Looks like we\’ve got the numpties writing the reports again:
UP to 12,000 women have been smuggled into Britain and forced to work as prostitutes earning hundreds of millions of pounds for organised crime gangs, reveals a new study.
Sigh. Being smuggled into the country is one thing. Working in the sex trade is another. And being forced to work in the sex trade yet another. Evidence of one is evidence of illegal immigration. Evidence of one and two is evidence of illegal immigration for the purposes of working in hte sex trade.
Only evidence of three is evidence of sex slavery.
The two-year study, known as Project Acumen, revealed that 30,000 women are working in brothels around the country.
Police estimate 17,000 are immigrants and believe 11,800 may have been trafficked into the country.
Right:
The study also found that around 5,000 of the foreign prostitutes working here had suspected they were likely to end up working in the sex industry long before they left home.
That\’s incredibly lame.
What we want to know is what is the number who are forced into sex work….what is the number who are being raped repeatedly?
Shit, did they get Julie Bindel to write this one too?
The probably number of forcibly smuggled sex workers is probably zero. I deduce this from the evidence of previous police raids into brothels where they found many foreign women and expected them all to claim that they were forced into the work when in actual fact none or very few of them were illegal immigrants. Nearly all were from the EU and all were in the UK voluntarily.
I think the report said 2,600 are forced, but elsewhere they say some are “working freelance”, so it could be the “forced” is because they need to pay back the fee asap, not that they are chained to a radioator or have their passport withheld.
Fact is, the way they bandy stats about, it does no credit to them.
Project Acumen divides the couple of hundred migrant sex workers it interviewed three ways. It then extrapolated the results to all 17,000 migrant sex workers it believes exist in England and Wales.
It categorises 2,600 as “trafficked.”
It creates a very large (9,200-strong) second category called ‘vulnerable’, of which it says (take a deep breath):
“The 9,200 vulnerable migrants…have elements of vulnerability to trafficking, but most are likely to fall short of the trafficking threshold. Approximately 3,700 of them are from Asia; there may be significant cultural factors which prevent them from exiting prostitution or seeking help, but they tend to have day to day control over their activities and do not consider themselves to be debt-bonded. A further estimated 4,100 are from Eastern Europe; although many are legally entitled to live and work in the UK, they tend to speak little English and because they live and work in areas they are unfamiliar with they are overly reliant on their controllers. Most made a conscious decision to become involved in prostitution, albeit with limited alternatives, and the financial rewards on offer are considered to be a significant pull factor for these individuals. Additionally, there are around 1,000 vulnerable women from South America and 400 from Africa involved in prostitution, who are highly unlikely to be legally entitled to live and work in the country so operate outside normal societal support networks and systems.”
Sadly, this of course is far too nuanced for our UK media, so it lumps them all together and calls them “sex slaves”, which gives them a nice big number which they then further stretch by 200 to 12,000.
It seems the national media have discovered a new journalistic technique to accompany their shorthand. It’s called “shortbrain.”
I’m trying to get a piece together for my lowly blog later today that will go into Project Acumen in proper detail.
When I started to try and make the movie FREIGHT about sex trafficking, no one would believe me about the size of the problem. The only piece of support I saw was Michael Palin’s Eastern European trip where he geatured a play touring Moldovia to tell villagers not to believe THEIR OWN PEOPLE who enticed them away to more wealthy areas of Europe. Freight is about to be released, it is wrapped in a commercial wrapper, but the message is hard and true. It is like a UK gritty version of Taken. Please check out the facebook page FREIGHTthemovie and click like, and tell all your friends. There are mini films on the you tube channel where the actors talk about the trafficking Freight2010 is the channel