I think we have had enough of the UKHTC spin and so with all due respect.

Sepian

EXCLUSIVE: THE STRINGFELLOWS ONE-PUNCH KILLER

By Graham Brough 31/01/2006

EXCLUSIVE Widow to sue lapdance club

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2006/01/31/exclusive-the-stringfellows-one-punch-killer-115875-16646625/

On the one hand, the UKHTC and on the other, a similarly exaggerated tableau.

Think of it as two warring sides, in New Zealand, the people with the psychiatrically distorted claims won, and they supported legal brothels, and are still busy lying to everybody including the CEDAW committee at the UN & etc.

In Britain, a similarly deranged spin doctoring junta, and they zig and zagged to the perspective of not wanting any brothels.

Fiona MacTaggart was telling us not so long ago Punternet customers were likely to drop a dime, crimestoppers makes a ‘beautiful sex slave’ soft porn promo for them, the punternet people

Fast forward, Harriet is asking the Gov of California to terminate a web-site hosted in err…Ohio.

The ECP and UKHTC deserve each other, nobody deserves Harriet Harman or Fiona MacTaggart.

And the poor Brit taxpayer picks up the tab for the not fit for purpose enterprise.

There you go, a dog’s breakfast of monlithic spin doctoring as a substitute for govt.

The truth is never good enough being the national motto.

Sepian

Officially what it means is, if you are a police force and you are coming up short, you go to the ‘rescued’ or ‘saved” grouping and charge a few Chinese women as sex traffickers, which is the way they did it.

Poppy, Fawcett, and Object, knew about this before Nick wrote his article

I can assure you of that.

Sepian

I agree completely with your assessment of the Newsnight clip.

Besides that, I’ve a nasty, sneaky feeling that what motivated this government scam was either another phoney job-creation exercise to spend taxpayers’ money on setting up specialist police anti-trafficking units or creating another superb public rationale for raids and monitoring email traffic. After all, who would want to question anything as wholesome as investigating and stopping wicked human trafficking?

I know little about this market but never expected the articulate and damning criticism from the rep of the Collective of Prostitutes. Professional social worker friends say she overdid her brief: one powerful motivation for prostitution is not the presented scenario of the desperate single mum trying to make ends meet in bringing up her kids but someone trying to support an expensive drug habbit without resorting to other – and probably riskier and less lucrative – modes of crime.

Prostitute rep – very impressive.
Macshane – utter utter buffoon.

It’s hard to see how the misnomer of ‘trafficking’ is altered in any way by what occurs afterwards to those who’ve paid criminals to smuggle them in illegally.

They’ve still paid.

They’re still illegal.

They still haven’t been forcibly removed from their homes.

Which is that this is NOT a one-way policy. That is: a policy where the worst that can happen is the industry will get clamped down on.

Talking to the ECP yesterday, one fairly senior individual re-ran the argument that the direct result of over-restrictive laws would be to make sex work MORE dangerous for the vast majority in it. She added that yes: some women may die as a rsult of the proposed legislation.

So please, Sunny, before you and your ilk remount your high horses…at least familiarise yourself with the possibility that there is an alternative view…and that the alternative view is not “liberalism because its nice” vs. regulating the industry.

But people getting killed on the back of screwed up HO research.

I am sick to death of the moralising argument that seems to believe the positions on issues such as this are asymmetric. On the one hand, free speech which is hard to value: on t’other, some crime against humanity.

No, the balance is far nastier…and people such as Sunny who can’t get their head around that are as guilty of the consequences as the traffickers themselves.

do you it’s sensible to characterize gangs controlling debt-indentured immigrant prostitutes as offering fair contracts which are honored and entered into freely?

If your policy objective is that of ensuring that lap-dancing clubs operate within the law and without creating either a nuisance or any significant public order problems, then that’s a pretty solid argument to put up in favour of the proposition that the licensing system works well if its applied properly – and that is exactl what Stringfellow argued before the committee.

…and that’s the problem with (or for) a number of the writers, activists and groups on this issue: even where they are rightly concerned with abuse and exploitation, they have a longer-term aim of abolition or prohibition, as Davies pointed out. They don’t just want to see the women who choose to work protected, the women who don’t want to work helped, and the men who abuse prosecuted – they want the whole thing shut down entirely. And they don’t seem too bothered about having sufficient evidence or doing proper research in the process.

No – trafficked is a perfectly reasonable description if the victim is then forced unwillingly into prostitution by threat of violence or via debt bondage.

These women, in the main, have paid large sums to known criminals to smuggle them illegally into this country.

It’s an insult to those, like the Korean ‘comfort’ women or the generations of black slaves, who really were ‘trafficked’ by being dragged from their homes and families against their will and shipped abroad.

A more relevant description would be illegal immigrant.

Thanks for #79, very informative.

Unless evidence emerges to the contrary, what we have here is a simple case of a PR firm being smart enough to hire an academic to help them navigate their client through an issue that was, and still is, mired down in all manner of dubiously researched and evidence claims about the impact of lap-dancing clubs on neighbouring businesses and local communities.

That’s not a vested interest nor is it necessarily hypocrisy – if a PR company working for Peter Stringfellow wants to pay her for an opinion that they could have easily got for free by reading through and digesting her prior research then, so what!

Moreover, if anyone other than can be arsed to look up Stringfellow’s memorandum and oral evidence to the the committee then the only empirical ‘evidence’ he put forward was an assertion that around 21% of local authorities appeared not to understand how to properly make use of their existing licensing powers in respect of lap-dancing clubs.

Other than that, Stringfellow’s argument rested entirely on the assertion that he operate two well-managed, upmarket, respectable, clubs located in non-residential areas and works closely with the police and the relevant licensing authority (Westminster Council) to a keep a thoroughly orderly house.

If your policy objective is that of ensuring that lap-dancing clubs operate within the law and without creating either a nuisance or any significant public order problems, then that’s a pretty solid argument to put up in favour of the proposition that the licensing system works well if its applied properly – and that is exactl what Stringfellow argued before the committee.

What it does support is, primarily, the trickery/debt bondage model of trafficking in which women enter or are smuggled into the UK one or two at a time with the promised of employment, etc. only then to be forced into prostitution.

So far as the TV Cop show model goes, that is consistent with the patterns for forced labour where the victim to perp ratio is over 25:1 (110 victims, 4 convictions in 2008)

But it depends on whether the law was being used to protect Poppy Project’s reputation (and there are plenty of ppl who are desperately trying to rubbish it for ideological reasons) and whether it is to stop disputing the claims made. There is a difference.

As I see it, the reputation of any such organisation can only be assessed based on their reliability, honesty and effectiveness. Effective the Poppy Project certainly are; but reliable they clearly are not, since they’re directly involved in fabricating evidence which was then presented to Parliament and used to allocated public funds. Honest they equally are not, since their reaction to getting caught lying is to sue; rather like the Simon Singh case, as others have pointed out. The reason the numbers matter is because being right matters: if a political organisation doesn’t care about accuracy, then they deserve a bad reputation.

Various problems with this article. … As Rahila Gupta points out (but you oddly choose to ignore):
In spite of these problems, we discover from a parliamentary answer from Alan Campbell in June that 267 people have been prosecuted under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which led to 109 convictions, a remarkably high percentage.

OK, which offences under the Act do those 109 convictions relate to? Because the SOA isn’t just about sex trafficking. Gupta doesn’t say. You don’t say.

This fact does not appear in Nick Davies’s article, despite his extensive research.

The facts are that, as Davies wrote, “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 [out of 406 arrests - btw another 122 arrests never happened, they were wrongly recorded - ukl].”

The second problem is your own conflation. What actually happened was they failed to get trafficking convictions. That is very different to finding loads of people who may have been involved (or they rescued loads of women) because getting convictions is never easy.

They didn’t fail to get trafficking convictions. They prosecuted 22 and 15 were convicted – as Davies makes clear.

The same happens for example in forced marriage cases where its very difficult to get convictions… sometimes because the victim doesn’t want to press charges for fear of reprisals. Again, this will apply here too, especially if the people doing the trafficking are part of dangerous gangs. Rahila herself points out:
I have interviewed police officers who say it is extremely difficult to use the trafficking laws to bring people to justice.

OK, but I’m not sure what we can do with that information.

And lastly, your article bizarrely ends with:
None of this. however, detracts from the fact that there are some serious questions to be asked about the origins of the government estimate of the scale of sex trafficking
No, the serious questions need to be around: how do we get more convictions for trafficking, how can we make it harder to traffic women into the country and how can we break these criminals gangs. That trafficking takes place is a fact.

No-one disagrees – the dispute is over how much trafficking there is.

So by trying to cast doubt over this, what you’re actually doing is feeding into the misogynist narrative that this is all overblown and we can go back home with nothing to worry about. …

Oh for god’s sake. It isn’t misogynist to be concerned about the distortion of the evidence and its impact on evidence-based policy making and the appropriate allocation of our finite resources.

From the UKHTC’s data on trafficking prosecutions and convictions there were 57 prosecutions for s57 (into UK) or s58 (within UK) trafficking offences in the UK in 2008 in which either a conviction was obtained (29 cases) or the case remained on file (24 cases) after the trafficking charge was dropped for lack of evidence or because the offender copped to charge of pimping/brothel keeping.

From those cases, the UKHTC identified a total of 80 foreign nationals who they defined as victims of trafficking.

So, what we have to work with in the first instance is ratio of near enough four victims for every three perps and a 5:4 ratio between convictions and cases with no conviction which remain on file.

Now we plug that information into the data from Pentameter 2.

We have 15 convictions in total cited for Pentameter 2 (ignoring the fact that none of the five most serious cases were actually detected during the operation) and with our 5:4 ratio from the UKHTC data we can estimate that another 12 cases are likely to have been laid on file, giving 27 cases in total which could reasonably be argued to have involved trafficking under the definition in SOA 2003.

Given the 4:3 victim-perp ratio that allows us to estimate that of the 167 ‘victims’ allegedly identified during Pentameter 2, 36 are actually likely to have been ‘trafficked’ under the SOA 2003 definitions.

But, we also have to note that the SOA definition of trafficking encompasses smuggling as well as trafficking in line with the force, coercion and trickery definition in the Palermo protocols, so all we can sure of, at the moment, is that those 36 ‘victims’ were smuggled. To estimate the number who were trafficking in line the Palermo definition we have to go back to the conviction data from Pentameter 2 from which we find that only 5 of the 15 convictions were based on evidence that fits the bill.

So, of our 36 smuggled ‘victims’, only 12 are likely to have been trafficked according to the internationally accepted definition of trafficking in the Palermo Protocol.

We now have enough information to estimate the proportion of foreign prostitutes working in the UK who are likely to have been a) smuggled and b) trafficked and what our say is that…

For every 100 foreign prostitutes working in the UK, 21 are likely to have been smuggled into the country and of those 7 are likely to have been trafficked in a manner consistent with the international definition of trafficking set out in the Palermo protocol.

If we now turn to the calculations used to arrive at the figure of 4000 women trafficked for sexual exploitation then even without raising questions about the validity of the Poppy Project’s estimates for the scale of the sex industry in London what we find that the Home Office have based their calculation on the assumption that, in London:

- 30% of all foreign prostitutes working in flats, saunas and massage parlours are trafficked (and the calculation is for trafficking alone, not a combined figure for trafficking and smuggling)

- 12.5% of all foreign prostitutes working for escort agencies are trafficked

- 100% of all foreign prostitutes working in walk-up brothels are trafficked.

The Home Office then based its UK calculation (which date to 2005/6 not 2003 as is commonly claimed) on an estimate of 1735 trafficked prostitutes working in London, which it then scaled up on the highly dubious premise that patterns of trafficking and prostitution in London will be valid for the rest of the UK, to reach a top end estimate of just over 3800 trafficked prostitutes for the whole of the UK.

This then became a round 4000 when the politicians got hold of the figure.

The UKHTC conviction data and data from Pentameter 2 support a baseline of only 354 trafficked prostitutes in London and, even if we extrapolate using the Home Office;s dodgy methodology, a figure for the UK in region of 780-800 trafficked women.

If I was doing this properly, I’d actually take the time to make adjustments to the HO’s scaling methods to try and arrive at an even tighter estimate but having run a few numbers on the back of fag packet, I reckon that 780-800 figure would come down to around 600-650 after the adjustments.

Now that is definitely a bottom-end estimate, but it does give a basis for making some kind of mid-point estimate on which its possible to legitimately base policy decisions, at least until we get some better data to work with.

All things considered, an estimate of 700-900 victims of trafficking in London and between 400 and 600 across the rest of the UK, the majority of which will be located in major population centres with sizeable minority populations looks to be a reasonable ballpark figure to be working with, which still makes this a significant issue.

Personally, and based on those estimates, I would see that the UKHTC still merits its funding, particular as women who’re smuggled/trafficked for the sex industry make up only 38% of the total number of recorded ‘trafficking’ victims. 7 out of every 10 foreign nationals identified as victims of trafficking are recorded under domestic servitude of forced labour, an issue that being almost entire lost in the unseemly haste to target sex workers and the clients with even more prohibitionist legislation.

That estimate also readily justifies the new national referral system and the funding that the Poppy Project’s service and support arm is getting, in fact the data on forced labour suggests that side of things is likely to be badly underfunded (as usual).

What these figures categorically DO NOT justify or support is the prominent position given to the Lillith Project, Eaves research arm, in the policy making process for the simple reason that the project is not a reliable source of evidence.

this argument is bizarre. Sunny is convinced that trafficking is a big problem and that the evidence that it isn’t is “thin”. Everybody else is suggesting that it’s the evidence that trafficking is a big problem that’s looking “thin”. In one corner we have Nick Davis finding exaggeration and distortion in previously reported numbers, and the fact that the police failed to secure convictions when they tried to find trafficking (a fact which is consistent with both Sunny’s idea that convictions are simply hard to obtain, and the idea that there’s just aren’t very many trafficked women out there). And in other corner we have Sunny, who’s firm belief that large numbers of women are trafficked is based on … well, I don’t know. I don’t think you’ve told us yet, Sunny.

I don’t know the truth of the matter myself, but I do know that Nick Davis has uncovered a shameful story of misinformation, and the Unity’s OP is on the money – there are some serious questions that need answering about where the numbers being used to guide govt policy are coming from.

Sure: although perhaps the pressure should be on Sunny to withdraw the allegation that I am a “global warming denier”?

Could you keep the climate change arguement for another day? Whilst it is perhaps more important than this, it is a diversion of the first order. And deserves a thread all on it’s own.

Sunny, I asked you if *you* could manage to explain the difference.

I’m not pointing out that the evidence is wrong. I pointed out from the start that the evidence base is thin and that it is being used to ask the wrong questions. And it suffers from the view that just because enough convictions didn’t take place – that trafficking is not a big issue. You could either ignore my points or you could address them.

Some have addressed them, others seem obsessed by saying that I’m saying Nick Davies is lying or that I’m ok with legal threats. Both are straw-arguments and both have been dealt with above.

Sunny, the evidence from Poppy and the government et al has apparently not been borne out on the ground. Millions of pounds and thousands of police hours have been spent investigating a problem whose extent seems to have been exaggerated for the purposes of ideology and policy. This money and time might have been better spent if there had been a proper evidence based approach. As I said, the issues with the figures had been raised some time ago by academics in the field as well as concerns about the ethics of the methodology used, they were then subjected to legal threats.

Do you think this is a cause for concern?

As for my views on trafficking, I am no expert nor particularly familiar with this area so I have no specific proposals – obviously I would like to see illegal trafficking (of all kinds) reduced and the welfare of those trafficked considered. I also think policy should be informed by the best available evidence to ensure the efficient application of finite resources for the outcome of greatest benefit. This hasn’t happened in this case.

At least hereabouts.

We tend not to see acedemic or doctorate credentials as very useful.

You are expected to get down and dirty. Fight your corner.

Go on.