The UK\’s biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.
The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.
It is to laugh, no?
Everything, all this criminalising punters who rent a woman controlled for gain, Harry Harman\’s campaign, Julie Bindel, has all been based on lies. No, not just bad information, but ideologically driven lies.
It\’s worth reading the whole piece in full. Even when they used a wider definition of trafficking (ie, transport for prostitution with the agreement of those transported) they still didn\’t find anybody in Pentameter II.
There\’s also a fuller werite up of the story here.
It\’s by Nick Davies (Flat Earth News) of course and good on The Guardian for publishing it. For they\’ve been one of the worst papers in spreading the story themselves.
I simply cannot wait to see the coverage of this elsewhere. I\’ve been shouting about how the published figures were cock for ages: schadenfreude isn\’t pretty but it is enjoyable.
The only thing I find surprising about this report is that it was published by the Grauniad…
So, “trafficked hookers” joins –
second-hand smoke,
6 grammes of salt a day,
3 – 4 units of alcohol a day,
efficacy of speed cameras,
efficacy of CCTV,
catastrophic global warming
etc., etc.,
… all based upon dodgy statistics or outright lies.
I fail to understand why this isn’t more widely acknowledged. It isn’t just George Bush and Tony Blair who will manufacture evidence in support of a cause they believe is right, this is a ubiquitous trait, and the people who are most likely to do it are those most convinced they are right – an implication of this is that the righteous ones – environmental NGOs, aid agencies and campaigners of all stripes etc. are very prone to this sort of things. The more sure you are you are right, the less likely you are even to notice you are doing anything wrong.
“I’ve been shouting about how the published figures were cock for ages…”
I see what you did there… 😉
The whol enotion of sex trafficking is cock. I first came across this when I worked at Index on Censorship and we were supplied with info by the Poppy Project, oh yes, and AI, way back in…99 I guess. Describing women held in modern slavery – how were they held? Chains? Manacles? No, their pimps kept hold of their passports… I disputed that this amounted to slavery. I suggested if I was being raped thirty times a day,a nd the only thing keeping me in my billet was that my pimp had my passport, I would, umm, leave…. My poohpoohing was cruelly ignored.
It’s all hokum, always has been. Feminist lies – feminist NGOs at the heart of government, unchallenged and unacountable, warping policy for idealogical reasons. In *this* instance they have been exposed – how effective are the lies in other areas?
Yes, Julia–we all see what he did there.
Luis:
Actually, Luis, I think you are either wrong or (more likely) engaging in a type of dissimulation not that different from the deliberate distortions that form the subject of discussion.
It’s not “people who think they are right” that seem motivated to stack the deck–it’s a certain kind of people who, thinking they are right, wish
to manufacture evidence, etc. I’d go even further in suggesting that the very same type people are moved to behave in similar fashion whether or not they believe they’re right (or, similarly, believe themselves to be right no matter in what they are engaged.)
And you know exactly to whom I refer.
is it Barbra Streisand?
Actually the Eastern Daily Press broke this story over a year ago. An operation involving 55 police forces, the Specialist Human Trafficing Agency and the Immigration mob raiding massage parlours across the land produced a handful of arrests, none connected with white slavery or human trafficking.
If the Guardian is reporting a more recent operation then we can only conclude that those in charge took their earlier failure as evidence the problem really exists and just needs more resources to solve.
So who’ll accept this wager?
I’ll put up a decent bottle of scotch against anyone who thinks we won’t be reading of yet another operation like this within the next fifteen months and that it is just as much a lemon as the one reported by the Grauniad.
l confronted Mary Honeyball on this issue many moons ago. She couldn’t or wouldn’t answer anything. Only result l got was being banned and my posts deleted! 🙂
l do wish however that these Specialist Police Units would investigate these Eastern European femmes fatales who extort vast amounts of money and much more besides from their male victims.
…. l have a Bulgarian wife 😉
“No, their pimps kept hold of their passports… I disputed that this amounted to slavery.”
It is coercive and the people who do it are gangsters.
Sepian
“these Specialist Police Units ”
Nick Davies should do CEOP next.
Sepian