A load of Poppy cock

According to today’s Guardian, “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.”

This outcome, the paper unsurprisingly suggests, indicates 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.”

This huge and costly operation – known as ‘Pentameter Two – was hailed by former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith as “a great success”, and its head claimed that 528 arrests had been made. But an internal police analysis of Pentameter, obtained by the Guardian after a lengthy legal struggle, suggests there was a striking shortage of sex traffickers to be found, despite 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".

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. Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking. 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.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.

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 is commissioning fresh research 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.

But a po-faced person from the Poppy Project – a Home Office funded agency set up in 2003 to combat the trafficking and abuse of women - sniffed defensively that “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."

‘Incredible’ is certainly the right word for the Home Office’s research estimate that there are 80,000 working prostitutes in the UK, and for Pentameter Two’s original claims that there are between 6,000 and 18,000 ‘sex slaves’ working in the UK – although their operation only led to 167 such persons being identified.

As a result of all the hullabaloo based upon these dodgy figures, Parliament is now in the final stages of passing the Policing and Crime Bill which contains a proposal penalise 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.

We have, of course, been here before. The Great Paedophile Panic originally stirred up by some hysterical paediatricians and a burgeoning ‘child protection industry’ which led to scandals such as the miscarriages of justice involved in some prosecutions of alleged offences – some dating back many years - at childrens’ homes, and the witch-hunts over what proved to be purely fantastic stories of ‘Satanic Child Abuse’, some of them resulting in years of agony and separation for blameless families, are still fresh in the memory.

One would think that the government would have learned some due caution from all of this, but there are evidently powerful elements who are still driven by a puritanical hatred of all sexual activity which doesn’t conform with their narrow notions of propriety, even if it is between consenting adults.

Of course no-one condones the sexual exploitation of unwilling women – or men, for that matter – by third parties for profit. But that is an entirely different matter from the persecution of prostitution willingly engaged in on a mutually consenting basis

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Half a century ago, the Wolfenden Committee in its famous report on homosexual offences and prostitution declared that

Unless a deliberate attempt is to be made by society, acting through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.

Amen to that. It’s high time that a civilised society – if we still are one - adhered to that common sense principle.