Why British men are rapists
The New Statesman
Joan Smith
Monday, January 23, 2006
In the world of stag-night excess, lad mags and lap dancing, paying for sex is losing its stigma and more and more men do it. These “clients” are responsible for a grotesque crime, yet they get away scot-free.
In the past couple of years the horrors of sex trafficking have been graphically exposed. It is now known that criminal gangs, usually from eastern Europe, offer innocuous-sounding jobs in restaurants and bars to young women who discover too late that their real destination is a brothel or massage parlour in the UK… [or, for example, Italy]
Such stories rightly cause an outcry, but there is something un-settling about the way trafficking is discussed, as though it were all about foreign gangsters and their victims. Why do these men (and occasionally their female accomplices) go to all the trouble of duping women and girls on the other side of Europe and in south-east Asia, and then transporting them to this country? How has sex trafficking become the third most profitable illegal trade in the world, after arms and drugs? Who, to put it bluntly, are these young women being forced to have sex with each day?
95% of female street prostitutes in the UK use heroin or crack cocaine
76% of the public favour introducing some form of regulation to the sex industry
69% of prostitutes say they report no or hardly any attacks to the police
60% of prostitutes say they have been beaten up or raped in the past year
55% of prostitutes say men have refused to pay them for their services
50% of working prostitutes are under the age of 25
27% of the public believe prostitution should be stamped out altogether
10% of men admit to having used prostitutes
1% of prostitutes say they have stopped street sex work as a result of police activity
See also: Bitch | Lab
The “Natasha” Trade – The Transnational Shadow Market of Trafficking in Women
Donna M. Hughes
University of Rhode Island
“In the Shadows: Promoting Prosperity or Undermining Stability?”
Journal of International Affairs
Spring 2000
