Miss Charlie Daniels

TIME TO BRING THE SEX TRADE OUT OF THE SHADOWS

By Charlie Daniels (As published by The Yorkshire Post)

Charlie Daniels is a media specialist on prostitution. Her book, Priceless, about her experiences in the vice trade in South Yorkshire, is out in paperback May 2007. The UK sex industry is about to have its biggest legal overhaul for years due to the Government's new strategy, Paying the Price. The original inquiry last year asked various agencies and relevant sources for their opinion. I was a contributor in my role as a writer who has had direct life experience in the trade.

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.

Then, fortunately, I had the sense to go and work indoors. During this time I worked in some of the most horrific 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. 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.

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.

Tolerance zones were ruled out by the Government for a number of reasons, most of which I believe to be sound. Thankfully the stigmatised label of "common prostitute" has been dropped 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 welcome, 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.

However, one problem I can predict with 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.

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 labeled 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? My answer to this is a whole other article!

I'm afraid it's a common misconception that, if legal brothels exist, street trade will disappear – in fact, the more above board a brothel is, the less suitable it is for most street girls who are from a different environment.

Most of what the Government is trying to do is commendable, especially the initiative for prostitution prevention. It now plans awareness campaigns in schools on the subject of grooming, a problem that has seen a major increase in the last few months. Overall, however, I'm a little disappointed that the Government went to so much effort to collate information and then, in some cases, offer a knee-jerk reaction to it. Further consultation with those in the know would have been beneficial. So, as in the cannabis debate, we can expect some developments to come.