Last year we wrote about a new research project led by Professor Teela Sanders of the University of Leicester “to examine how websites which promote and/or facilitate sex work can address sexual exploitation.” We explained that the aim of the research seems like an oxymoron. How can websites that promote and facilitate sexual exploitation simultaneously prevent or reduce sexual exploitation?
Surely even a child can see that if you are serious about preventing or reducing something, the best approach would be to stop promoting and facilitating it? But it would seem that the researchers are so embedded in their ideological position that they can’t see the blindingly obvious. An ideological position that nothing must interfere with the convenience of men who seek to buy women for sexual use and abuse.
The project has now been completed and the report published. Given the project definition, the results are not surprising – but they make depressing and enraging reading. Most concerning of all is the project’s veneer of legitimacy and the likelihood that the “findings” will be used to inform the government and OFCOM’s response to the new requirements in the Online Safety Act to develop a code of practice for commercial sex websites.
The biased premise of the research and why this matters
The report acknowledges that pimping websites are “the most significant enabler of commercial sexual exploitation in the UK” and are “spaces where organised crime can create profiteering from vulnerable people (usually women and children)”. Then it goes on to claim that these websites “are here to stay” and that closing them would “result in the marketplace being displaced”.
For the latter, the report gives a reference to a Vox article from 2018 that responded almost hysterically to FOSTA-SESTA within a couple of months of its passing and links to an Instagram post as if by reference – not what most people would describe as academic rigour.
The ‘Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act’ (known as FOSTA-SESTA) was signed into federal law in the US on 11 April 2018, making it illegal to operate websites that promote and facilitate prostitution and enabling victims to sue websites that knowingly facilitated their prostitution. As major legislation against pimping websites recently passed by another G7 nation, you would think that the researchers would be interested in a serious examination of its impact.
Childsafe is a US organisation that monitors child sexual exploitation on the web. A year after FOSTA-SESTA was passed, they did an in-depth analysis of its impact on online prostitution advertising. They found prostitution advertising was significantly disrupted and there’d been a large reduction in demand and no evidence of widespread displacement of the advertisements to alternative platforms.
Childsafe calculated that the closure of the big prostitution advertising websites like Backpage meant that startup costs for pimps and traffickers are now significantly higher, profits are lower, admin takes much longer, and the risks are greater. As a result, “sex trafficking is a less attractive illicit business in 2019 than it was in 2018.”
But apparently the Leicester researchers ignored all of this and instead appeared to rely on an article by a journalist who specialises in “pop culture”.
The researchers also claim that the introduction of the Nordic Model in Northern Ireland (NI) had little impact on preventing sexual exploitation – and provide a reference to the 2019 review commissioned by the NI Department of Justice (DOJ). We looked at this review and found multiple issues with it. Even though the Nordic Model law had not been enforced in NI, and there had been no training for those tasked with implementing it, no public information or education campaigns, no exiting services had been set up, and there was widespread opposition from the NI police and DOJ, the review showed that it still had a measurable impact on men’s behaviour – making them less likely to go out prostitution buying. You can only imagine the positive impact on women and society if the approach had been implemented diligently.
If this is not enough to indicate the bias of the Leicester researchers, the fact that the research’s key aim is how commercial sex websites can prevent modern slavery and human trafficking and not whether this might be feasible, surely proves it. By making the focus so narrow, it would be possible to ignore anything that did not conform to the ideological position that these websites are “here to stay” regardless of the predictable harm they cause to individuals and society.
So, the overriding focus of the research seemed to be to ensure that nothing was uncovered that would jeopardise the legitimacy of these websites or that could be used to argue for their closure. This might be reasonable, except that the researchers have presented the research as providing unbiased “evidence on the best approaches to MSHT prevention on ASWs[*]” (page 9 of the study protocol) and are explicitly aiming to influence legislation and government responses not only to these websites but also to violence against women and girls (VAWG) more generally:
“Working collaboratively with the NCA, NPCC and close ties with the UK Home Office through the Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre will ensure this new knowledge reaches these decision-making spaces. We plan to specifically ensure that these findings are directly integrated into the drafting of the law and any framework of governance around ASWs that is developed. The contribution by the peers in this process means we aim to inform the Bill in such a way that is meaningful to them, protecting the right to sell sex consensually online, whilst also protecting workers from exploitation and trafficking. Thus, beyond online harm, the findings will also be relevant to several areas of law and policy: notably future working groups associated with the Violence against Women and Girls Strategy; the Ten Years Drugs Strategy and other sex work governance.”
Page 10 of the study protocol, emphasis added.
Note that they consider people have a “right” to post online prostitution advertisements.
[*] MSHT is an acronym used by the researchers to mean “sexual exploitation, modern slavery, and human trafficking”; ASWs is an acronym they used to refer to “adult services websites” – their euphemism for what are more accurately called commercial sex websites or pimping websites.
Research questions
Page 9 of the research report lists four main questions that drove the research “to meet the aims” of the project and “fill identified gaps in the research area” and goes on to say that they were addressed “via a multi-method approach” and were designed “to offer a holistic view of the problems”.
Sian, a prostitution survivor, made the following astute observations:
“The questions all focus on the websites, pimps and punters and how to keep them happy. There is no mention of the safety of victims apart from how taking the websites down may make ‘spotting victims harder’.
It seems to me that the entire research was tailored to keeping the websites online and making profits from the sale of women and girls, keeping pimps free from legal interference, and punters unbothered by requirements for identification and breaches of their ‘privacy’. There is no such concern about the ‘privacy’ of the women being sold amid all the calls for strengthening ID checks on them.
The ‘multi-method approach’ is pointless when it ignores the most vulnerable party in the prostitution scenario.”
Sian makes a really important point here. Nowhere in the report do the researchers consider the well documented violence that is inherent to prostitution – except to make claims that criminalising any aspect of the industry (including the websites and sex buyers) would expose the women to more harm. The evidence does not support these claims.
That the researchers did not consider the safety of the woman as a discrete issue is extraordinary, especially when you consider that last year Mark Brown was convicted of the murder of two women he met through AdultWork, where he was a registered user.
Research methodology
According to the study protocol document, the research consisted of:
- 51 interviews: 30 with the police, 13 with “practitioners”, and 6 with “those working in the Adult Service Website industry”. There was little information about how these people were selected for interview. It appears that the “practitioners” were from 13 separate organisations – but we are not told the names of these organisations or how they were selected and whether they represented a range of ideological positions.
- An online survey for “consumers using ASWs, to understand how they perceive their role in identifying crimes, barriers to reporting and prospective further criminalisation in relation to MSHT on ASWs.” This gathered 142 responses.
Interestingly they did not conduct any research into the views of women and others who have been advertised on these websites by pimps and traffickers. We contacted Rachel Keighley, one of the key researchers, on 15 September 2022, in response to a call out for participants advertised in the Human Trafficking Foundation’s 7 September’s newsletter. In our email we introduced Megan King, one of our members who is a survivor of sexual exploitation facilitated through these websites, and we explained that she was keen to participate in this project.
We did not receive a response. This is unfortunate, because if they had interviewed her, she would have shed light on some of their apparent misconceptions and wishful thinking.
For example, page 2 of the study protocol references an article in The Independent to support their claim that the offence of controlling prostitution for gain “is used to criminalise any activities where somebody associates with a sex worker”. Our research shows that this claim, often repeated by sex industry lobbyists, is utter scaremongering.
Not only does the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) guidance explicitly state that the offence should only be used where a third party is sexually exploiting another person for gain, but FOI requests show that there were on average less than 10 prosecutions per year for this offence in England and Wales over the past five years. This is a practically insignificant number, given that conservative estimates put the number of people involved in prostitution in England and Wales at around 65,000.
The Independent article repeats a number of other dodgy claims beloved by the sex industry lobby. For example, “Jasmine” is reported as saying that:
“advertising online means it is possible to see a client’s credit card, which means she can google their name, and also get their phone number and run that through Ugly Mugs to check they are not listed as being violent.”
But the big commercial sex websites do not facilitate payments for in-person sexual encounters and do not require punters to provide ID. If the researchers had talked to Megan, they would know that payment takes place offline, typically in cash, and that punters often use unregistered burner phones that they can easily replace they if they are reported to Ugly Mugs.
This begs the question why the researchers would use a newspaper article that contains such misleading information to back up their assertions? Is it because they are ignorant and really don’t have a clue how these websites actually work? Or is it because they understand full well, but for ideological reasons, want to perpetuate the sex industry lobby’s misleading claims? I’m not sure which of these two options is worse quite frankly.
“Peer research and action learning”
The researchers make much of the fact that they worked with 10 sexual exploitation survivors from eight different countries, who they referred to as “peers”:
“This research project employed peer research methods, working alongside Survivor Representatives with Unseen UK. Peer research methods are valuable as they recognise the agency and expertise of those with lived experience to partake and guide research within their community. […] Ten peer researchers from eight different countries supported the project, eight females and two males, ranging in age from mid-20s to 65+. They were actively involved through participation in the advisory group, instrument design, implementation, analysis, and the dissemination phase of the research project. The peer researchers were compensated for their time through gift vouchers and payment of travel expenses.”
Page 10 of the research report, emphasis added.
The Cambridge online dictionary defines ‘peer’ as: “a person who is the same age or has the same social position or the same abilities as other people in a group”. It’s hard to see how someone who is “compensated” with gift vouchers and travel expenses is really a peer of academic researchers who are “compensated” with hefty salaries, kudos, and respected academic positions.
This use of the word peer therefore oozes obfuscation. The researchers published a paper that gives further details of how they worked with these “peers”. On page 3 it states, with a straight face:
“PAR focuses on decolonising the research process, acknowledging lived experiences and contributing to social impact while challenging the hegemonic power relations in academia that are deeply gendered, classed and racialised.”
The hypocrisy might have made me laugh if it wasn’t so enraging: they used some marginalised people to give credibility to their flawed research, paid them peanuts and yet pretended this was a challenge to the “hegemonic power relations in academia”. You couldn’t make it up. Unless you are an academic, I suppose.
There is no explanation of what criteria were used to select the “peers”. Although the paper states that they had experience of sexual exploitation, there is no information about whether this was facilitated through commercial sex websites and if so, if this was in the UK. Clearly a number of them had limited English (translators had to be used) and they had little if any prior experience of academic research.
The researchers provided training and Unseen gave them weekly “employability” skills sessions. It is brilliant to know that this group of survivors were given these opportunities, which they clearly appreciated. But it begs the question of why the researchers didn’t also find British women who have been advertised on these websites and have excellent English and possibly also have undertaken advanced study. I suspect the answer is that the researchers didn’t actually want to know what Megan and other British women like her could tell them.
Apparently, the “peers” first engaged with the research at the design stage and they helped shape some of the interview questions, etc. However, there is no evidence that they were involved in drawing up the research premise or the fundamental questions it was aimed to answer. And even if they did have a chance to comment on the research fundamentals, is it likely that they would have had the language skills to fully comprehend the issues or the confidence to critique them? After reading the paper, I must answer with an emphatic no.
Even so, the “peers” did manage to make the researchers think by recommending near the end of the project a change in language from “preventing modern slavery” to “eradicating modern slavery”. The paper makes it clear that they wanted exiting routes to be available to those selling sex and at least one wanted sex buyers to be targeted. I am left wondering how the results might have been different if they had been educated on different options, such as the Nordic Model and the possibility of banning these websites along the lines of FOSTA-SESTA. But I suspect that was the point and the researchers didn’t want “peers” who had the knowledge, confidence and skills to be able to challenge the basis of the research.
‘Whistleblowing’ and the sex buyer survey
The researchers say that they recruited respondents to take part in their survey of “consumers” by advertising on “adult service website platforms”. They received 142 responses (page 31 of the research report) from 150 respondents (page 8 of the study protocol) of whom 92% claimed to be male with “just under 50% having purchased sexual services on ASWs for 3 years or more”.
It is generally accepted that in excess of 99% of sex buyers are male, so these figures set my alarm bells ringing. Presumably the 8% who weren’t male were female and therefore not representative of the average punter – meaning that we would need to see the sex-disaggregated data to be able to make useful conclusions. But the researchers do not provide this and seemingly carried on as if they had a representative sample whose aggregated responses are reliable enough to base national policy and legislation on.
The key messages the researchers gleaned from the survey can be summarised as:
- Sex buyers carry out verification checks “to ensure the sex worker is not displaying obvious signs of sexual exploitation”.
- It needs to be easier for sex buyers to report concerns to both the websites and police.
- Sex buyers want greater regulation of the websites.
- Sex buyers could play a greater role in identifying exploitation.
Wow! What a rosy picture the researchers have of sex buyers! As if punter forums where they can state what they really think about the women they buy without inhibitions, didn’t exist! These show that punters often notice the women show signs of sometimes severe exploitation and drug use and yet they use and abuse her anyway and then go on to write a review complaining that he felt hardly done by because of her lack of enthusiasm.
The report reproduces data collected by the Modern Slavery Helpline in the four years to 2021. This shows that in four years, 30 sex buyers contacted the helpline to report a prostituted person they had concerns was being exploited or trafficked. This works out at less than eight a year.
This is a deplorably tiny number, given that conservative estimates put the number of people involved in prostitution in the UK as a whole at around 80,000, of whom a significant proportion fall under the international definition of human trafficking, each with a multitude of punters every year. And of all those prostitution encounters and all those women, punters only reported suspicions about eight of them. What more evidence do we need that punters are not going to lead this revolution?
Here is Sian’s response:
“It’s heartening to hear that most punters would cancel the booking if they were worried about exploitation, but I do wonder how much of that was said because it was the right thing to say, and that in reality the cancellation wouldn’t happen. The low number of punters who would report the potential exploitation kind of bears this out.
Personal experience here: Out of around 5,000 guys that paid to abuse me when I was involved in prostitution, not one had any problem with it, and not one backed out, even though I was always in my school uniform so it was obvious I wasn’t legal. In fact, plenty of guys who just went along with their friends ended up paying to join in.
While punters are absolutely at the forefront of those who should be reporting any suspicions of trafficking or coercion, they’re there for themselves and their sexual urges, and this takes precedence over almost everything else, especially the closer the punter gets to meeting with or interacting with the prostituted woman or girl.
I note that many of those interviewed said ‘consensual sexual services’ shouldn’t come under legislation, and that this is entirely unchallenged by the report authors.”
As to greater regulation of the websites, of course punters would want that because it would take the onus off them and their behaviour. If he is later accused of having paid for a woman who had been coerced, he would be able to claim that he assumed everything was hunky dory because the website is regulated.
And of course most punters would prefer to report suspicions to the websites rather than the police because above all punters want anonymity. They don’t want to give the police their name with all the implications that might have on their relationships, marriage, career, and community standing. The researchers appear to consider punters’ desire for anonymity sacrosanct.
What they learned from the police, websites and practitioners
The researchers summarise what they learned from interviewing 30 police personnel, 13 “practitioners”, and 6 from the “Adult Services Website” industry in two key messages.
Key message 1: “ASWs are host to large amounts of intelligence and therefore must play a crucial role in the identification and prevention of MSHT amongst the online sex industry, including working alongside the police and NGOs supporting survivors of exploitation.” (Emphasis in the original)
I will leave the response to this to Sian:
“So these websites should be kept online because of the possibility that one could spot a trafficked woman or child there, and it could be reported. Wouldn’t TAKING THE WEBSITES DOWN ENTIRELY be far simpler and far, far more of a guarantee of stopping human trafficking being profited from via these websites? Wouldn’t that make advertising trafficked women and children much harder?
Since when has ‘we know where to find criminals’ been a reason to allow those criminals to organise and carry on breaking the law?
But apparently, it’s all fine when it’s women and children who are for sale.”
Exactly!
Key message 2: “ASW current responsibilities include multi-layered ID verification and reporting tools, safety centres and partnerships with the police, proactive removal, and human/AI moderation of content. However, these measures are not universal among all ASW platforms and there is a distinct lack of safeguarding practices across the platforms examined in this project.”
Esther, a British prostitution survivor with personal experience of advertising on these websites, has observed that commercial sex websites engaging with the police and research of this type, is more likely than not driven by commercial concerns. By positioning themselves as the ethical website whose “anti-trafficking measures” are approved by the police, they gain a commercial advantage. Punters are likely to lap this nonsense up because it assuages their conscience (should they have one) and they can claim that there is nothing dodgy about their behaviour because they bought her through a police-approved website.
Sian’s response is also apposite:
“Oh, the wonderful trust and reporting parts of ASW websites. Apologies if I view these as simply a sop to those complaining about exploitation and human trafficking, a way of saying ‘See, we’re dealing with it’, which means they don’t have to do anything, because none of what is listed as proactive is in any way so. It’s simply window-dressing.
Working with ‘sex worker support groups’ means working with pimps. Note the mention of ID keeps cropping up, but it’s only aimed at those advertising, and not those buying.
We need to remember who is at risk here. From the emphasis of ensuring the ID of those selling, you would think that the men buying are at greatest risk. But we all know (a) that’s rubbish as so many punters are violent, and (b) the ID is no guarantee of anything as there are many documented cases of women (and even children) being sold behind other women’s ID.
The researchers provide a long list of stereotypes of how to spot a trafficked person, as if there’s no possible way they could be just like anyone else. The vast majority of women in prostitution don’t want to be there. No amount of ID or checking spelling or whether the women look tired will provide a pimping website with only women who actively and happily, freely choose to sell themselves via prostitution.
This whole premise that ASWs can somehow be made free of exploited women and girls is ridiculous.”
Signs listed in the report suggesting an advert might indicate MSHT include “poor use of English”, “use of third person” [sic], and “a more business like tone”. Esther reveals how this underestimates how pimps and traffickers work:
“Buyers who contacted me through the telephone number on my profile frequently expressed surprise that I spoke English and had a British accent, so accustomed were they to finding that a woman they paid to meet did not speak English in a way which matched the words written on her profile. The buyers knew very well that profiles written in English free of grammatical errors or spelling mistakes were frequently written by, or on behalf of, people who controlled women they sent out. This had not deterred the buyers from accessing the women they knew were controlled by others.”
So the researchers’ advice is likely to identify only adverts written by less-experienced or less-successful pimps. Again, this reveals how much the researchers missed by not engaging with British prostitution survivors who have inside knowledge of the world the researchers claim to want to understand.
However, there are a few gems of wisdom in the report – mostly quotes from interviewees or “peers” – but the researchers fail to really engage with them. For example, this quote from a Police Constable is pure gold:
“I don’t know whether there’s a reluctance of the websites to necessarily accept their role within it. They’re a business, they’re set up to make money, and they want to present as operating clearly within the law. But how willing they are to look for that exploitation, because that potentially loses revenue for them. And so their profit margins, does that influence their willingness to actively pursue exploitation and stamp that out on the website? Are they turning a blind eye because actually that’s making them some money?”
Page 19 of the research report.
It is interesting that it was a police constable, the lowest rank in the British police hierarchy, who clearly expressed what the researchers appear to consistently ignore: that commercial sex websites have a fundamental conflict of interests. Their business is based on sexual exploitation so they are unlikely to make reliable partners in efforts to prevent it.
We know that these websites hire ex-police officers, which Esther has pointed out, means that the police also have a conflict of interests. The “intelligence” that they gain from their police work is of value to the websites and would make them desirable future employees to those websites. But the researchers don’t mention this.
Research recommendations
The researchers provide separate recommendations for the UK government, OFCOM, and “ASW platforms”.
Recommendations for the UK government:
1. The researchers recommend that the UK government formulates the Online Safety Bill with “prevention of MSHT at its core”. Of course we would agree with this in principle. But we vehemently disagree with the researchers’ notions about what this should mean in practice.
We do not accept that commercial sex websites can ever conform to the UK’s binding obligations under CEDAW to outlaw third-parties profiting from women’s prostitution and under the Palermo Protocol to discourage men’s demand for prostitution that leads inexorably to sex trafficking. But surprise, surprise, the researchers don’t mention this either.
Commercial sex websites not only directly profit from women’s prostitution, they also facilitate third parties profiting from women’s prostitution, and facilitate and normalise men’s demand for prostitution. If the UK government is serious about preventing sexual exploitation and sex trafficking and complying with our binding obligations under international law, it must close down these websites – and provide women with genuine exit routes out of prostitution and viable and sustainable financial alternatives.
2. The researchers recommend that the UK government “respect the continued practice of the wider sex industry”. They justify this by claiming that any form of criminalisation of the industry puts “sex workers at increased risk of abuse, violence, and exploitation”. This is not borne out by the evidence, which consistently shows that the more liberal the regime towards prostitution, the larger the industry and the more women are harmed within it.
The researchers then say that they “found concerns that, as happened in the USA with SESTA/FOSTA, sex work is in danger of being driven into more dangerous environments because of legislation that was simply supposed to target sexually exploitative activities.” Yes, that would be the concerns of the expert in pop culture writing on Vox, I suppose. A truly stunning bit of academic research that was! (Not.)
Here is Sian’s response:
“The report calls for “education of sex work as a legitimate business distinct from exploitation”. But it isn’t a legitimate business distinct from exploitation. Respecting ‘sex work’ does nothing to ensure the safety of women and children from traffickers. And in fact does the absolute opposite.
In my opinion, this report is simply an attempt to publish yet another pseudo-scientific ‘academic paper’ to support the continued abuses of the sex industry of women and girls in the UK, an attempt to legitimise an industry that is built on abuse, sexism and racism.
This report is not based in the reality of prostitution. That’s clear from how it quotes exactly zero women in prostitution, and has such a large amount of input from punters and the pimping websites.”
3. The final recommendation to the government is that “modern slavery does not equal illegal migration”. We absolutely agree with that.
Recommendations for OFCOM and the ASW platforms
The researchers make a number of recommendations to OFCOM and the ASW platforms which, unsurprisingly, we disagree with. Commercial sex websites facilitate, promote and profit from the prostitution of (mostly) women and girls. That is their business, their raison d’etre. They need shutting down.
Conclusion
There’s not enough room here to go through the research report line by line, but hopefully we have provided enough of an insight to give pause for concern. We call on the UK government and OFCOM to reject this research and return to the drawing board, this time ensuring that the voices of survivors of prostitution are central to any research.
It is particularly concerning that this project was funded by public money via the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and was supported by the Modern Slavery & Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre, which is a project of the Bingham Centre for The Rule of Law. The Bingham Centre’s “vision” is based on the eight key legal principles that Lord Bingham set out in his book, The Rule of Law. It is hard to see how the recommendations of this research comply with any of them.
I’ll give the last word to Sian.
“This research was based on the premise that commercial sex websites are legitimate and should be accepted. But what that really boils down to is not wanting to tell men no.
No-one ‘needs’ sex, no-one ‘needs’ to purchase another human being. There are no classes of women or girls who should be willing or made to be available for men to purchase.
Consensual sex is not the problem. It’s buying consent that is the problem and that’s what happens in prostitution. Buying consent is not consent, as stated in the recent EU resolution.
The argument that these websites being above ground and legal aids prosecution of pimps and traffickers is patently wrong. The latest data for prosecutions in England and Wales shows that to be a fallacy: there were practically no prosecutions for pimping. The vast majority of prosecutions were of women for their own prostitution.
Why would making it easier to advertise women and girls to be bought and sold be helpful in prosecuting criminals, when almost no prosecutions have happened in the last five years? Making it harder for men to purchase women and girls for sex means less of them will do so. It means less money for ASWs and pimps, of course, which is why those groups resist more legislation against them.
Please sign our petition
Please sign our petition calling for commercial sex websites to be shut down.
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. Men no longer have to get into their car and cruise the streets looking for a woman to buy or make their way to the local brothel in a side street in the city centre. Now they can simply browse an online catalogue of women and order one up to their flat or hotel room as if she were a pizza.
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.