Drop in the ocean? More sex traffickers jailed

[Valenteenah.]

Does jailing the odd gang or gang member here and there actually make a difference? Especially when hundreds of similar gangs operate in London alone and tens of thousands of women are trafficked into sex slavery each year?

 

Somehow, I don't think the government, or police for that matter, are doing enough about this issue.

 

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Sex trafficking gang members jailed

 

Staff and agencies

Friday September 29, 2006

Guardian Unlimited

 

Members of a gang that lured a Lithuanian woman to Britain and then sold her into prostitution were today jailed for up to nine years.

 

The woman, who risked her life when she jumped out of a 20 ft-high window to escape the gang, came to the UK from Lithuania after they promised her well-paid work. But what followed was sexual abuse as she was first raped and then forced into prostitution.

 

Albanian Riza Hoxha, 45, of Ilford, Essex, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring between April 24 and May 24 last year to "traffic a person to the UK for sexual gain".

 

Jailing Hoxha for eight years the judge, Duncan Matheson, said he had clearly been the "primary moving force in what went on".

 

Hoxha's accomplice and countryman Ylber "Billy" Dauti, a 23-year-old illegal immigrant living in Golders Green, north-west London, was sentenced to nine years for trafficking and for plotting to cause prostitution for gain.

 

Lithuanian Ruta Strazdaite, who tricked her friend into prostitution, and Monika "Lilly" Szabova, a Slovakian prostitute, were also convicted of trafficking and prostitution charges, and were sentenced to four years and two and a half years in prison.

 

The judge told the gang that having lured their "psychologically vulnerable" victim to Britain with false promises of work, they subjected her to a "significant degree of compulsion to act as a prostitute, quite plainly contrary to her wishes".

 

Read full article here.

[ElPunto]

^The British government could do more for sure. But there has to be more of a concerted effort for action in the home countries of these women. After all, is the British government supposed to care more about Lithuanian, Moldovan or Ukrainian women that their respective governments and societies?

 

The other thing I find slightly odd - these stories of women lured by the promise of jobs and then trafficked is hardly unusual. So if you were a women in one of these countries, would you not be able to investigate these claims of jobs in some fashion or other before heading off? After all, these countries are not at African levels of destitution - you can telephone, look up on the internet, talk to NGOs, speak to embassy staff at the destination countries etc.

 

I don't know - this certainly is no easy problem to solve.

[Valenteenah.]

^ Hello there.

 

I too wonder about what Eastern European governments are doing about the human trafficking problem. Clearly not enough, seeing as the problem is only increasing and not decreasing.

 

In terms of how the women are lured, the same tactics are not always used. This particular victim was a 36 year-old mother of three, which I suppose explains the lure of a well-paying job (and her escape at the risk of causing serious injury to herself). These gangs have groomers who usually lure very young girls, between 12 and 19 mostly, with free holidays, festivals, modelling careers and such. These girls are befriended by young good-looking guys; they are groomed and then sold to gangs once they are brought into the country. Expecting a weekend away or a fun couple of days at a festival with their ‘boyfriend’, they find themselves raped and abused in a brothel, unable to speak the language, without their passports or any form of ID and with no one to help them.

 

This is why I think it’s important for the Govt and Police to do more…once these girls are in the UK, their countries of origin cannot do much for them without the help of British authorities.

[Baluug]

You gotta put some of the blame on these girls as well, though......You'll never get a free ride from someone you just met, you gotta be smarter than that.

[Valenteenah.]

^ It may not be someone they have just met. It may be someone they have known a while, someone who has gained their trust. That's what the grooming is about.

 

But you are right, the girls are certainly to blame for their naivete.

[sheherazade]

^the girls are to blame for using the men- they want something out of the situation, though they don't get quite what they bargained(wrong word really) for. Naive is a nice way of describing what a hell a lot of women do, ending up in a brothel(against their will) or a hotel room(by choice) for material gain. I'd say women from cultures where milking(another wrong word) men is acceptable are more at risk. Poverty alone can not explain it. False flattery gets you everywhere.

 

The government ought to clear out all those upstairs flats flooding Soho with their dim red lights. What do they think goes on in there? Puppet shows? I walk by those places and see men look left and right in case they are seen by someone they know and quickly disappear up narrow stairs. I was waiting outside a restaurant for friends once with a friend who was checking out the men going in, u know, making comments like 'U'd never think he would, would you? I mean look at him'. I was trying not to but I knew what she meant. These joints must be popular for them to flourish. In the 15 minutes we were there, a steady stream of men appeared, disappeared, appeared and disappeared. She was still talking about Mr Clean-living looking when he shot the down the stairs and out. 'That was quick', she quipped.

 

No wonder house properties are astronomical. If it's not a whore-house, it's not affordable.

 

Blah.

[Cara.]

I think naivete is by definition blameless. These women/girls are NOT to blame for being exploited by sociopathic b@stards.

[Legend of Zu]

^^^^ How dare they? dem bast@%$#

 

In general, to me the exploited girls can be divided into few groups - the ones who are old/wise enough to know what they doing (but those they could cheat; and some others who were captured at a very young age (poor them; and others who were decieved (prolly were told they would do odd jobs like being maid and so on).

 

What about the Slave laborers?

[ElPunto]

Originally posted by Cara:

I think naivete is by definition blameless. These women/girls are NOT to blame for being exploited by sociopathic b@stards.

Blameless? You think? I always thought that naivete when you have the opportunity to know and learn and be educated makes one much less blameless. At the very least, one hopes naive people realize their naivete and seek counsel so that they may avoid the potential harmful consequences of their self-inflicted naivete.

[Cara.]

Aha, but see, you can be so naive that you don't know you're naive.

 

As a great poet once said: "As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don't know we don't know."

 

[Valenteenah.]

Anyone can be exploited.

 

 

Sheh, I suppose Soho would be the one place you could expect to find brothels, but I'm sure there are more in 'The City'.

 

Do you by any chance remember a police raid on a three-storey townhouse in Hyde Park some months ago? It was a whorehouse and several young girls were rescued. The clientele were all well-heeled city businessmen.

 

Guess how much the rent was? £6000pw. And this wasn't the only brothel the pimping tenant was running.

 

Enslaving and abusing women has never been more profitable.

[sheherazade]

Lol, no I don't remember, er, should I?

 

6K a week! I don't know that the women at such establishments are enslaved or abused. They're high end whores and would be taken care of- whore in a bad state, City boy won't pay up. He has standards, you see.

[xiinfaniin]

Originally posted by Cara:

As a great poet once said: "As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don't know we don't know."

 

^^

Rumsfield a great poet , eh !

 

Waad iga qoslisay ...

[Valenteenah.]

Originally posted by sheherazade:

I don't know that the women at such establishments are enslaved or abused. They're high end whores and would be taken care of- whore in a bad state, City boy won't pay up. He has standards, you see.

I would define forced prostitution as abuse. And you are assuming City boy would care whether his prostitute is being held against her will or a career girl.

 

I don't remember many details, but the raid was part of the Met's Operation Pentameter, which targets organised criminal gangs trading in sex slavery.

[sheherazade]

I'd say high-end prostitutes are less likely to be forced; many will be in it of their free will. Whores who come at a high price will have to look the part; a harassed, abused whore isn't worth big bucks. City boy wouldn't pay big money for damaged goods. It's simple economics. I don't know, if I were paying a lot of money for sex I'd want a whore that was worth the price. Then again I never would so maybe I have no conecpt of what to look for in a whore. Maybe abused is THE desirable look. Hmm, whom to ask?