Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution

[Lou 9208]

Surprised of the result?

I am not!

 

Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails

The Guardian, 20-10-09

 

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.

Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.

 

While some prosecutions have been made, the Guardian investigation suggests the number of people who have been brought into the UK and forced against their will into prostitution is much smaller than claimed; and that the problem of trafficking is one of a cluster of factors which expose sex workers to coercion and exploitation.

Acting on the distorted information, the government has produced a bill, now moving through its final parliamentary phase, which itself has provoked an outcry from sex workers who complain that, instead of protecting them, it will expose them to extra danger.

 

When police in July last year announced the results of Operation Pentameter Two, Jacqui Smith, then home secretary, hailed it as "a great success". Its operational head, Tim Brain, said it had seriously disrupted organised crime networks responsible for human trafficking. "The figures show how successful we have been in achieving our goals," he said.

 

Those figures credited Pentameter with "arresting 528 criminals associated with one of the worst crimes threatening our society". But an internal police analysis of Pentameter, obtained by the Guardian after a lengthy legal struggle, paints a very different picture.

 

The analysis, produced by the police Human Trafficking Centre in Sheffield and marked "restricted", suggests there was a striking shortage of sex traffickers to be found in spite of six months of effort by all 55 police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together with the UK Border Agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish government, the Crown Prosecution Service and various NGOs in what was trumpeted as "the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking".

The analysis reveals that 10 of the 55 police forces never found anyone to arrest. And 122 of the 528 arrests announced by police never happened: they were wrongly recorded either through honest bureaucratic error or apparent deceit by forces trying to chalk up arrests which they had not made. Among the 406 real arrests, more than half of those arrested (230) were women, and most were never implicated in trafficking at all.

 

Of the 406 real arrests, 153 had been released weeks before the police announced the success of the operation: 106 of them without any charge at all and 47 after being cautioned for minor offences. Most of the remaining 253 were not accused of trafficking: 73 were charged with immigration breaches; 76 were eventually convicted of non-trafficking offences involving drugs, driving or management of a brothel; others died, absconded or disappeared off police records.

 

Although police described the operation as "the culmination of months of planning and intelligence-gathering from all those stakeholders involved", the reality was that, during six months of national effort, they found only 96 people to arrest for trafficking, of whom 67 were charged. Forty-seven of those never made it to court.

Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking, including two women who had originally been "rescued" as supposed victims. Seven of them were acquitted. The end result was that, after raiding 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours all over the UK, Pentameter finally convicted of trafficking a grand total of only 15 men and women.

 

Police claimed that Pentameter used the international definition of sex trafficking contained in the UN's Palermo protocol, which involves the use of coercion or deceit to transport an unwilling man or woman into prostitution. But, in reality, Pentameter used a very different definition, from the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, which makes it an offence to transport a man or woman into prostitution even if this involves assisting a willing sex worker.

 

Internal police documents reveal that 10 of Pentameter's 15 convictions were of men and women who were jailed on the basis that there was no evidence of their coercing the prostitutes they had worked with. There were just five men who were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes. These genuinely were traffickers, but none of them was detected by Pentameter, although its investigations are still continuing.

 

Two of them ? Zhen Xu and Fei Zhang ? had been in custody since March 2007, a clear seven months before Pentameter started work in October 2007.

 

The other three, Ali Arslan, Edward Facuna and Roman Pacan, were arrested and charged as a result of an operation which began when a female victim went to police in April 2006, well over a year before Pentameter Two began, although the arrests were made while Pentameter was running.

 

The head of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, Grahame Maxwell, who is chief constable of North Yorkshire, acknowledged the importance of the figures: "The facts speak for themselves. I'm not trying to argue with them in any shape or form," he said.

 

He said he had commissioned fresh research from regional intelligence units to try to get a clearer picture of the scale of sex trafficking. "What we're trying to do is to get it gently back to some reality here," he said.

 

"It's not where you go down on every street corner in every street in Britain, and there's a trafficked individual.

 

"There are more people trafficked for labour exploitation than there are for sexual exploitation. We need to redress the balance here. People just seem to grab figures from the air."

 

Groups who work with trafficked women declined to comment on the figures from the Pentameter Two police operation but said that the problem of trafficking was real.

Ruth Breslin, research and development manager for Eaves which runs the Poppy project for victims of trafficking, said: "I don't know the ins and outs of the police operation. It is incredibly difficult to establish prevalence because of the undercover and potentially criminal nature of trafficking and also, we feel, because of the fear that many women have in coming forward."

 

The internal analysis of Pentameter notes that some records could not be found and Brain, who is chief constable of Gloucestershire, argued that some genuine traffickers may have been charged with non-trafficking offences because of the availability of evidence but he conceded that he could point to no case where this had happened.

 

He said the Sexual Offences Act was "not user friendly" although he said he could not recall whether he had pointed this out to government since the end of Pentameter Two.

 

Parliament is in the final stages of passing the policing and crime bill which contains a proposal to clamp down on trafficking by penalising any man who has sex with a woman who is "controlled for gain" even if the man is genuinely ignorant of the control. Although the definition of "controlled" has been tightened, sex workers' groups complain that the clause will encourage women to prove that they are not being controlled by working alone on the streets or in a flat without a maid, thus making them more vulnerable to attack.

 

There are also fears that if the new legislation deters a significant proportion of customers, prostitutes will be pressurised to have sex without condoms in order to bring them back.

[fortunateone 156618]

Thanks for posting this. Very important info, since we here see time and time again the case against decriminalization of our legal prostitution is all about trafficking, (and pimps and so on). On rabble.ca these facts are presented time and time again, and still the debators will pull numbers out of their collective asses in order to force the issue to be about myths about sex work, and not about the reality.

 

susan davis posted there about a lie in a newspaper story that claims that she is promoting an Olympic brothel in Vancouver. Within the same thread someone actually quotes the story and tries to tell us that yes she did say she wants a brothel opened up specifically for the Olympics. She stated categorically that that is NOT what she said, she was misquoted and the story was a deliberate lie, yet these people actually quote from the article to tell her what she said. OMG, that is too much.

 

The story you posted with the real facts will be quoted by these abolitionists ONLY showing that 25,000 number and ignoring everything else and use it to prove that prostitution is evil.

[Lou 9208]

Abolitionist (or anti-prostitution groups I should say) started to organize themselves when the international movement for the rights of sex workers got stronger, which happened at the end of the 90's. They have been using trafficking as their main argument to keep prostitution illegal - statu quo - or to criminalize only clients since, in their book, all women are victims and are raped every time they have a sexual relation with a client. I have been interested in the topic of trafficking for years, I have interviewed police corps in Canada and Asia, visited rescued organizations while I was on vacation in Asia (that are all empty, I swear I saw them), and a lot more. I know for sure that trafficking of women as presented by these organizations is a big myth and they know it also. Important police officers also told me that they believe it's a big myth and that money and energies should be put elsewhere. People who cross borders illegally do it for work but rarely for sex work... They get jobs with horrible conditions in sweatshops, restaurants and stuff like that, rarely, rarely they travel for sex work since it is not the biggest demand and not all women are capable of working as a prostitue neither. The women who travel legally or illegally for prostitution do it in most case voluntary even tho sometimes they are victims of abuse.

 

South East Asia Unesco did a study because they were wondering where these absurd numbers where coming from. They also told me they believe it is a big lie that pleases the American governement and others. I have all this on tape, not only in my head!!! And I promise it wont stay in my drawer for very long:)

 

Anyway, I could go on for ever, but what is sad and should be said here is that the abolitionist movement wan on some points. We can now be arrested (us, drivers, associate...) in Canada when we travel from a province to another for sex work because it is now consider trafficking.

 

Here is a great article (in French sorry) about the Mondial of Foot Ball (soccer) in 2006 where 40 000 prostitutes were expected to be trafficked for the big game. This article recounts where the lie came from, how it evoluated and then explains the reality (no victim of trafficking!!!!). If I can find it in english, I'll post it.

 

You should fallow the link to read it since it is too long to be posted.

 

http://endehors.org/news/une-legende-urbaine-les-40-000-prostituees-d-europe-de-l-est-importees-en-allemagne-pour-la-coupe-du-monde-de-football

[Susie 1472]

trafficking myths are the biggest threat to our industry presently. i read an estimated 40,000 wome and childrena re to trafficked i vancouver during the games....yeah right!

 

i love that story from the UK and am ging to use it in the Sally Ann meeting coming up. if you remember they are fundraising to "fight trafficking".....morons.....

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

... Here is a great article (in French sorry) about the Mondial of Foot Ball (soccer) in 2006 where 40 000 prostitutes were expected to be trafficked for the big game. This article recounts where the lie came from, how it evoluated and then explains the reality (no victim of trafficking!!!!). If I can find it in english, I'll post it ...

 

Here is an article by Brendan O'Neill about the reports that have been splashed across the media for the last little while that claim 40,000 prostitutes/trafficked women will be in South Africa for the 2010 World Cup:

 

(http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8324/, 18 Mar 2010)

Stop this illicit trade in bullshit stories

 

Apparently 40,000 ?hookers? will be trafficked to South Africa for the World Cup. Where have we heard that story before?

 

David Beckham might not be going to the World Cup in South Africa this year, but 40,000 hookers will be. That is literally what a headline on the NBC sports website claims: ?40,000 hookers making their way to South Africa for World Cup.? Other media outlets have been a bit more PC: ?40,000 prostitutes to enter South Africa?, says the UK

Daily Telegraph

; ?40,000 prostitutes bound for South Africa?, says the

New York Daily News

. Apparently many of these hookers will be trafficked into South Africa against their will, forced into a life of grimy prostitution for the satisfaction of drunken football fans.

 

It sounds scary. And also eerily familiar. Where have we heard that figure of ?40,000 hookers/prostitutes/trafficked women? before? That?s right, during the last World Cup, in Germany in 2006. In May 2006, a month before the World Cup kicked off, the UK

Independent

warned of ?40,000 women being imported [to Germany] for the "use" of visiting fans?. It said the ?combination of sport, booze and sex is a huge problem, encouraging degrading attitudes and sometimes actual violence towards women?. One British columnist said in May 2006 that ?anything up to 40,000 extra sex workers are likely to be smuggled into [Germany] in the coming weeks?. We were told that inebriated footie fans would have sex with these ?slave women? in specially built ?wooden performance boxes resembling toilets?.

 

There was only one problem with the alarming claims made in 2006: They were codswallop. Utterly unfounded. A big bag of nonsense. A study carried out by the Council of the European Union (CEU) and published in 2007 found: ?There was no sign whatsoever of the alleged 40,000 prostitutes/forced prostitues ? a figure repeatedly reported ? who were to be brought to Germany for the 2006 World Cup.? Far from 40,000 enslaved women trussed up in ?sex sheds?, the CEU report said the German authorities, having spent millions of Euros and thousands of hours of police time on the lookout for trafficked women, found only five cases of ?human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation? in relation to the 2006 World Cup.

 

Yet now, four years later and on the other side of the world, we have the exact same headline-grabbing figure being spouted in relation to South Africa. During the 2006 World Cup, the figure of 40,000 seems to have orginiated with the American feminist group, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), though it?s unclear how they arrived at their ? let?s be generous here ? ?estimation?. The figure of 40,000 trafficked women for this year?s World Cup seems to have originated, bizarrely, with South Africa?s Central Drug Authority (CDA), though again it?s unclear how they arrived at this super-neat, familiar number. Maybe they were browsing old editions of European newspapers from 2006, including Britain?s

Independent

and

Guardian

, and thought: ?40,000 enslaved whores? If it can happen in Europe, it could definitely happen in Africa.?

 

I have a new theory about how these mad, bad and hysterical scare-numbers are arrived at. In recent years, every time there has been a major international sporting event, a motley crew of government officials, campaigning feminists, pliant journalists and NGOs have claimed that the movement of thousands of

men

to strange

foreign countries

where there will be lots of

alcohol

and

horniness

will result in the enslavement of women for the purposes of sexual pleasure. Obviously. And every time they have simply doubled the made-up scare figures from the last international sporting event, to make it look like this problem of sport/sex/slavery gets worse year on year.

 

So during the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000, really the first time that a sporting event was almost ruined by hysterial official and radical scaremongering about a new ?sex slave trade?, it was said there were 10,000 sex slaves. ?During the 2000 Sydney Olympics, an estimated 10,000 women were imported [to Australia]?, says one study of the ?new global sex trade?. In fact, while there is evidence that a few more, generally poor Australian women made a living as prostitutes during the 2000 Games, there is no hard evidence of any women having been ?imported? to Australia for the purposes of sexual exploitation.

 

And yet, when it came to the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, what did the scaremongers do? They simply doubled the figures, from 10,000 to 20,000. ?As many as 20,000 people [will] be trafficked into Athens to work as prostitutes?, reports claimed. There will be an ?anticipated increase of 20,000 forced prostitues?, warned feminist campaigners. In reality, the Greek authorities discovered only 181 instances of people having been trafficked into Greece for the whole of 2004, and not a single one of these instances was ?trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation? ? the majority were foreign children being used as beggars or as labour in Greece, which means they were defined as having been trafficked. Twenty-thousand ?forced prostitutes?? The Greek authorities found none.

　

And yet, what did the trafficking obsessives do when the German World Cup came round two years later? They doubled the figures again, from 20,000 to 40,000 (where in the real world the figures for trafficked prostitutes were zero for Greece and five for Germany). I guess we should be grateful that they have shown enormous restraint in relation to this year?s World Cup and have stuck with the 40,000 figure instead of doubling it to 80,000. Given how wrong they were during Sydney, Athens and Germany, why should we believe a single word they say about South Africa? Of course, South Africa is not Germany, and as a result of poverty and underdevelopment many African women and young people are forced to do jobs they would rather not do. But the idea that they are ?enslaved? is mad, and the idea that their misfortunes are caused by the arrival of apparently leering footie fans from the West is politically and historically illiterate and a distraction from any serious debate about development.

The sport-sex-slavery scare springs from officials? and

 

campaigners? warped minds rather than from anything remotely resembling evidence. As an in-depth study by a Canadian research group discovered recently, ?the commonly held notion of a link between mega sports events [and] tafficking in persons is an unsubstantiated assumption?. Profoundly this scare speaks to an elite fear of unpredictable movements across borders, of working-class male behaviour, and of Third World women being easily tricked into a life of sexual bondage. Already, for the London 2012 Olympics, the UK government is scaremongering about ?international criminal gangs? tricking and abducting women from abroad and selling them for sex in London?, to use Harriet Harman?s hysterical words. How many forced hookers will they claim are arriving in London for 2012? Forty-thousand again? Or maybe they?ll double it to 80,000? Any advances on 80,000? Who?d like to take a bet on this perverted new sport?

[rileydaniels 1901]

No one is asking me and I am not sharing my story.

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

Yes, The Independent in the UK is now boldly citing "up to 100,000" sex workers are headed to RSA for the World Cup:

The World Cup in South Africa will attract more than just the 2.2 million tourists who have bought match tickets. Up to 100,000 prostitutes will enter the region this summer, an influx which will swell an already out of control industry...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/inside-south-africas-brothels-the-world-cup-and-the-sex-trade-1989550.html

 

The bidding remains open ... the sky is the limit ... going once ...

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

Story by Les Carpenter, for Yahoo! Sports, 10 June 2010:

 

http://g.sports.yahoo.com/soccer/world-cup/news/debunking-world-cups-biggest-myth--fbintl_lc-prostitutes061010.html

JOHANNESBURG ? Of all the wild, fantastic stories that blossomed in the months before the World Cup, there was the rumor that South Africa would soon be flooded with 40,000 prostitutes. They would come streaming across the border from places like Zimbabwe and Mozambique, all of them ready to satisfy the demands of a half-million soccer fans in an endless futbol orgy.

 

HIV warnings were sounded. Churches shouted their scorn. And a wary country braced for the impending onslaught of sex-hungry soccer pilgrims.

 

Now, with the World Cup starting on Friday, the fans have poured in on airplanes. There are lines at restaurants and traffic jams on the freeways.

 

The only thing there aren?t many of is prostitutes.

 

?We laughed at that [40,000] number,? said a government security source who asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak publicly. ?There was no evidence there would ever be 40,000 prostitutes.?

 

The government has been watching, the source said, monitoring ads in sex newspapers, websites on the internet and listening to chatter in the world of human trafficking. It has determined that a few women have arrived in recent days. Investigators have noticed a small spike in ads. Some of these sex workers have come from neighboring countries, usually smuggled in because they believe they can make more money during the World Cup.

 

But the only evidence of any organized prostitution rings ? the kind of movement that would generate great numbers ? is that there appear to be more women from Thailand. Yet even then, the source suspects, there are hundreds of them. Not thousands.

 

?Where are they going to get accommodation?? the source asked. ?They have to advertise too and there is no evidence that they are.?

 

More likely, the source continued, are that large groups of fans might bring along one or two women who will be paid to have sex with the men.

 

Still, the fascination of a sudden arrival of sex workers on an unsuspecting South Africa remains. Especially among the women who stand to be most affected by an onslaught of foreign competition.

 

?Is it true? Are they really coming?? a prostitute who gave the name ?Polly? said as she sat outside the restaurant Tivoli next to the Balalaika Hotel in the upper-class suburb of Sandton one night last week. ?I?ve heard there are 40,000 women coming to South Africa for World Cup. But is it true??

 

She said she saw an interview on television with a high-ranking government official a few weeks ago ? she can?t remember who ? and he was asked the question: Were there really 40,000 prostitutes heading to South Africa? He stared at the camera, she said. He said nothing. It was the end of the show, the last question. And slowly the broadcast faded into a commercial.

 

She took this to mean the rumors were true.

 

?I think it?s so unfair,? she added. ?There are lots and lots of beautiful girls in South Africa. Why do they have to come here??

 

Apparently they aren?t. It?s just the myth of 40,000.

 

No one is quite sure where the number originated. But in the past few years, whenever a place holds a great sporting event the rumor of a flood of prostitutes soon blossoms. And for some reason that number is 40,000.

 

Laura Agustin, a sociologist who studies and blogs about migrant sex workers, calls it ?a fantasy number.?

 

?It has no basis,? she said.

 

There have never been studies on prostitution and large events, she continued. No reasonable data exists. Rather, people become obsessed with the idea that groups of men traveling for sporting gatherings like the Olympics and World Cup are going to be so desperate for sex that they will demand prostitutes. And therefore truckloads of women have to be brought in.

 

Back in 2006, when the World Cup was held in Germany ? where prostitution was legal ? there was talk that the country would be buried by 40,000 sex workers. Interest in them was said to be great. Yet they mostly wound up sitting around brothels waiting for the parade of willing men that never happened. Later, a study commissioned by the European Union and uncovered by the British internet magazine Spiked found only 33 cases of human trafficking at that time. And just five of those cases turned out to be related to the World Cup.

 

?I don?t think [soccer] fans should be targeted like this,? Agustin said.

 

And yet they apparently are.

 

?It?s muddled thinking, however,? she wrote on a recent blog post. ?Stag parties, in which groups of men ritualistically drink and whoop it up together often have a sexual element, but that usually consists of paying dancers or sex workers to come perform. That?s a contract in a party setting, not the rape of the Sabine women.?

 

The latest rumor was repeated last month in a story by the Christian Science Monitor, which quoted the magic 40,000 figure and even spoke to a handful of prostitutes from Zimbabwe, one of which suggested she might be able to use her newfound World Cup earnings to buy a car.

 

?I don?t think there will be that much business,? the government security source said.

 

Thus destroying the myth of a World Cup that was going to be all about sex.

 

Instead, it will be all about soccer.

[FineWineDiva 7343]

Surprised of the result?

I am not!

 

Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails

The Guardian, 20-10-09

 

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.

Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.

 

While some prosecutions have been made, the Guardian investigation suggests the number of people who have been brought into the UK and forced against their will into prostitution is much smaller than claimed; and that the problem of trafficking is one of a cluster of factors which expose sex workers to coercion and exploitation.

Acting on the distorted information, the government has produced a bill, now moving through its final parliamentary phase, which itself has provoked an outcry from sex workers who complain that, instead of protecting them, it will expose them to extra danger.

 

When police in July last year announced the results of Operation Pentameter Two, Jacqui Smith, then home secretary, hailed it as "a great success". Its operational head, Tim Brain, said it had seriously disrupted organised crime networks responsible for human trafficking. "The figures show how successful we have been in achieving our goals," he said.

 

Those figures credited Pentameter with "arresting 528 criminals associated with one of the worst crimes threatening our society". But an internal police analysis of Pentameter, obtained by the Guardian after a lengthy legal struggle, paints a very different picture.

 

The analysis, produced by the police Human Trafficking Centre in Sheffield and marked "restricted", suggests there was a striking shortage of sex traffickers to be found in spite of six months of effort by all 55 police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together with the UK Border Agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish government, the Crown Prosecution Service and various NGOs in what was trumpeted as "the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking".

The analysis reveals that 10 of the 55 police forces never found anyone to arrest. And 122 of the 528 arrests announced by police never happened: they were wrongly recorded either through honest bureaucratic error or apparent deceit by forces trying to chalk up arrests which they had not made. Among the 406 real arrests, more than half of those arrested (230) were women, and most were never implicated in trafficking at all.

 

Of the 406 real arrests, 153 had been released weeks before the police announced the success of the operation: 106 of them without any charge at all and 47 after being cautioned for minor offences. Most of the remaining 253 were not accused of trafficking: 73 were charged with immigration breaches; 76 were eventually convicted of non-trafficking offences involving drugs, driving or management of a brothel; others died, absconded or disappeared off police records.

 

Although police described the operation as "the culmination of months of planning and intelligence-gathering from all those stakeholders involved", the reality was that, during six months of national effort, they found only 96 people to arrest for trafficking, of whom 67 were charged. Forty-seven of those never made it to court.

Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking, including two women who had originally been "rescued" as supposed victims. Seven of them were acquitted. The end result was that, after raiding 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours all over the UK, Pentameter finally convicted of trafficking a grand total of only 15 men and women.

 

Police claimed that Pentameter used the international definition of sex trafficking contained in the UN's Palermo protocol, which involves the use of coercion or deceit to transport an unwilling man or woman into prostitution. But, in reality, Pentameter used a very different definition, from the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, which makes it an offence to transport a man or woman into prostitution even if this involves assisting a willing sex worker.

 

Internal police documents reveal that 10 of Pentameter's 15 convictions were of men and women who were jailed on the basis that there was no evidence of their coercing the prostitutes they had worked with. There were just five men who were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes. These genuinely were traffickers, but none of them was detected by Pentameter, although its investigations are still continuing.

 

Two of them ? Zhen Xu and Fei Zhang ? had been in custody since March 2007, a clear seven months before Pentameter started work in October 2007.

 

The other three, Ali Arslan, Edward Facuna and Roman Pacan, were arrested and charged as a result of an operation which began when a female victim went to police in April 2006, well over a year before Pentameter Two began, although the arrests were made while Pentameter was running.

 

The head of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, Grahame Maxwell, who is chief constable of North Yorkshire, acknowledged the importance of the figures: "The facts speak for themselves. I'm not trying to argue with them in any shape or form," he said.

 

He said he had commissioned fresh research from regional intelligence units to try to get a clearer picture of the scale of sex trafficking. "What we're trying to do is to get it gently back to some reality here," he said.

 

"It's not where you go down on every street corner in every street in Britain, and there's a trafficked individual.

 

"There are more people trafficked for labour exploitation than there are for sexual exploitation. We need to redress the balance here. People just seem to grab figures from the air."

 

Groups who work with trafficked women declined to comment on the figures from the Pentameter Two police operation but said that the problem of trafficking was real.

Ruth Breslin, research and development manager for Eaves which runs the Poppy project for victims of trafficking, said: "I don't know the ins and outs of the police operation. It is incredibly difficult to establish prevalence because of the undercover and potentially criminal nature of trafficking and also, we feel, because of the fear that many women have in coming forward."

 

The internal analysis of Pentameter notes that some records could not be found and Brain, who is chief constable of Gloucestershire, argued that some genuine traffickers may have been charged with non-trafficking offences because of the availability of evidence but he conceded that he could point to no case where this had happened.

 

He said the Sexual Offences Act was "not user friendly" although he said he could not recall whether he had pointed this out to government since the end of Pentameter Two.

 

Parliament is in the final stages of passing the policing and crime bill which contains a proposal to clamp down on trafficking by penalising any man who has sex with a woman who is "controlled for gain" even if the man is genuinely ignorant of the control. Although the definition of "controlled" has been tightened, sex workers' groups complain that the clause will encourage women to prove that they are not being controlled by working alone on the streets or in a flat without a maid, thus making them more vulnerable to attack.

 

There are also fears that if the new legislation deters a significant proportion of customers, prostitutes will be pressurised to have sex without condoms in order to bring them back.

How Interesting !!