A lot of prostitutes lead a lonely, vulnerable life. Many have equally lonely deaths. This is more than brought home by the discovery, after 6years, of the remains of Julie Dorsett at some local allotments.
The periodic small coded handwritten adverts in shop windows, like Bexters News, WM Smith, Lolek, Baltika, High Spirits etc., advertising the services of these women, either working alone or through some shady network, is never an encouraging sign to me.
There has been the odd initiative recently to help women who don't want to be involved to get out of prostitution, which the borough has picked up some scraps from, but on the whole I don't see these efforts as credible given the scale of prostitution in London. Some of the projects are well meaning and do some valuable work. Nevertheless, government funding can often seem like patronage to favoured special interest groups rather than funds designed to offer a viable alternative which would work. Some efforts by the government have been seen as counter-productive by prostitutes themselves, designed to make their lives more dangerous than they need be.
The Home Secretary was recently proposing further criminal measures, which makes for a popular sound-bite for an unpopular government. The crusading measures, I suspect, will have a more marginal impact than Ms Smith thinks they will. I note among other things that the Home Secretary is still failing to close the huge gaps in the immigration system which allow the trafficking of many of the most vulnerable young people into the UK. These gaps exist because the government, despite all its hypocritical posturing about Human Rights, will still not allow the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to be fully incorporated into our immigration laws and given real meaning through their properly resourced application. Under-aged teenage girls destined for massage parlours do not arrive in trucks, they come in with passports, accompanied by adults, often claiming to be relatives, who the immigration service does very little to investigate.
But that is beside the point. What the government's policy makers fail to face up to are the untold truths that for all the women they fail to protect (and there are many) there are many adult prostitutes who engage in this activity out of their own volition. Over many years I have met many women who come within each category - victim and perpetrator - if you need labels - and not a few who may even describe themselves as coming within both.
Many of those who have worked out of choice have generally just wanted to be able to go about their business as equal citizens before the law, like others in equally morally dubious trades like politicians, pawnbrokers, bookmakers, lawyers and hedge-fund managers. I don't suppose the game will ever be eradicated, so I wish things could be a bit more above board, better regulated, less hypocritical, less lonely and, above all safer for the women concerned.