Saturday, November 07, 2009

Criminalising Witnesses.

I'm feeling bored and have nothing to write about, I wish there was another incredibly stupid article by Beatrix Campbell OBE to mock.

Hooray!

She applauds a move to punish men who pay for sex with prostitutes who have been coerced, even if they were unaware of the fact. The incidence of trafficking has been vastly and systematically exaggerated as Nick Davies demonstrated last month. Bea dismisses Davies and insists that trafficking is no more of a moral panic than satanic abuse. Or something,

However trafficking does happen on occasion . In fact some Romanian traffickers were convicted this week:

A GANG who trafficked a woman from Romania to work the streets of Manchester as a prostitute has been jailed.

The migrant workers lured their victim - a single mum in her twenties - to the UK after their building work dried up because of the credit crunch.

They promised the woman she could earn money as a dancer but forced her to have sex with up to ten men a night in Manchester's red light districts.

And the case demonstrates the biggest problem with criminalising the users of prostitutes:

She finally escaped their clutches when she appealed to one of her 'punters' and he helped her flee to his house.
Would the 'punter' have helped her if doing so would have ensured that he was charged with a criminal offence?

2 comments:

James Higham said...

I was in Manchester and missed her - how could that be?

Mark said...

Would the 'punter' have helped her if doing so would have ensured that he was charged with a criminal offence?'
Spot on Ross.
The extent of 'people trafficking' for the sex industry is exaggerated by the usual femiloon suspects, but it does go on- and has done so for over a century. It just used to be called the 'white slave traffic' not 'people trafficking'.
'White slavery' really got going in late C19/early C20 Argentina, and it meant providing female company both for the lonely guachos out on the Pampas, and for the tango bars of Buenos Aries. Coincidentally, one of the main areas where these 'comfort women' were sourced was Romania ! There is a novel called 'The Moldavian Pimp' that evokes this milieu of a century ago. There are also fleeting references to such transatlantic sex trafficking in Joseph Roth's magnificent novel 'The Radetsky March'.