Secret workers

I began work for Lifeline in 2004, initially as a volunteer. At that time the majority of female sex workers accessing our service were identified as ‘White British’. Just three years later the national profile of the same group is very different.

At Lifeline Manchester’s Harm Reduction Centre, male and female sex workers access the project to collect free condoms and lube from the Syringe Replacement Scheme. Our statistics show that more and more Eastern European women are presenting at our drug services, but it is not clear that we have been equipped to meet their needs.

In 2006 anecdotal stories began appearing in the press about Eastern European women being brought to the UK , and forced into the sex industry. The term for this is Human Trafficking. 2007 is the Bi-centenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

The more reports staff and volunteers read in the papers and heard on the news, the more concerned we became. We started having conversations with workers in other organisations who were also questioning how this affected their services.

Not only did we have difficulties communicating with the client group, which meant we did not know if we were meeting their needs. There was also the possibility that some of these women could have been trafficked.

It was agreed that I carry out research to find out more. The research method was quite straight forward. We asked sex workers to disclose their country of origin on a voluntary basis. Together with Supporting People, we compiled a list of the main Eastern European countries identified as source countries for the women we were concerned for. They were; Czech Republic , Estonia , Hungary , Latvia , Lithuania , Poland , Slovakia , Slovenia , Bulgaria and Romania .

In February 2007 everyone at Lifeline Manchester, including volunteers, was fully committed to collecting the data. I realised this was becoming a real concern shared by all the team. The dedication everyone showed to the project was amazing.

By May 2007 we had collected a vast amount of research evidence and I began to data crunch the facts. The results surprised us all.

• Ninety-one female sex workers had accessed the service an astonishing 407 times in just one quarter. I.e. 1 presentation every 12, and on average 8% of overall visits per day!
• Twenty-seven of the ninety-one individuals self identified as White British, and a staggering 33 identified as White European.

• Over half of this client group were under 30.
  Twenty-seven aged between 20 – 24 yrs
  Twenty-one aged 25-29 yrs.
• Eighty-three women were Sauna based workers and six of them worked on the beat.

The three main European countries that the women originated from were Lithuania , Romania and Poland . Although speculative, this amounted to 28 women who potentially could have been trafficked into the UK sex industry.

I find that figure extremely disturbing. Our initial hunch that more Eastern European women were accessing the service than any other nationality was right. We were right to act upon the hunch.

But what are we doing to help these women. To force people to other countries to be (and lets not be scared of saying this) slaves is criminal in every sense of the word.

I am interested only in what might help, and that is what motivated me to write this piece.

This is what I think might help.

1. Working well with agencies already tackling this issue.Continuing to keep abreast of the evidence presented to us.
2. Seeking interpreters and addressing communication needs.
3. Working together as partners, commissioners, managers, workers and volunteers.
4. Avoiding empty gestures.
5. Not using the ‘money’ argument as an excuse.
6. Forget empty gestures.
7. Understand the issues, problems and fears these women have Looking reality in the face.
8. Put pressure on purse holders to release resources.