Sex and drug trafficking: when liberal attitudes aren’t enough

One sees some odd things these days, but this one just about takes the biscuit. Working with “the sex industry” in the UK, the above company “challenges exploitation, human trafficking and under-age working by encouraging potential abuses to be reported so investigations can be carried out and victims rescued” it says there on a website pointed out to me by a Mancunian Slogger.

It seems like a decent enough idea in theory (the world’s oldest profession is unlikely ever to go away, and it’s another plank supporting my theory that women should really be in charge and yet somehow aren’t) but on closer inspection there are various worrying things about it.

For a start, the logo suggests that the organisation offers ‘standards against female exploitation’. But go to this site here, enter, and you will see that the emporium featured (while carrying the reassuring Safe logo) is, um, a very raunchy and somewhat tatty knocking shop. Given the content, I severely doubt that it’s run by women, so how is this not exploiting women?

Safe turns out to be part of Redline UK, whose website proclaims how ‘RedlineUK recognises that many people become involved with the sex industry entirely out of their own choice and free will’. Do they? How many women do then, eh? I realise I’m decades out of date here, but in the 1970s I did a study of this sector and trust me folks, The Happy Hooker is a myth. The vast majority of women in it are exercising their free will to raise money for the next fix, pay off the pimp who’s kn0cking seven bells out of them, or feed a kid left behind when Feckless Frankie f**ked off in search of pastures new.

Secondly, I must fess up to an emotional block here. The address of the bordello I linked to earlier is at 464 Bury Old Road Prestwich, Manchester M25 1NL. That’s just a few hundred yards from St Margaret’s Primary School (where I was educated up to age 11), just after a Parade of shops that used to feature nothing more offensive than the El Paso Supper Bar (a chippy) and car dealers Woodburn & Spence (where I bought my first 1965 Mark II Mini 850, BKU 351C). It’s about twenty minutes walk from the quasi-posh neighbourhood where I had me broughtins up, as they say in Liverpool.

When I was being brought up in a genteel manner there from 1951 until 1966, a bordello would’ve been unthinkable: enthusiastic amateurs were the best one could hope for, and back then that really was a decidedly vain hope. So while I don’t want to get all Nimby about it, what about the neighbours whose environment is being exploited by this shining example of Grant Shapps entrepreneurial endeavour at its best? And HowTF did Prestwich go from aspirational twentieth century decency to massage parlour mecca in sixty years?

There are two reasons why I’ve never been to a brothel (as a client) in my life. The first is that I was never within a million light years of being that desperate; and the second is that, call me right on and all that, I fail to see how fucking someone for money is anything other than exploitation – either of me, or the ‘sex worker’. I leave the ‘u’ in the f-word there on this occasion because that’s all bordello sex is ever going to be: using a girlie as a meat wank-puppet. Fuck is an ugly word when used outside of anger or intimacy, but running call girls is an ugly business.

When I first moved to Brixton in 1977, squatter pimps took over the empty house next door and turned it into a full-on whorehouse. I saw the ‘sex-workers’ (another obscenely sanitised pc bollocks term) come and go, with their black eyes and needle-scratched forearms and thin faces. How in God’s name have we learned not to be shocked by such slavery any more….and why do we think that a posh shot on a poxy website run by a bunch of shit-for-brains bullies with a reassuring ‘SAFE’ logo on it suddenly makes the activity something different?

“Well then grumpy old man,” I hear you call, “WTF would you do then?”

Let’s look at Redline UK for a minute, and then you might understand. I’m going to continue how I started with this lot, because I think they are suffering from Wishful Unthinking Tendency. They exist (they insist) to be ‘ the first organization (sic) prepared to invest time, money and expertise in support of those within the sex industry that are opposed to the trafficking of women and underage girls and want to do something about it.’

To which my opening two question are 1. And who these knights of the night exactly? 2. What exactly do they want to do about it?

If they are ‘opposed to the trafficking of women’ why are they selling women to men? Are they merely coppers directing the f**king traffic, or are they, er, getting rich on the trade? And if it’s a trade, then it’s trafficking innit?

‘The Sex Industry’ makes it sound like some of these slimeballs are about to launch on the bloody Stock Exchange for crying out loud. These people aren’t sex marketeers selling sex with sex workers to hip-hop sexual buccaneers: they’re sociopathic traders in miserable depravity acting as cunt-pushers to sadly inadequate willy-pullers and, here and there, young blokes with too much beer on board and not enough beyond sawdust in the brain. Witness my informant’s remark in the email about this sordid business:

“My husband was surprised at the way his cousin and his cousin’s mates openly discussed going there as if it was a normal thing to do on a night out – it seemed like a culture change to him…..I was particularly appalled by the reviews on “punter net” which were explicit….My worries were that some shady bloke was making millions out of exploiting women, and the police appeared to have a special relationship with him….Am I a crank?”

Well Ma’am, if you are then I’m the Chipping Sodbury Witchfinder General.

I’ll tell you what I’d do. First up, I’d launch a TSO investigation into the standards being applied by ‘Safe’, because frankly I see it as nothing more than a bit of puffery along the same lines as the Booze Industry’s toothless watchdog Drinkaware.

Second, I’d fire the Greater Manchester Police Constable – something I and half a million other Mancs have wanted to do for quite a while – and get someone in there who thinks that maybe, just maybe, it is the police’s job to harass vice, not acquiesce in it.

Third, I’d grab every living Prestwich liberal-pc-right-on pillock politician still extant from the last forty years, and shoot the lot of them.

Fourth, I’d apply a 75% tax rate to every organisation ‘legally’ providing this service, and use every penny it received to get every ‘sex-worker’ clean, retrained and armed with better self-esteem as soon as possible.

Fifth, I’d bomb my way into Theresa May’s office, kidnap the silly tart, and then put her to work on her back for a month to see how she liked it. And if that sounds a tad misogynist, then get this: every male MP caught going to prostitutes would be stripped of his seat and banned from standing for office anywhere again.

None of this is very ‘enlightened’ of me is it? Well actually – if you think that, you couldn’t be more wrong. My enlightenment may not be yours, but it’s mine and I’m sticking to it. Here’s why:

* You will never solve misery by appeasement of those who feed on it

* You cannot restore civilisation by appealing to the beast in us

* You cannot stop women from being exploited and trafficked by sticking logos on websites

* You cannot promote decency by accepting depravity

* You cannot be an effective copper by ignoring the difficult bits of the job

* You cannot polish a turd and then declare it to be a shiny brown tube: it will still be a turd.

Harsh it may be, but it is both true and fair. I have the same attitude to prostitution (nb NOT prostitutes) as I do to the Drugs trade…especially as they are intimately related. Just because our law enforcement officers and legislators lack the spine to eradicate it is no reason to give up and let it rip – so Dave can have his weekly toot-and-giggle experience…or his mate Gideon can lick a line on his way up somebody’s thighs.

I applaud Russell Brand’s reality about treating drug users, rebuilding their esteem, and the reform of drug offence laws. But I am and will always be a hawk-cum-vulture when it comes to the growers, lords, traffickers and pushers – and even more so the pimps. Redline and Safe are no different to the Red Cross inspecting Sachsenhausen in 1942, and calling it the Racial Rationalisation Industry while ignoring the psychopathy that spawned it.

Cue shoal of horrified emails and comment threads. Meanwhile, big kiss and thank you to Mancunian Mum Ursula for inspiring this Slogpost.

Earlier at The Slog: New developments on the Kerry-Lavrov Weapons Exchange