by Unity

There’s no two ways about it, what I’ve got to say this evening is likely to upset, annoy and even anger more than a few people who are notionally on ‘our side’, but there are some thing that simply have to be said…

…so don’t say that you haven’t been warned.

My starting point for this evening is Nick Davies’ stunning exposé of the near abject failure of the Home Office’s highly touted ‘Operation Pentameter Two’ investigation into sex trafficking in the UK. Over the course of six months, hundreds of brothels/sex workers were raided, in the clear expectation of finding a thriving underground trade in trafficked sex workers, as part of campaign that involved government departments, specialist agencies and every single police force in the country…

…and turned up next to jack-shit – a total of five bona fide, honest-to-goodness trafficking convictions in total.

Nick’s article has already sparked off a pretty lively and entertaining row on Newsnight between Denis McShane and Jeremy Paxman and drawn a response from Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters (which I’d cheerfully fisk if I thought it would make the slightest bit of difference) none of which, in any sense, detracts from the fact that neither of the Pentameter investigations has come anywhere near close to substantiating any of the claims that the Home Office or Home Affairs Select Committee interests have made about the alleged scale of sex trafficking to, and within, the UK.

To some that’s clearly a controversial observation – it shouldn’t be.

The truth, such as it is, is that sex trafficking is a real enough phenomenon and one from which the UK is certainly not immune but, and its an important but, its a phenomenon for which we lack sufficient credible evidence to make any reasonable inferences about its prevalence in this country. To a scientist this is unfortunate but not especially problematic. It just tells us that we need more research and, in all likelihood, a better and more innovative range of research methodologies with which to attack the problem.

To certain politicians, however, it is problem because, not to put it too finely, it strongly suggests that the estimates they’ve been relying on to swing public opinion behind their preferred prohibitionist agenda may easily have been concocted on the back of a fag packet for all that they’re underpinned by anything other than bunch of numbers pulled at random out of their own arses…

…which, if you look at how some of these figures arose may conceivably not be that far from the truth.

Rahila’s article mentions an estimate of 5,000 trafficked women and children referenced in a recent report of the Home Affairs Select Committee, which is allegedly ‘based on an aggregation of the figures provided by those working in this field’.

The origins of that figure are set out in paragraph 28 of the full report as follows:

28. Neither the NGOs nor government agencies were willing even to guess the total number of trafficking victims in the UK. Chief Constable Maxwell, Programme Director of the UKHTC, one of whose main responsibilities is to obtain accurate information about the scale of the problem, admitted “at the minute I do not think we have got a real handle on what the figures are”. The same few statistical studies in specific areas (the Poppy Project’s analysis of information provided by victims of sexual exploitation who had been referred to it, Kalayaan’s analysis of responses from its migrant domestic worker clients, ECPAT UK’s research on child victims in three UK regions) were cited to us time and again. The nearest we came to an overall total was when we added up the result of these studies and suggested to Anti-Slavery International that they implied that there were more than 5000 victims in the UK; Anti-Slavery International concurred.

All of which puts us firmly into guesswork territory even before we refer to the oral evidence sessions on which this paragraph is directly based, where we find that what Chief Constable Grahame Maxwell, the programme director of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, actually said, in response to a question from Ann Cryer about the estimated scale of sex trafficking was:

Chief Constable Maxwell: It is a very difficult to thing to estimate. We had a report in 2003 that said there were 4,000 victims. In P1 we looked at 10% of all visible sex outlets and from that we rescued 88 people. The best piece of research I have seen is from the South-West Regional Intelligence Unit, and what I want to do is try and use that methodology to give us a picture across the UK and try and get something which is a fairly firm figure around what we are dealing with, because at the minute I do not think we have got a real handle on what the figures are.

Pay careful attention here to the statement in bold text given above and now watch the birdie as we move on the evidence given by Klara Skrivankova of Anti-Slavery International (but introduced to the committee as a representative of the UK Human Trafficking Centre Prevention sub-Group) in an exchange with the committee’s chairman, Keith Vaz…

Q2 Chairman: Do we have numbers, for example, for the UK? Would you know how many people are currently in the UK who have been trafficked here? Ms Skrivankova: There are some minimum estimates and they are very conservative estimates from the government. You will be aware of the number of 4,000 women that are trafficked at any given time into the UK, which is the government estimate and is a very conservative estimate. Q3 Chairman: When you say “at any given time” at the moment you estimate—and we know that these are going to be estimates—you estimate that it is about 4,000? Ms Skrivankova: That is the government estimate and that is only on women trafficked for sexual exploitation. So what is important to point out is that this number does not include people who are trafficked for labour exploitation. Q4 Chairman: Do you have a rough figure as to how many those are? Ms Skrivankova: The only number on people who are trafficked for labour exploitation that we currently have comes from the statistics of an organisation called Kalyaan, and they provide assistance to migrant domestics that were in forced labour or were trafficked. According to their data they have recorded within a year that over 300 people were trafficked in London—only in London—for the purposes of domestic work. So that is quite a high number over a short period of time. Q5 Chairman: So roughly 300 for domestic workers and roughly 4,000—and you are saying it is a conservative estimate— Ms Skrivankova: That is a very conservative estimate. Q6 Chairman: … of women in the UK at the present time who are here in the sex industry? Ms Skrivankova: The sex industry and domestic work; the number does not include any other forms of labour exploitation. We have discovered people who are trafficked into construction, processing, packaging and into agriculture and in the catering industry. We now have information about people who are trafficked for committing illicit activities and we do not know that number. Q7 Chairman: But it is more than 5000? Ms Skrivankova: I would say so, yes. We have enough information to conclude that it is a significant problem, that it is in thousands. If you look at the number of cases that were recovered in the recent police operation, Pentameter, that ran over a period of, I believe, four to six months, within that they have just in a small area recovered over 80 cases, and that was over a short period of time of a focused action.

If Vaz tried to pull that off in court he’d quickly get pulled up for leading the witness but that aside what we actually have here is concrete evidence that the figure of 5,000 cited by the Home Affair’s committee is a combined figure for sex trafficking, trafficked domestic labour in London and trafficking in children and, more importantly, that the 4,o00 estimate for sex trafficking alone is a ‘government estimate’ the actual source of which is disclosed in the Home Office’s regulatory impact assessment of ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings:

The overall scale of human trafficking remains unclear although internal research conducted in 2003 suggests that at any one time there were approximately 4,000 victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation in the UK.

Everything I’ve read while researching this article is entirely self-referential and lead back to this unpublished internal Home Office review from 2003, the validity of which cannot be established, or even scrutinised, because despite it cropping up in just about everything published by the Home Office on the subject of sex trafficking in recent years, this research has never been placed into the public domain.

That said, this same document continues with this, now rather embarrassing observation:

More recent intelligence estimates from the police led Operation Pentameter 2 are consistent with the earlier research findings, suggesting that the scale of this form of trafficking has remained relatively stable over the past 5 years.

On that utterly flimsy basis, the government is putting down estimates of the costs and benefits of implementing this convention; £1.8 million per year in prosecution costs and £2.1-£3.4 million for a national referral system and specialist victim support services against £1.2 million a year recouped from projected seizures of traffickers’ assets and from placing victims into legal employment during a 12 month temporary residence period that would follow on from their initial crisis and reflection/recovery support, all of which is based on this new system dealing with 500 trafficked adults and 360 trafficked children a year a figure that appears, like the estimated unit cost of providing these support services, to have been derived exclusively from information provided by the Poppy Project.

The new system from dealing with victims of trafficking, which would offer victims 5 days crisis support, 45 days reflection/recovery time and a full years temporary residency in the UK, including a work permit, is a considerable advance on the previous ‘system’ under which trafficked women were frequently at risk of short-order deportation. As for whether the estimates attached to this system have any basis in reality, who knows for sure – certainly not the Home Office if the available evidence is anything to go by – and anyone who finds themselves feeling seriously vexed by Nick’s article should perhaps consider that the absence of any credible estimates for the prevalence of sex trafficking might just as readily leave this new system woefully underfunded as produce the opposite outcome.

None of this. however, detracts from the fact that there are some serious questions to be asked about the origins of the government estimate of the scale of sex trafficking and the unpublished internal Home Office Review from which it purports to have originated, particularly in light of Keith Vaz’s overt and suspiciously enthusiastic efforts to place this estimate on the offical record and into the report of the Home Affairs Committee, where its referenced as having merely been cited in the

Government’s Action Plan on Tackling Human Trafficking. Nowhere in the final report, does the Committee disclose the fact that this figure is derived from an unpublished internal Home Office review.