“Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution” (link). Well, that’s sorted then.

I won’t waste time attacking the article,  but I’ve a couple of points to make about the  debate. I did my Masters dissertation on this topic, so I am basically an expert. If they just listen to me everything will be fine.

So: Misleading media coverage and misguided policing has helped to establish a set of  criteria for ‘legitimate victimhood’ for women who have been trafficked, which excludes a huge number of serious cases and obscures the wider problems faced by women in the sex trade. You probably know the stereotype: virginal 15 year old Albanian blonde is promised a job as a waitress, or maybe even kidnapped, and when she arrives in the UK she is beaten and raped and forced to work as a prostitute. This is real. It does happen. And amazing but severely under-funded organisations like the Poppy Project can tell you about it, because they spend every day picking up the pieces.

But it doesn’t happen nearly as much as the tabloid press would have you believe. And – astonishingly enough – the lives of real women are more complicated than lurid Sun case studies. There are many different routes for migrant women into the UK sex trade, and coercion may or may not be involved at any point.

Because the media, the police, the government and – sadly – a number of campaigns have focused so narrowly on kidnap and involuntary prostitution, many migrant women working in the sex trade are unable to access services when their human rights have been abused. As an example, a woman who willingly enters the UK sex trade, but finds that she is forced to hand over all her earnings to her pimp, has no ability to refuse customers and is prevented from leaving. That is slavery, whether she comes from Thailand, Moldova or Bromley.

By conjuring a moral panic based on a discourse of innocence, border violations and kidnap, the media and the government fail to engage with the risks and problems surrounding ‘domestic’ prostitution. This means that many women working in prostitution continue to be failed by a State that does not offer them protection, but it also impedes progress in combating trafficking for sexual exploitation where it does occur.

Hope that makes a bit of sense. It’s been tricky trying to condense 15,000 words into 500 so if anyone wants to actually read the thing you can do so: Violating the Body Politic