Prostitution and safety

Today's piece is rather a grim one. The most unlikely setting, the small city of Ipswich in Suffolk,has become the focal point of the national news because 5 working girls - the conventional euphemism for prostitutes - have been found murdered within the last 10 days. The small Suffolk police force, shocked and overwhelmed, now accepts that it is dealing with a serial killer of,presumably, prostitutes, but every woman in the area is now living in fear. (The picture below shows Gemma Adams and Tania Nicol, two of the murdered girls)



The news compels one to look at some pretty grim statistics with regard to the murder of prostitutes in the United Kingdom - they don't make pretty reading. Since 1992 over 100 girls working the streets of the United Kingdom have been murdered. Compare this to the vice capital of Europe, Amsterdam, where the number of working girls murdered over the same period is 15. Hundreds more women simply disappear off our streets, their fate never discovered.

There are a multitude of reasons for this but many of them boil down to one thing - social attitude. 'The Guardian' newspaper did an investigation into violence against prostitutes four years ago - not just murder, but beatings, rape and the like - and found that the average 'man in the street' doesn't care about the fate of these women. 'Most of 'em are asking for it', 'They've only got themselves to blame' and 'If they weren't selling themselves they wouldn't get hurt' were some of the attitudes - so when a prostitute is reported missing or simply disappears, who cares? The newspapers don't and it would seem that missing prostitutes come pretty low on the police scale of priorities too - until they turn up dead.

It is a strange irony that the home of Orange religious zeal has developed one of the most tolerant and successful relationships with its working girls, granting them tolerance zones where they can work in a reasonably safe environment under limited police protection, compared to the squalid street walking in dark, poorly lit streets that are the domain of Britain's prostitutes, the girls frequently moved on by a police force ever conscious of the need to remove the stigma from our streets.

The girls here are pariahs, with little protection and little sympathy when they get into trouble, and the situation is tailor made for the kerb crawling anonymous sadist and possible killer who can pluck single lonely girls off the street with no questions asked.




My City Council, for once amazingly enlightened, approached the government for permission to open the first vice tolerance zone in England in an area away from residential streets and where the girls would have access to secure accommodation and medical facilities but it was turned down by the Government as 'appearing to encourage immoral conduct'.

One of these days a British government is surely going to have to face up to this issue. Prostitution is as old as humanity itself and will never go away. (There is a nice touch of humour on the board advertising church services at the Oude Kerke in Amsterdam's red light area which says 'We are the second oldest profession in the city') and as long as British society continues to treat these women as social pariahs and pretend they didn't exist, rather than face up to the fact that these are very vulnerable human beings who are exposed to great danger, then we will continue to have working girls murdered, raped, beaten and 'disappeared' at a rate which should shame a civilised country.