Posted on 09/27/2004 1:15:31 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
THE MAN on the phone says he’s not really supposed to be giving out the details. But, he admits, there are Asian and Eastern European women available tonight. It’s £40 for half an hour. He promises a "whole mixture". In another sauna, the receptionist offers Greeks and Nepalese. "Don’t be nervous," she tells an undercover male reporter. "Just come along and enjoy yourself."
Just four brief phone calls revealed the sex workforce in Edinburgh and Glasgow is truly exotic. As well as a large number of Scottish girls working in the cities’ massage parlours there are women from across the globe who will have spent the weekend having sex with dozens of men for money.
The welfare of prostitutes has long been a serious social problem in Britain, with most selling their bodies and risking sex diseases to feed drug habits, many working the streets and some raped, attacked or murdered. But there is a growing underclass in the seedy world of the sex trade, of foreign women who are being forced to work as poorly paid prostitutes for powerful gangmasters. And some critics fear that proposals to relax Scotland’s prostitution laws could make it a hotspot for the gangs that traffic women.
Human sex slavery is a bigger global problem than it was 200 years ago. But despite its horrors it remains hugely secretive. Sometimes, brief anecdotes are the only grasp campaigners have on the problem, like that of one foreign woman under surveillance by police, who watched her take in 60 clients in a single day. She earned £85. The rest, up to £1,200, went to the men who owned her.
Last week it emerged police were investigating a Glasgow sauna, the Royale in Charing Cross, in connection with claims that the girls working there were sex slaves from the Far East. But that only hit the headlines because a prominent Sheriff, Hugh Neilson, was found on the premises wearing a towel. He is said to have told police he was only there for a shave.
It’s an embarrassing indiscretion for one of Scotland’s most high-profile judicial figures. Neilson presides over the Executive’s pilot youth court and is currently suspended pending an investigation by two senior judges. But what is a far more excruciating notion for Scotland’s legal establishment is speculation about why Neilson may have been there.
It is estimated 700,000 women are trafficked annually worldwide, with at least 1,400 ending up in Britain. Earlier this year, more than 120 were rescued in a London operation.
There has also been an apparent increase in the number of men using prostitutes. Between 1990 and 2000 the percentage of 16-44-year-olds admitting paying for sex doubled to 4.3%, according to a study of 11,000 men in the Lancet medical journal.
Some men regard their use of prostitutes as a necessity. For others it’s a bit of fun. But for the women forced into the sex trade and treated as chattels life can be horrific.
Women and underage girls are lured to Britain in many different ways. Some are brought in quite legally but are bonded though debts of up to £30,000 and forced to work. Some are doped or forcibly taken, passed through Europe and end up in London or the north.
Some are promised work as dancers or waitresses. One ruse being run on Albanian beach resorts involves men who have secured residency in the UK. They regularly ‘fall in love’ with local women out there. They tell the women that if they come back to Britain with them they can get married. Sometimes the woman is anxious about such a big step. If so, she is told she can bring a friend with her. In these cases, both women are taken captive.
Women who escape report being robbed of their passports, raped by gangmasters, threatened with their lives, and sold over and over again to brothels.
In one case, a woman about to give evidence was told by her own brother that he would kill her if she spoke out. The women have to pay for their rent, their food and even their washing powder and can be fined £1,000 if they stray off the route to work.
Most women held as sex slaves do not escape. Some have their movements so tightly controlled that there is no possibility, and some have even jumped out of second and third floor windows. Others are controlled by threats to themselves and their families back home; and others are coerced through brutal physical and sexual assaults.
Jan Macleod, chair of the Roots Out of Prostitution partnership, said the secretive nature of the problem makes it extremely difficult to monitor.
"The official position is that very few women come forward to say they have been forced here and made to work as a prostitute," she said. "The police are quite sure that a number of women who have been picked up over the past few years have been forcibly trafficked but are too afraid to speak out.
"It is a very hard area to work in because a lot of the women come from societies where it would be seen as a breach of their family honour if they were involved in the sex industry, whether or not they were forced into it. They may have been told, and it may be true, that the people holding them know where their families are and they may be threatened that if they give a statement to the police their family will find out about it," she added. "There are a whole range of ways of getting women into this country. But this is a problem that is going to escalate unless the penalties increase."
There are political moves afoot to deal with prostitution in Scotland. Independent MSP Margo MacDonald is pressing forward with a private member’s bill aimed at giving councils the powers to create tolerance zones for prostitutes. It is her second try after MSPs threw out her bill last year.
But Macleod is firmly against the idea. She said: "Where you set up tolerance zones, you get more trafficking. We commissioned research on different countries’ responses to prostitution. In Australia, they set up tolerance zones because they thought it would break the links between prostitution and organised crime but they have grown stronger and the illegal sector has expanded. In Holland, which also has greater tolerance, 60% of the prostitutes are foreign. When you look at that in the wider social and political context, there is something very distasteful about the fact that women from countries with economic problems are brought here to service men in the West."
The Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University completed the first contemporary investigation of trafficking of women into the UK for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
It estimated, using various data, that during 1998 up to 1,420 women were trafficked into the UK for this purpose. Most were likely to be found in ‘off-street’ locations that are seldom subject to regular monitoring. Indeed the researchers raised concerns the majority of police forces have limited knowledge of trafficking and give it limited attention, creating the danger of a climate of toleration.
In Scotland trafficking is still quite rare with most of the sex workers who travel to Britain doing so under their own steam. In fact although there are Dutch, Greek, Nepalese, Asian and Eastern European women working in massage parlours most of the women working off and on the street are Scottish. But the sex industry disregards national borders and there are fears Scotland is playing an increasingly lucrative part of gangs’ networks.
In a recent comprehensive study, London was found to be a European capital of ‘off-street’ prostitution. The government-backed report, Sex in the City, found London hosts more than 8,000 off-street sex workers in 730 flats, parlours and saunas. Only one in five are British. The traffickers can make huge fortunes from their operations, with a large brothel turning over up to £1m a month.
Dozens of women are thought to be held as sex slaves in Scotland’s cities every year. They are often kept in one place for around six months before being moved or sold on. The Scottish Drugs Enforcement Agency, which investigates serious organised crime, is constantly looking for intelligence on human trafficking networks.
The Glasgow probe is believed to centre around the trafficking of Eastern European woman in particular into the city for the illegal sex trade. Raids on Scottish saunas have increased since 2002 when 10 women - from Kosovo, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and Thailand - were found at eight premises in Glasgow city centre.
Strathclyde police are reluctant to give out the details of their latest operation and will only confirm that two saunas have been targeted in the last month by uniformed and plain-clothed officers in relation "criminal activity surrounding the sex industry". But several people involved in running the saunas have been reported to the procurator fiscal.
The problem is becoming so serious a £50,000 project to trace and support women trafficked as sex slaves into Scottish brothels and saunas will be launched at the end of the month. The two-year scheme will see the creation of safe houses and is expected to create better intelligence on the criminals behind the trafficking. Usually sex slaves are deported within hours of police raids, with little or no information supplied. Once home, they can be confronted again by racketeers.
Jim Coleman, deputy leader of Glasgow City Council, has led a crusade against the sex trade, fighting against lap dancing clubs and prostitution, which he believes flies in the face of every effort to combat social exclusion.
Coleman said: "We are trying to close down every sauna in Glasgow. If that means the problem moves elsewhere, to private flats, then we deal with it there. If we have a case where 30 men a day are going up and down the stairs of a tenement we can deal with that because it’s an antisocial behaviour issue. But if we are going to tackle prostitution we must address it as a social problem."
FACT OR FANTASY IN THE WORLD OF TRAFFICKING
ACCORDING to the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit of the London Metropolitan University, there are a number of common misunderstandings about trafficking in women:
Myth - Women who are trafficked were involved in prostitution in their home country anyway.
Fact - Although some were involved in prostitution, many were not. Deceptive recruitment is extremely common.
Myth - Trafficked women choose to migrate and use illegal methods.
Fact - Although many women from poorer countries do want to migrate to improve their lives, the vast majority cannot do this legitimately or without some assistance. This facilitates exploitation.
Myth - They earn a lot of money.
Fact - The size of the debt to the traffickers and the charges women are forced to pay once they are working within the destination country means that most hold onto very little of the money they earn. If they want to return home the traffickers impose another charge which the women then have to work to pay off. The reality is that the vast majority of trafficked women earn little or no money at all. When they are detected or arrested by police most have no financial resources at all, and return home with no more than they left with.
Myth - It is a way for unskilled women to improve their standard of living
Fact - While in the destination country their standard of living is fairly terrible too; most live in shared flats with limited facilities and poor food. The collapse of many economies and the fact that the highest rates of unemployment are among women, means that some trafficked women have professional qualifications, but no legitimate means of earning a living applying their skills.
It almost seems to be set up so that these women can be exploited. I mean, if they cannot be helped and protected long enough to have a trial and convict some of these slavers, then there is something wrong. Punishing slavers should be a high priority.
There are few things more pathetic than a man who pays for sex.
....well, you pay for it in one way for another......
/sarcasm
Does an engagement ring count?
Thank you, Gloria Steinem.
No, an engagement ring is what you pay for NOT having sex, ever again.
These women know what the job is they are going to do in another country and are not innocent bambi's. I am not saying these horror stories never happen but the folks spinning these tales have an agenda also.
LOL!
this is an adbomination to GOD
Never was a truer word spoken. Ask any married man at a convention w/o his spouse.
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