IGNORE THE STREET PLIGHT ANY LONGER AND WE WILL ALL HAVE BLOOD ON OUR HANDS...

By former madam & sex worker Miss Charlie Daniels

At 18, I was a single mum living in dire poverty. It hardly surprised anyone when I ended up on the streets, selling my body. But the streets were a hostile place and over a short space of time I was raped, mugged and beaten severely. One night I suffered the humiliation of being bundled into the back of an unmarked police car by two plain clothes who referred to me as "flesh blood" and "new tart", I was taken to the station, put in a cell, photographed, cautioned and then released - yet all I had wanted to do was to but milk and nappies for my baby. In one instance a client broke both my knee-caps with a hammer, in another I was kidnapped, held hostage for three days, raped beaten and dumped back in the street naked and yet I only worked the streets for a few short weeks.

Fortunately, I had the sense to go and work indoors. During this time I worked in some of the most horrific illegal sauna/massage brothels imaginable where guns, drugs and dealers, pimps, violence, robberies and shop-lifters were all part of a daily life that had become an extraordinary form of normality. Back then there wasn't as much competition unlike now where many private flats and well run saunas have sprouted up. (The invention of mobile phones and the internet changed the industry radically).

Somehow I managed to rise above all this and decided to break free, opening my own saunas at the age of 21. After a brief spell in prison, I became homeless and once again desperate, so I undertook my second spell in the trade.

Over the years I had learned business skills, opening a chain of parlours and flats, and in 2003 I narrated and contributed to ITV's Personal Services, a six-part series that would film the sale of my successful businesses – the end of my empire and an era. Although I am not proud of my past, I refuse to be ashamed of it.

I don't promote it as a healthy life choice and it worries me more and more that women are entering the industry for pin money. I don't ask anyone to find the trade morally acceptable either, but we do need a more sensible debate on the issues. It doesn't help that most people are fed stereotypical views about the trade by the media and the general attitude "not on my doorstep" does nothing to help.

I believe that I operated my sauna businesses in as ethical manner as possible and the only law that was being broken was that of running a brothel. I offered the women that worked for me excellent security, showed them how to work safely, how to be the best they could be and, when they decided the time had come to leave, I would help them to plan for the future – for one of the biggest problems about the game is not quitting it, but staying quit. Yet in all that time I was always under the threat of some disgruntled girl or rival parlour owner going to the police and ensuring that I served time for running a brothel, living off immoral earnings or exercising control over prostitutes.

No one ever wants to see the surreal events not happening Ipswich ever happen again. But I feel quite frustrated it could have been avoided. I don't like politics and I don't vote or hold opinions on any one party but social policy is a whole other matter. When David Blunkett first announced the review Paying the Price which would look at the UK's sex industry I was over the moon. But as all politicians do who take the moral route - he was caught gloriously with his trousers down. As a result I was speaking at a conference a year later where a female minister had very different ideas and was going down the dangerous route of saying we had to challenge it was here forever. This attitude is what drives the industry further underground and the more underground it is the less safe and unaccountable.

The new streets strategy rejects the idea of tolerance zones and concentrates on changing the attitudes of society and the judicial system so that the women involved are given every opportunity to be rehabilitated. Sadly this is already failing. Years ago we stopped imprisoning or naming and shaming street workers (many of whom are mothers) and yet under the new ASBO scheme that is exactly what the Government are now doing. Thankfully the stigmatised label of "common prostitute" has been dropped (although we still seem to be stuck with prostitute instead of the preferred term sex-worker) and the emphasis has been placed on greater awareness for the wider issues that cause street-based markets, such as: drugs, homelessness, entitlement to benefits for those who leave home between the ages of 16 and 18 and the biggest single growing problem in the trade – migrant and trafficked workers. There has been a shift in the law to allow for a crackdown on street-based clients, which I welcomed, for clients who cruise the streets, instead of using indoor sites, usually do so for a reason, such as not using protection or bartering for a cheaper deal. In the worst cases, some are looking for children and others may have a more sinister motive but sadly there have been little or no resources to implement this. In one area a scheme to crackdown on kerb-crawlers ran but, because a certain ethnic community were making up the majority of clients arrested their leaders said claimed the police were racially targeting them, the police however tell a very different story but due to today’s hot cultural diversity debate, the scheme was later dropped. There is also some feeling amongst various agencies that when the clients are moved on the girls are then forced into working in even more down-beat areas away from the usually known places.

I predicted in January 2006 in a similar article, that this idea of removing the clients so that the girls go elsewhere is the fact that it has been tried before and only serves to push the street trade further underground and into different areas, causing even more problems with monitoring and protection of girls but at the same time I do believe that if there were no street clients the girls would have to find something else to do the worrying thing is this could likely end up being more harmful crime.

It's a common misconception that, if legal brothels exist, street trade will disappear.

Clients do not visit street girls because we don't have legal brothels - in fact the indoor industry is already booming. What we need as far as brothels go is an informal registration of places. As we have heard from the police in this case, such women live chaotic lifestyles. From my own experience in running parlours, if we discovered a girl had a habit we would refer her to various agencies for help - but we would have no other choice than to sack her. No one wants class A illegal drugs on the premises and sadly even the nicest of girls who become addicted to this substance ultimately she turn into a complete nightmare to work with. The more above board a brothel is, the less suitable it is for most street girls who are from a different environment.

The indoor sector is also due a shake-up. Although I am delighted to hear that sauna owners who employ under-age girls or trafficked women are going to be hit hard, I am more than a little confused at the definition of commercial sexual exploitation as it is not clear if the better-run, existing parlours will be allowed to continue.

The Government says that it recognises such parlours exist but, because less scrupulous ones also hide some of the most harrowing atrocities against workers behind closed doors, all but the new recommended mini-parlours are at risk of prosecution – under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a brothel owner can serve a term of up to seven years' imprisonment and also become labelled as a sex offender.

The announcement that women can now work together indoors in small groups was a welcome move forward for safety's sake. However, the new strategy doesn't appear to clarify in what sort of premises this can take place – i.e., residential or commercial. The existing law says this must be from the woman's own home and, as most working girls are also mothers, this was always a bad idea. Nor does it take into consideration the fact that landlords can still be prosecuted for allowing a brothel to exist.

But, crucially, it overlooks the fact that this will not suit the majority of women who enter the industry on a part-time basis, who may not have the resources or desire to set up, to advertise and to vet their own clientele. And if the Government suddenly thinks that all the girls they take off the streets (many of whom are addicted to drugs and who show various forms of anti-social behaviour) will suddenly quit the game altogether, or go to work in an organised indoor fashion, then it must ask itself the question: why don't they do so already in the illegal, yet tolerated, brothels that we already have?

WE NEED REGISTERED LICENSED BROTHELS - we can do this without legalisation!

Sadly there are over 75 sex-workers missing or murdered in the UK over the last decade. The crimes in Suffolk are not new, (in fact there were sex-workers missing and murdered there before) the only reason it has been so heavily highlighted was due to the media frenzy that escalated once 2 victims had been linked the word serial killer emerged. Of course since then the story became even more newsworthy because the killer disposed of a bunch of bodies so quickly - an unprecedented act.

Sadly this country is becoming like the US. Serial killers are immortalised. In this sick world it appears the more victims and the more gore the better. Books are written, films made and women throwing themselves at the imprisoned and the general level of fascination is such that the families of the victims are forgotten in the quest to sensationalise the drama.

The level of public sympathy has been extraordinary. Even the police call for us all to view these women as mothers and daughters as opposed to mere prostitutes. People text and email me daily to say the families of their victims are in their thoughts and prayers. I guess that's a privileged position I’m in after writing about my experiences and sharing them with people who previously didn’t understand the industry. Also suggestions that myself and others made over the last few years are now being followed such as, showing photos of the victims as everyday women and not just a mugs hot. A far cry from the days when the attorney general in the summation of the Yorkshire Ripper case said the greatest tragedy of all was that some 'innocent women' had been killed women where were some bodies daughter or some bodies mother.

There is some sunshine to come after such an horrendous storm...

The girls deaths will not be totally in vain. This of course will come as no comfort for their families, but the nation cannot ignore the plight of street women for a moment longer. It's only a shame that this results from such a great sacrifice of beautiful life...