The True Face Of Human Trafficking For Sex Work

We hear much about how women are trafficked into the UK to then be rented out as sex slaves. This would be, and is if it happens, appalling. It would be and is repeated rape. It’s also one of these things which, if it does happen at all, is thankfully extremely rare. We actually had every police force in the country searching for it over 6 months, in Operation Pentameter, and they found precisely no one in the country they could prosecute for it.

What is more common is people who are entirely happy to be doing sex work arriving in, or being aided into, the UK in order to do sex work. The problem we’ve got here is that the numbers of the second are used, often enough, to make claims about the first.

We do need to note something – sex work is legal in Britain. Soliciting isn’t, living off immoral earnings- defined as being those of another – isn’t, but the prostitution itself is legal.

So, here we’ve a case about this:

Another sex worker told the court how she worked for the couple at Chelsea Cloisters.

She explained that she had worked as a prostitute in Hungary and Austria before moving to London in September 2016.

The woman explained that she had answered an advert on a website and had met Ms Szuda outside Chelsea Cloisters.

“She showed me around the flat and she offered me two rooms. The smaller room was £60 per day and the bigger one for £80 per day.”

She explained that Szuda gave her a key to the flat at Chelsea Cloisters, which operated like a hotel.

That’s not sex slavery. It’s not rape. It’s the voluntary migration in order to sell sex. We do indeed have to distinguish between the two, something the campaigners upon the subject are very careful not to do.

We can, if we so wish, complain about both. But we still must distinguish. That proper definition of trafficking, the movement of the unwilling into sex slavery and repeated rape, is an abhorrence. The second, adult women making decisions that we might think they shouldn’t, well, that is different. Adults are allowed to make decision we think they shouldn’t, that’s what being adult means.