“Trafficked women don’t have a choice, men do.” This is the message from Britain’s Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith.

The effects of human trafficking stretch from Rio to Timbuktu, from San Francisco to Berlin and from your street to mine. As the British government takes a moment to produce a sound bite for the media to hide away more economic shame and a jump in unemployment levels, one has to think, why 200 years after the abolition of slavery do we still allow it on our doorstep?

The buying and selling of sex is legal in Britain, soliciting or pimping of sex is illegal. Therefore you might deduce that the trafficking of humans for prostitution can’t go on. Why would it after all? When you can buy sex and apparent affection from someone who is clean, a willing participant in the transaction, why go to someone who could be riven with disease, a victim of rape/gang rape, a woman beaten, bruised, scared out of their wits and all this in a country where they cannot speak the language. Why would someone chose the latter over the former?

Nikki Adams, a spokesperson for the English Collective of Prostitutes, says that “the government had made up the number of women being trafficked into the UK.” This statement shows what many see as the government’s laissez-faire attitude towards the problem of trafficking. In turn though, Jacqui Smith’s claim that up to 70 percent of prostitutes in Britain have been trafficked, has no evidence to support it.

In December 2007, Harriet Harman MP said, “Do we think it’s right that in the 21st Century that women should be in a sex trade or do we think it’s exploitation and should be banned?”

The argument against a blanket ban on the sale of sex is that it will merely become an underground activity and place the women in more danger. But if you examine the law the payments involved in prostitution are legal but it is totally illegal to either ask for or offer the services required. This criminalizes everyone who seeks the company of a prostitute as well as the prostitute for advertizing the fact that she is one. This is all ready driving the industry underground and fueling the need for trafficked women who can’t say no. In 1999, Sweden criminalized the purchase of sex, though the sale of sex was decriminalized and this lead to a 50 percent drop in street prostitution.

The old cliché goes, once you scratch the surface…but as with many political issues prostitution is layered. The Home Office report, ‘Paying the Price’ (2004) says that up to 95% of prostitutes are problematic drug users. Where do we go from here? Make drugs illegal? Well we have done that all ready. We can’t make them go into rehab, and we can’t help them find a job that will pay as much as they are all ready earning to fund their addiction.

Why do people use drugs? Were they abused as a child, bullied at school or just someone who lost their way? If they were abused then why didn’t the local councils help them? Were they too scared to tell anyone?

If they were abused then why haven’t we created the society where a child can report abuse and be rehabilitated or if they were bullied at school, why is there stigma about telling the teacher and putting a stop to it?

When you look closely enough, you could trace the routes of prostitution back to early childhood. Of course this is discounting forgetting personal choice but many have choices taken away from them so it isn’t wholly appropriate. So is it wrong for me to suggest that should prostitution be controlled by either the government or an independent organization and that this should involve health controls and drug rehabilitation?

For every prostitute that is in a ‘safe’ brothel, how many Belarusians, Croatian, Georgian or Macedonian women are being sold from lorries to be locked in cellars somewhere in your town?

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