UK: Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 2009-10-20 06:29

Story here. Excerpt:

'The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.

The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.

Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.
...
Those figures credited Pentameter with "arresting 528 criminals associated with one of the worst crimes threatening our society". But an internal police analysis of Pentameter, obtained by the Guardian after a lengthy legal struggle, paints a very different picture.

The analysis, produced by the police Human Trafficking Centre in Sheffield and marked "restricted", suggests there was a striking shortage of sex traffickers to be found in spite of six months of effort by all 55 police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together with the UK Border Agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish government, the Crown Prosecution Service and various NGOs in what was trumpeted as "the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking".

The analysis reveals that 10 of the 55 police forces never found anyone to arrest. And 122 of the 528 arrests announced by police never happened: they were wrongly recorded either through honest bureaucratic error or apparent deceit by forces trying to chalk up arrests which they had not made. Among the 406 real arrests, more than half of those arrested (230) were women, and most were never implicated in trafficking at all.'

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Comments

Just because some lame police departments and public prosecutors could not get prosecutions for this crime does not mean that human trafficking and forced prostitution crimes did not occur.

I think the main point of the article is that the sting was a waste of money and effort. Many arrested during the sting were found guilty of charges relating to prostitution and immigration violations, but they could not get the trafficking charges to stick. The ones that were found guilty of trafficking were not a direct result of the sting, so the argument is they should not be included in the calculations.

There is much more evidence that human trafficking does exists compared to evidence that it does not exist.

I do not think this is an MRA issue.

Prostitution between willing adults is no big deal, but taking young poor girls out of their homeland based on false promises and then getting them hooked on drugs and alcohol is a crime and should be a concern to everyone.

PS- some young boys get forced into prostitution as well

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Submitted by Kris on Sun, 2009-10-25 19:38