A Few Questions for Belle de Jour, Call Girl and Scientist

November 20, 2009, 1:30 pm
By RYAN HAGEN
In 2003, a young American woman in London studying for her PhD. ran into money trouble. To support herself while writing her thesis, she joined an escort service. Under the assumed name Belle de Jour, she started to blog her experiences. That blog led to a series of successful, [...]

Prostitution in Georgian London: Harlot’s progress

Oct 15th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital. By Dan Cruickshank. Random House: 688 pages; £25. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
AS MANY as one in five young women were prostitutes in 18th-century London. The Covent Garden that tourists frequent today was the centre of a [...]

UK: A law which will protect women from exploitation

Letters:
UK news | The Guardian
Thursday 22 October 2009
Nick Davies follows a long tradition of saying that trafficking is not a big problem and so no action should be taken to deal with it. I have always been of the view that anyone coerced into selling their body experiences unacceptable abuse of their human rights. That [...]

UK: Sex trafficking is no illusion

Nick Davies argues that the problem of sex trafficking has been exaggerated. This is the last thing trafficked women need

Comments (362)
Rahila Gupta, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 October 2009 11.00 BST
An article on trafficking into the sex trade has been written by the investigative reporter Nick Davies, whose reputation will lend authority to it – although it [...]

UK: Trafficking: we can learn from victims

A report in today’s Guardian suggests sex trafficking has been exaggerated; but it must not be reduced to a numbers game
Comments (89)
Helen Bamber
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 October 2009 22.30 BST
Knowledge about the wider picture of trafficking can be accumulated only over time and gleaned from a detailed and dedicated approach to the cases of individual victims. [...]

UK: Sex trafficking: a futile war of statistics

The descent of a Newsnight discussion on the sex trade into a shouting match shows how difficult it is to debate the issue
Comments (130)
Denis MacShane
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 October 2009 16.30 BST
Anyone see the ding-dong between Jeremy Paxman and Denis MacShane on Newsnight? I was there. It was an utterly weird experience to be in the [...]

UK: Have sex traffic levels been exaggerated?

The Guardian newspaper has said that the problem of sex trafficking has been exaggerated and that the number of people who have been brought into the UK and forced against their will into prostitution is much smaller than claimed.
Jeremy Paxman talks to former minister for Europe, Dennis McShane, and Nikki Adams, of the English Collective [...]

UK: A bad bill for sex workers

A lack of trafficking evidence highlights the flaws in a policing and crime bill that fails to distinguish between types of sex work
Elizabeth Pisani
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 21 October 2009 10.00 BST
Last night, I went to a play about sex trafficking at the Arcola theatre. The programme notes: “While elements of It Felt Empty When the Heart [...]

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

Comments (56)
Nick Davies, The Guardian, Tuesday 20 October 2009
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 [...]

UK: Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic

Nick Davies
The Guardian, Tuesday 20 October 2009
There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as the now notorious torrent about Saddam Hussein’s weapons.
In the story of UK sex trafficking, the conclusions of academics who [...]