This is an edited transcript of Esther’s speech at the ‘Breaking the Cycle: Exposing the links between male violence, pornography & prostitution’ conference in London on 11 November 2023. The recording is online. Esther’s speech starts at 45:48.
There are and will be more Andrew Tates
Andrew Tate is an imitator, not the originator, of “loverboy pimp” strategies. They are very common everywhere and have been for a long time.
They are so common in Romania, to which Tate extradited himself, that UK law enforcement agencies have been involved in previous joint actions against them with their counterparts there and the UK government has helped to fund campaigns warning about them.
Loverboy pimp activities have resulted in thousands of young Romanian women being trafficked across Europe and to the UK, where commercial sex websites are the equivalent of German mega-brothels.
Indoor prostitution, the most common and most hidden form of prostitution in the UK, is mainly facilitated through commercial sex websites run by companies registered in the UK.
It is also facilitated through social media, through dating and hook-up sites, and in other online spaces. But in the case of commercial sex websites, sexual exploitation is the primary purpose for which they exist. They concentrate demand.
For a buyer, access to a woman they can pay for sex is just a click away. Every other avenue for accessing prostituted women involves more effort, more time, a higher level of prior knowledge or a higher risk of discovery, all of which are potential deterrents to an impulse buyer.
Commercial sex websites have also contributed to huge increases in the numbers of women and young girls entering the sex industry because of austerity budgets, media misrepresentation of what involvement in the sex industry is like, coercion and trafficking.
Because commercial sex websites are just a click away.
Law enforcement collaboration – double standards, conflict of interest and the potential for corruption
In January 2021 the National Police Chiefs Council, successfully argued in the High Court that it was necessary for convictions for loitering and soliciting handed down to Fiona Broadfoot and Julie Swede more than 20 years ago to remain on the Police National Computer until they reached 100 years of age in case they applied at some point for positions requiring the “utmost integrity”, such as the police or judiciary.
This was before the convictions of sex buyer Wayne Couzens and the convictions of many other police officers for acts of sexual violence.
The same National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), and the National Crime Agency (NCA) collaborate, and the NCA is embedded with, one of the largest commercial sex websites operating in the UK, Vivastreet.
The UK company which owns Vivastreet, is itself owned by a company registered in Malta whose owner lives in Spain. The UK company which owns its main competitor, Adultwork, is apparently owned by a company registered in Panama.
The NPCC and NCA have also collaborated with these websites by seeking to change the language used to describe them, by referring to them as adult services websites (ASWs). This term is misleading and intentionally obscures and sanitises the nature of what is transacted on the sites. Online electoral registration, marriage registration and gambling sites are all for the use of people over the age of 18. Are they ASWs?
Vivastreet advertises its partnership with national law enforcement agencies, which it is using in its own commercial interests to knock out competitors and achieve market dominance at the taxpayers’ expense.
This conflict of interest has not been addressed by those whose positions require “the utmost integrity”.
The Home Affairs Select Committee has been conducting an inquiry into human trafficking. The committee has democratic oversight of the Home Office, including police forces and national police organisations like the NCA and the NPCC.
The managing director of the company which owns Vivastreet, refused to tell the committee what her salary was, but prices buyers can expect to pay for access to the bodies of women advertised through Vivastreet are advertised on the women’s profiles.
How is this democratic accountability?
Andrew Tate is a home-grown pimp. Ministry of Justice statistics on prosecutions for offences related to pimping suggest it is highly unlikely he would have been prosecuted at all if he had stayed here.
His profits from the sexual exploitation of others were facilitated and enabled online, as is now the case for most of those who profit from the prostitution of others in the UK.
In 2021 cross-party groups on commercial sexual exploitation in both the Westminster Parliament and the Scottish Parliament published reports on commercial sex websites which concluded that they knowingly facilitate the prostitution of others and are a major enabler of it.
The report by the Scottish Parliament’s cross-party group said that the scale of sexual exploitation and trafficking facilitated by these sites vastly outstrips policing capacity to respond.
It also concluded that collaboration with the sites by UK-wide law enforcement failed to meet objectives, provided political cover to the website companies, and underplayed the level of threat they pose.
The NCA and the NPCC have not addressed these issues adequately.
The UK’s international obligations to reduce demand for sexual exploitation.
Several international agreements which have been signed and ratified by the UK require it either to discourage demand for sexual exploitation, or to suppress exploitation of the prostitution of women:
“States Parties shall adopt or strengthen legislative or other measures, such as educational, social or cultural measures, including through bilateral and multilateral cooperation, to discourage the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation of persons, especially women and children, that leads to trafficking”
– UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children (the Palermo Protocol) Article 9.5
“States Parties shall take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to suppress all forms of traffic in women and exploitation of prostitution of women.”
– UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Article 6
“To discourage the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation of persons, especially women and children, that leads to trafficking, each Party shall adopt or strengthen legislative, administrative, educational, social, cultural or other measures”
– Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (2005) Article 6
These texts clearly refer to the exploitation of women and girls and the exploitation of prostitution of women and not only to moving them from place to place.
It would be curious if they did not, as this would otherwise mean that the agreements were seeking only to address travel, rather than exploitation through prostitution for the profit of others experienced both by women already in a state, and where it is the outcome for women brought to a state because of demand from sex buyers.
The international agreements make an explicit causal connection between domestic demand for prostituted women and sex trafficking. The connection between increases in demand and increased sex trafficking is evidence-based.
Exploitation through prostitution and therefore sex trafficking only exist because of demand. Demand for sexual exploitation through prostitution is a barrier to women’s equality.
Profits for traffickers wouldn’t justify the risk if demand was constrained by enforced sanctions against buyers and there was a greater focus on supporting women to exit.
No effective measures are being taken to protect women from predator pimps like Andrew Tate in England and Wales or Scotland because no steps are being taken to address demand.
As sex trafficking is the most frequently detected type of trafficking globally and the most profitable, we should be seeing higher numbers of prosecutions for sex trafficking than for other types. The exact opposite is the case.
Profiting from the exploitation through prostitution of others in England and Wales and Scotland has been effectively decriminalised and this approach is supported by guidance from the NPCC which was updated in June 2023.
The Scottish Government’s strategy for preventing violence against women and girls, Equally Safe, regards prostitution as a form of gendered violence and is taking forward policy actions, including challenging men’s demand for prostitution.
In February 2023 the Home Secretary included VAWG within the Strategic Policing Requirement, recognising it as a national threat alongside terrorism and serious and organised crime.
The updated guidance on prostitution-related offences published by the NPCC in June 2023 says that prostitution is not necessarily violent. This moving of the goalposts by the NPCC demonstrates a clear commercial benefit gained by the companies which own commercial sex websites from their partnerships with national law enforcement bodies.
The criminal justice system has suffered bigger budget cuts since 2008 than many other public services, and the announcement that VAWG is an equivalent threat to terrorism has not so far been matched by equivalent resources.
For the NPCC to limit access to potential resources for tackling profiteers who exploit others through prostitution by seeking to change the framing of what prostitution is, while it simultaneously argues that lack of enforcement of the law is due to limited resources, is very cynical.
The NPCC guidance is not mandatory, as the operational independence of police forces in England and Wales and of their chief constables is an important constitutional principle but is likely to be highly influential and to make it harder for individual forces to adopt different approaches to see whether they are more effective. It is also likely to have an impact on the effectiveness of different approaches adopted in Scotland, Northern Ireland and possibly the Republic of Ireland, because of our shared borders and the Common Travel Area.
The National Crime Agency said this in written evidence to the Home Affairs Committee:
There is a demand for sexual services in the UK which has created a sexual services marketplace where both autonomous, self-determined sex workers operate alongside traffickers exploiting victims of sexual exploitation. NCA does not aim to reduce the demand of legal sexual services however is undertaking work to tackle the demand for sexual exploitation.
The demand for trafficked victims of sexual exploitation cannot be tackled without reducing demand for prostituted women, wherever they come from.
When asked by the chair of the Home Affairs Committee for a comparison of the percentages of posts on Vivastreet from autonomous women compared with trafficked women, the NCA’s director general of operations couldn’t provide this. (Q429)
The NCA has based its objectives, which put the UK government in a position where it is not complying with international treaty obligations, on a claim it cannot evidence.
Academics with whom the NCA and the NPCC have been cooperating, frequently refer to the USA, where the role of the state in providing healthcare, benefits to alleviate poverty and other means of reducing inequality is extremely limited.
Are those on the left who champion “sex work is work” seeking a similar rollback in the UK? They are highly selective about which neoliberal practices they favour. Would they support US laws relating to gun control or hunting animals?
The operational difficulties law enforcement agencies have been having with bringing prosecutions is evidence in favour of targeting buyers in the UK. It is not evidence supporting collaborating with pimping websites which are clearly keen to recruit former police officers, with all the inside knowledge or “intelligence” they have from cases they haven’t prosecuted.
It is sex buyers who are most invested in maintaining the stigma associated with being involved in prostitution. Businesses that give buyers access to prostituted women service this investment.
Vivastreet has introduced and is proposing to introduce measures, including facial recognition, which are mainly aimed at identifying women whose profiles are on the site.
These measures will support those rare buyers who find themselves at risk of prosecution because they will be able to claim they would not have expected to be able to access a woman who was trafficked on a website which had these measures and was supported by a partnership with law enforcement agencies.
Commercial sex websites do not require buyers to provide ID, only the women advertised on them. They place the privacy and public reputations of buyers above the safety of women they do identify and from whom they take money.
Compare these ID requirements with what you need to provide to gain access to a property through Airbnb or to adopt a cat or dog through an animal welfare charity.
It isn’t possible to “screen” buyers through social media sites because these sites have fake profiles and genuine ones tell you nothing about whether a buyer abuses women or has alcohol or substance issues which make him a danger.
One measure Vivastreet says it is introducing to protect women from predatory buyers will give women direct access to a police portal. Vivastreet gives reporting “timewasters” as one of the purposes of this access. That could be a potential buyer who originally acted on impulse and changed his mind.
The managing director of the company which owns Vivastreet gives such high priority to tackling “timewasters” that, when the Home Affairs Committee asked whether members of the safeguarding team at the company could book “mystery shopper” appointments with women on the site to carry out welfare checks, or check that their profiles were legitimate, she said this would be unethical. Checks are carried out by the NCA if the website passes on an alert, which means that the cost of checking whether the website is endangering others is picked up by the taxpayer, rather than the company which owns and profits from it.
Restaurants regularly face serious financial losses due to customers reserving tables and not turning up. Shouldn’t they and other industries which have these problems be able to access a police portal where they can report “timewasters” who threaten the survival of their businesses?
Privatising profits and socialising losses – the link between the business models of energy companies, water companies and the sex industry
Ecologists and environmentalists often use a game theory game called the Commonize Costs-Privatize Profits Game when considering resource allocation. It is closely connected with a concept called the “tragedy of the commons”.
Players seek to externalise costs generated by their actions across the wider community while privatizing their own financial or other profits. They are incentivised to deplete resources.
Private energy and water companies paying large dividends to shareholders while consumers’ energy costs soar, and taxpayers pay the cost of cleaning sewage and other pollutants from rivers and coastlines, are recent examples.
The business model of commercial sex websites and other companies and individuals profiting from the exploitation of others through prostitution is the same, but the sex industry escapes criticism for this from those who most loudly denounce exploitation of resources at public expense in other contexts.
Environmentalists and ecologists see populations as resources but are silent about addressing demand which leads to the sexual exploitation through prostitution of women and girls.
They rail against corporations but have no issues with the behaviour of corporate interests involved in prostitution.
An individual player wishing to continue profiting through this game by offloading costs must not broadcast their involvement in the game, or their use of this strategy.
Equal access to information, which democratic societies claim as an important value, is costly to a player seeking to win in this scenario.
Transparency, like freedom and equality, may be championed in public, but misleading claims, deception and secrecy bring individual players higher rewards.
Doesn’t that sound like the sex industry?
Andrew Tate’s indiscretion and sharing of a strategy contributed to his undoing. The strategy and the profiting from sexual exploitation of others more generally, continues and will do so while demand is not addressed.
Breaking the Cycle
Esther spoke on the afternoon panel at the conference. You can watch it here (starting at 45:48).
Sign the petition
Commercial sex websites are today’s red-light district and mega-brothel. They have made buying women for sexual use and abuse easier than ever before. This has normalised prostitution and led to rapid expansion of the industry and many broken lives as girls and young women are brutalised within it – while society at large carries the bill.
Commercial sex websites currently operate freely in the UK. Please sign our petition to show that you think that commercial sex websites should be shut down, and pimps and sex traffickers held to account.