Slaves in Soho

Slaves in Soho: Ros Coward Violent gangs have taken over the UK sex trade - an unacknowledged result of intervention in the Balkans
Guardian Leader Pages, Pg. 24 - March 26, 2003

If Tony Blair took a short stroll from Downing Street to Soho, the heart of London's sex trade, he'd find human rights abuses right under his nose every bit as terrible as those in Iraq. Increasingly, coercion, human trafficking and violence dominate the UK's sex industry. Yet strangely, this domestic human rights issue fails to arouse crusading zeal. Women in the sex trade, however unwillingly they arrived there, don't attract any high-minded concern.

Some people still excuse the UK's sex trade as "the oldest profession", a harmless preserve of sad punters and petty criminals. Some designers and musicians even glamorise prostitution and pimping in their creations. Nothing is further from the truth. Scotland Yard's vice squad estimates that 70% of off-street sex services in Soho - brothels , saunas and massage parlours - are run by foreigners, including gang members from countries like Albania. They have infiltrated this pounds 12m a year industry simply by using impoverished women mainly from eastern Europe to undercut going rates. Many are kept captive having been tricked, or even abducted, and sexually brutalised. Police say women trafficked in this way are now a "predominant feature" of Soho's off-street trade. Stories surfacing from these women are barely credible in 20th-century Britain. Last year "Natasha" gave evidence against a pimp. Aged 15, she had been forced to have sex with customers for 20 hours a day, earning her "owner" pounds 500 a day. She'd come from a broken and impoverished home in Romania, been tempted by offers of a better life, and ended up trafficked via the Balkans to sex slavery in London. A similar recent prosecution of two Albanians for trafficking, rape, indecent assault and drug possession revealed another Romanian girl, 16-year-old Anna, who had been sold at 12 and trafficked via Macedonia to London.

Perhaps public outcry is muted because of small numbers. Police estimate that it has resulted in 150 criminal cases in the past two years. But, by its nature, this crime is covert. Most girls come from cultures which shun the police. Pimps, with threats of prison and systematic use of rape and violence easily intimidate them. Estimates suggest several thousand may enter the UK each year. Simon Humphreys, head of Scotland Yard's vice squad fears this will increase. "So long as men in the UK think it's acceptable to use these women, the criminals will supply them."

The police take these developments seriously. This is not just because they fear that gangs surfacing in London's sex trade have a track record of escalating violence, as has happened in Italy where Albanian gangs have taken over the sex industry. It's also because, as Simon Humphreys says: "This is a shocking subjugation of human rights akin to slavery." Although new sexual offences legislation will make prosecutions for trafficking easier, the punishments won't reflect the seriousness of the crime. Anti-slavery International says: "Human trafficking for the sex industry is not the same as pimping, nor is it the same as people smuggling. This is enslavement, subjugation, people kept in captivity and abused in extreme ways."

Prosecutions are difficult because people trafficking is a trade based on trans- national networks. The London police force is hardly suitable to conduct complex international investigations necessary to track the networks of London pimps. Nor can they tackle remote causes like disparities of poverty and wealth between western European countries and those of the east such as Moldova, Romania and Ukraine.

Complex though the issue may be, it seems incredible that society at large and politicians in particular are so complacent about the situation. This indifference to prostitutes' lives is partly historic. Although we know many of these women have been coerced, they are still stigmatised. Being illegal immigrants compounds perceptions of them as undeserving. Current widespread acceptance of sex services like pole- and lap- dancing also makes men think this is just "normal" sexuality.

There may also be other reasons for political indifference. Close examination of current sex slavery would expose the consequences of the west's last major military intervention. Many of the UK's prostitutes have passed through the Balkans where the west's unfinished business created a huge sex market. Of course, poverty in the girls' homelands, the west's appeal, porous borders and mass migration all contribute to sex trafficking. But this contem porary sex slavery really took off in 1999 when Nato troops arrived in Macedonia. It significantly increased after the Kosovo war. Shamefully, the long-term presence of large numbers of soldiers and charity workers created a thriving sex industry. That industry is now dominated by gangs who flourished because of the west's undifferentiated support to all groups opposing Milosevic, including Albanian criminals. What remains is an unstable region with a voracious sex industry and flourishing criminal networks.

No wonder politicians aren't queueing up to understand the roots of the UK's sex slavery, especially right now. But their indifference is shocking. What's happening to women right under our noses is just as important as abuses further afield.