Deputy Mayor leads crackdown on London’s vice trade

Posted on December 11, 2009
Filed Under Government, London, Prostitution | Comments Off

Deputy Mayor for Policing, Kit Malthouse, has called on Londoners to join the fight to end violence against women and to give prostitution adverts the red card.

Kit Malthouse was joined by the Met Police, and partner agencies including the White Ribbon Campaign, Eaves, Object, and the Salvation Army to highlight the proliferation of prostitution cards in telephone kiosks across London. This year over 400,000 cards have been seized by the police and other agencies. They are often the main form of advertising by brothels and are a direct sign of the growth of the city’s vice industry and the sexual exploitation of women- many whom may have been trafficked to the UK.

When elected last year, the Mayor Boris Johnson pledged to make the capital safer for all Londoners and has since launched ‘The Way Forward- A call for action to end violence against women’. An estimated 4,000 women and girls were trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation in 2003. Men who buy sex are often not aware that women involved in prostitution may have been coerced, exploited and sometimes trafficked these women are being forced into prostitution.

The display of vice cards was made an arrestable and recordable offence in 2001. Recent research undertaken by the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit and the Safe Exit Project found that one of the most common access routes used by men to source a woman involved in prostitution was in phone boxes.

Notes
1. New information from the cards collected today will be recorded and anyone caught carding arrested.
2. The police operation, Cashleen, will take place over three days and will cover Westminster, Camden, Lambeth and Kensington and Chelsea.
3. Already this year 43 people have been arrested across London for carding
4. Over 85% of those who work in off street prostitution i.e. in brothels, so-called massage parlours are foreign nationals and have been trafficked from outside of the EU
5. An average of 9 women involved in prostitution are killed each year (one every 6 weeks)

Call the Public Liaison Unit at the Greater London Authority on 020 7983 4100

http://www.london.gov.uk/view_press_release.jsp?releaseid=24459

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