Dear Sir,My interview (Mean Streets, 13 January 07) on what forces women into prostitution, takes what I said about pimps and Black men out of context.The interviewer asked if there were pimps and drug suppliers, and if they were mostly Black men. I said I didn’t know any drug dealers or pimps and that the […]
US PROStitutes CollectiveP.O. Box 14512San FranciscoCA 94114Tel/fax (415) 626-4114July 7, 2006Dear conference organizers,There are many grassroots sex workers who like us were kept out of the Revisioning Prostitution Policy: Creating Space for Sex Workers Rights and Challenging Criminalization conference July 10th to 12th in Las Vegas because of your high registration fees. We wanted to […]
Suzanne Gilbert 29 May 2006Conference ProducerCapita ConferencesTel: 02078 085 316Fax: 08701 658 989 Dear Suzanne Gilbert,We have had to withdraw from participating in your conference: “Tackling Prostitution: What works? Reducing the impact on communities and lives”.As an independent sex workers organisation which protects and defends the rights of sex workers, we cannot give credibility to an event which […]
ON May 15 The Voice (‘Sex Slaves Freed’) reported on the joint police/immigration Operation Pentameter which claims to have freed 19 victims of sex trafficking. But police are reportedly arranging with charities to return some of the women to Malaysia. Deportation is the reality behind the headlines.The Poppy Project, set up to deal with victims […]
Dear Sir or Madam,Ninety-five per cent of sex workers are not drug users — not even the Home Office claims that (Guardian 18 Jan 2006) women who don’t use drugs don’t use the Home office funded projects on which these figures depend. These figures dominate while the major factors that force women into prostitution – poverty, domestic violence, homelessness […]
Letters to the Editor The inquiry into ‘Camden Ripper’ Anthony Hardy, held in private, which exonerated the psychiatrists, did not go far enough into Hardy’s previous violence or the authorities’ responsibility for not prosecuting him earlier. Yet he was known to hate women, particularly prostitute women, had a history of extreme violence and hospital staff […]
DAVID Blunkett is using the Home Office consultation paper on prostitution, Paying the Price, to promote his own punitive agenda of compulsory health checks and registration with the police (Bold move to legalise brothels, 16 July).The report focuses on the “95 per cent of street workers [who] are drug users” — a statistic we would […]
Your cover story (Review, last week) repeats misinformation aimed at promoting new anti-trafficking laws. An unbiased look would spot that such laws would remove the requirement for the victim to give evidence against her abuser, thus enabling her immediate deportation. The use of anti-trafficking as a means for deportation was exposed in last year’s Soho […]
The Editor,At last, a vindication of the rights of Monica Coghlan, a working class woman who came to court 14 years ago and told the truth about Jeffrey Archer. Ms Coghlan like many other women in the eighties fled the poverty of the North and went into prostitution in London to support her young child.In court […]
You report claims that the Albanian Mafia has taken over Soho (“SoHopeless”, June 23rd). This is a government fabrication aimed at justifying a police clampdown on prostitute women there and laying the basis for anti trafficking legislation that would increase police powers at women’s expense. In 1999, we successfully opposed attempts by Westminster Council to […]