficient detail.
It was only a determined campaign by Black Women’s Rape Action Project that won the release of a 17-year-old victim of trafficking from an adult prison after she was charged with travelling on false documents. The Joint Committee on Human Rights report on Human Trafficking confirms that “victims may often find themselves treated as immigration offenders and face enforcement actions such as detention and removals.”[11] It called for a review of immigration laws and policies “in the context of their impact on the victims of trafficking.” 2007 research found that “The current system does not guarantee them [trafficked persons] protection, access to services, let alone justice” and that “policy in the UK interprets trafficking primarily as an immigration offence.”[12] Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s refusal to guarantee that those rescued from forced prostitution would not face deportation[13] confirms that the protection of victims is not prioritised.
In addition, the government is accused of legalising trafficking by removing the right of migrant domestic workers to change employer. “This will make it virtually impossible to challenge any maltreatment or abuse, and indeed will encourage it. 32% of domestic workers who registered at Kalayaan during 06-07 had their passports withheld by their employer, 24% had been physically abused and 9% had been sexually abused.”[14]
Allowing victims of trafficking residence permits and other protection has been dismissed by government as raising “large questions of the evasion of immigration control . . .” If women’s safety and welfare were really the priority why shouldn’t a woman who has escaped from a situation where she faced threats, violence and/or rape and fears reprisals have the right to stay in the UK?
8. Criminalising men who buy sex is a diversion from dealing with violence. The government has launched a six month review of the demand for prostitution, and government ministers have been quoted saying that “the pull factor [in trafficking] is the demand for prostituted women.”[15] While the 1999 Swedish law which criminalised men who buy sex is being used as an example, there has been no investigation of its consequences for women’s safety. Police in Sweden recently commented that the law has driven women into the hands of pimps and made it harder for the police to prosecute violent men, including traffickers.
When Women Against Rape met with rape policy heads at the CPS last year, they said that police often decide not to collect evidence such as mobile phone records or forensic blood tests because it was “too expensive”. Research commissioned by the police and council in Ipswich following the tragic murders of five young women, also found that police don’t go after pimps because, again, “it’s too expensive.” (“In Pieces, A review of prostitution, community safety issues and good practice,” August 2007)
Targeting sex workers and clients indiscriminately is cheaper, easier and better for crime figures. But it will do nothing to increase women’s safety, on the contrary. Safety First A coalition of bereaved families, Ipswich residents, church people, nurses, doctors, probation officers, anti-rape and anti-poverty campaigners, trade unionists, prison and drug reformers, sex worker projects co-ordinated by the
English Collective of Prostitutes Tel: 020 7482 2496, 07811 964 171 |