Authors: Sarah Forsyth
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #True Crime, #General
A succession of press releases dramatically told the stories of some of the young women who had been rescued by the police. One – a 15 year old Lithuanian girl who was tricked into travelling to England thinking she was going to be selling ice cream in the summer – was taken captive as soon as she landed at Gatwick Airport, sold in a coffee shop in the arrivals hall by her new trafficker and thereafter repeatedly raped, abused and beaten by the pimps who forced her to work as a prostitute in a ‘massage parlour’.
The success of Operation Pentameter ensured that it was followed a year later by Pentameter II; it was also a key factor in the creation of the United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre – an extremely well-funded new ‘multi-disciplinary agency’ set up to co-ordinate efforts to crack down on all forms of the new slave trade.
With all this effort, and all the attendant publicity, it would be easy to believe that the problem of sex trafficking is at last being effectively addressed and that young women – whether they are traded from Thailand to a backstreet British brothel or, like Sarah Forsyth, from England to the organised hell of Amsterdam’s Red Light District – are increasingly being protected.
Unfortunately, as so often is the case, the press releases, photo opportunities and televised raids mask an uncomfortable truth. Operation Pentameter was
well-intended
, well-managed and unquestionably changed the lives of a number of abused and exploited women, but along with the ensuing Pentameter II, it really only made the tiniest scratch on the cold and unforgiving glacier of sex trafficking.
The number of ‘premises’ (as the police politely describe buildings where men pay to have sex with prostitutes) raided during the first operation – 515 – represented less than ten per cent of the known commercial brothels in Britain at that time (a figure that has increased year on year ever since). Those brothels traded openly under the euphemisms ‘massage parlour’, ‘sauna’ or even ‘health club’. They advertised – as they do now – freely and regularly in local newspapers up and down the country, and in at least one national daily. They do not seek to hide their existence from passers-by; most cities and towns – and even some small villages – now boast between one and ten such ‘premises’ boldly displaying commercially produced name boards above blacked-out, plate-glass windows. Some – either consciously or unconsciously – mimic the glowing pink neon of Amsterdam.
All day, every day, 365 days a year, several thousand women work – or are forced to work – in these brothels. The people who own them operate largely untroubled by the law – except when the demand for good publicity leads to new raids. There are websites devoted to providing detailed ‘field reports’ by punters on the sex they paid for with these women – and television viewers have grown accustomed to watching programmes in which these ‘consumer guides’ are presented at unquestioning face value.
One glance at the UK Human Trafficking Centre’s [UKHTC] own publicity material should be enough to convince anyone that 200 years after Parliament passed worldwide anti-slave trade legislation, and a British government was prepared to go to war with those who perpetuated it, their successors today seem far less emotionally committed.
[UKHTC] plays a key role in co-ordinating work across stakeholders and, with its partners, delivers a diverse set of programmes, including targeted campaigns to prevent and reduce the trafficking of human beings (THB). In addition, the centre conducts research, develops training packages for UK Law Enforcement partners, cascades good practice and works to deliver an improved knowledge and understanding of the way criminal enterprises associated with human trafficking operate.
‘Stakeholders’? ‘Cascades’? What does this bureaucratic jargon actually mean to the women brought here in their thousands every year and forced against their will to have sex with men for money? Very little.
For every highly publicised case such as the Lithuanian girl traded in a café at Gatwick Airport, there are thousands which never even cross the radar of law enforcement – much less make it to a headline-grabbing prosecution. Nor have courts really caught on to the serious penalties contained in the new laws. The men who trafficked the Lithuanian girl received the maximum sentences possible –14 years for each count with which they were charged. But the man who ran that brothel in genteel Cheltenham got just 30 months in jail.
Even when trafficked women are rescued from British brothels many have faced callous and very revealing treatment at the hands of the British government. In February 2006 – just as Operation Pentameter was yielding for the Home Office its crop of invariably favourable press stories – Amnesty International pointed out that officials in the very same department were routinely treating foreign women freed from sex slavery here as illegal immigrants. According to AI’s spokeswoman, Kate Allen:
Currently victims of trafficking have almost no rights in the UK. In the eyes of the law they are simply illegal immigrants and are routinely detained and deported.
Up to now highly vulnerable trafficked women have been put into immigration detention. Instead, they should be offered immediate support and care with organisations that are experienced in helping women who have endured physical and psychological violence.
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There is, in fact, only one publicly funded organisation which works with trafficked women, freed from incarceration in British brothels. The Poppy Project – a charity, funded by the Home Office – does wonderful and life-saving work. It was set up in 2003 to provide a safe refuge for trafficked women escaping their captors, and although it could originally only help 25 women at any one time, it has since expanded its efforts so greatly that by 2007 it had handled 550 cases of women fleeing from enforced prostitution.
That same year as I was producing the Roger Cook retrospective documentary in which Sarah Forsyth’s story was to be told, I contacted the Poppy Project for its advice. So horrifying was Sarah’s account – so extreme her ordeal – that I wanted to get an expert view of it. It wasn’t that I doubted Sarah – there was too much incontrovertible evidence supporting all the essential elements of her story – more that I wanted to get a sense of whether hers was an isolated set of circumstances.
The Project’s manager, Natalia Dawkins, soon put that notion to rest. What happened to Sarah in Amsterdam happens almost every day on the streets of towns and cities across Britain:
Some of the women we help talk about being kidnapped and trafficked from their countries of origin: bundled into a car or having to walk miles across borders and being raped and beaten on the way. And then arriving in this country, completely disorientated and fearful and distrustful of anybody that was around them and pretty much brainwashed, because, by then, their experiences had been so extreme and so violent that they felt like they were no longer human beings.
Other women are tricked into prostitution, but they are very surprised when they are accused of being gullible or naïve for believing the stories that they were told. For them, we are talking about younger women, so women that are under 25. If you are 19, you are still a baby and answering job adverts, agreeing to go with uncles and aunts to the UK. To take up work in the service industry as chamber maids or working in a restaurant or a hostess in a bar and agreeing to do that, so that they can make a little bit more money than perhaps their siblings or their parents have, with a view to actually coming back and then perhaps studying.
When you speak to the women you work out how creative and how businesslike these people are in terms of recruiting women. Traffickers actually create fake employment agencies and fake immigration officers that are going to process their travel documents.
The women on the project have also given us clear accounts of what their experiences were when they arrived in the UK. One woman talks of being locked in a room and men just simply shoved through the door and she would have to have sex with them. Another woman talks about being shown pornographic films for at least a week and different men raping her before she was actually permitted – I use the word loosely – to go into the brothels and sell sex.
It’s also clear from their accounts that a trafficker can make significant amounts of money by forcing a woman to sell sex in London at the moment. There is one woman on the scheme today and she worked out that her trafficker in one month earned £15,000 from her sleeping with between 15 and 21 men a day, including Christmas Day. She did this for six months. She describes being told that she would need to pay back her journey from Moldova to the UK, which, at that time had cost £7,000. She had worked it out and discovered that she had paid that ‘debt’ back to him many times over.
But why, then, did they not try to escape? As Sarah says, this is the question she gets asked most often. Why didn’t you run away? Once again the experience of the women being helped by the Poppy Project matched exactly Sarah’s explanation – feelings of powerlessness and dependency, and above all, the physical restraints they had to overcome to get away from their traffickers.
One story that sticks in our minds is that of a woman who is still on the scheme today. She talks of being locked in a room and being forced to sell sex until she finally worked out that she might never get out of there alive. She climbed out of the window, onto a balcony; this was a property in West London with several floors and she basically jumped from the top floor to the balcony below. In doing so she damaged her back quite badly and also damaged her leg.
At the same time there was a construction worker opposite who had seen her jump, who came over to her with a ladder and helped her to climb down. She was terrified of him and literally ran what she thinks is probably a few miles. She was in West London and was eventually picked up in Camden and so had run or walked all that way with quite severe injuries.
People tend to talk glibly about prostitution as ‘the oldest profession’. We don’t believe that: for us, it’s the oldest oppression.
The experience of trafficked women given refuge by the Poppy Project makes clear that Sarah Forsyth’s story is all too typical of the modern face of sex slavery. Only two differences mark her out: the fact that she is a young British woman with the ability to tell her story clearly to a British audience; and that she was trafficked from Britain, rather than into it. But as the research for that Roger Cook documentary deepened, the picture that emerged threw a revealing light on this second difference.
Certainly, there appeared to be persuasive evidence of trafficking into British brothels from overseas. In 2007 reliable estimates suggested that 80 per cent of prostitutes in British brothels were non-UK nationals – a complete reversal of the position five years earlier when the figures showed that 80 per cent were British women.
But there were also worrying signs that the UK was becoming a noticeable exporter of women to the sex trade in Europe and Asia. According to charity workers trying to help women escape from prostitution, the threat of trafficking was not confined to foreign nationals.
Peter Green is the project director of Barnabus, a Christian outreach project which works with people involved in the sex trade in Manchester. In the course of his work he kept coming across strong rumours that British women were being threatened with being sold abroad, and in 2007 he warned:
I believe sex trafficking of women from overseas is widespread. But I also believe that this is a two-way issue, that young British women are being taken out of our country and sold abroad because they owe money to the massage parlours here.
Mr Green made his statement after being alerted to the threat hanging over one British woman by fellow charity workers.
It’s something I’d never considered, but when I first heard about the plight of this young lassie it became logic to me. If people are being transported one way, they can be transported the other way too.
This young lassie was having to service 20 guys a day just to pay off interest, that’s before she started to earn anything, and she was under constant threat of being sent – trafficked – out of the country.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe people see it. We just see what we see on the television and in the newspapers about trafficking from overseas, without looking in the opposite direction.
Mr Green worked in Britain’s second biggest city – and one that, thanks to its concentration of brothels, has been dubbed ‘the sauna capital of Europe’ (‘sauna’, of course, being a euphemism). He was therefore in a strong position to sound his warning. Unfortunately it fell on official ears that seemed somewhat sceptical. Grahame Maxwell, deputy chief of South Yorkshire Police and programme director at the UK Human Trafficking Centre in Sheffield, appeared to have doubts about the notion of trafficking as a two-way street:
We are aware of internal trafficking, where foreign nationals are grooming English girls and taking them city to city. It is, however, very hard to get a person who doesn’t want to leave the country to leave. So unless they are drugged and hidden in the back of a van, which then you are talking something very serious indeed, a lot of it may well be just threats.
However, if Mr Maxwell visited Gateshead he would find Sarah Forsyth only too keen to talk to him about the realities of sex trafficking as a two-way street. Sarah’s life had been saved in part because Leon and Helène, the two detectives from the special Amsterdam unit, had listened to rumours on the street. They believed the idea of a young British woman being trafficked and traded across national borders and into the Red Light District was perfectly likely to be true. They listened, they noted down and they made attempt after attempt to locate and rescue her.