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The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser

7 February 2008

Last year, in Parliament and across the country we marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade by staging exhibitions, holding events and attending functions. Sadly, during the time that all that worthy commemoration was taking place we were facing another challenge.

Two hundred years after the legal slave trade was abolished there is a desperate need to tackle today’s trafficking in human beings and ridding our country of the wretched misery it causes.

Trafficking involves the movement of a person by coercion or deception onto a situation of exploitation. It might mean bringing young men into Kent from Romania to pick fruit illegally or shipping in workers from the Orient to collect cockles – who could ever forget the day we found 58 dead Chinese in a container in Dover Docks or the night that 23 people drowned in Morecambe Bay. But all too often it entails smuggling in young girls for prostitution.

Last year the Government published its Action Plan on Tackling Human Trafficking and this week, my Home Affairs Select Committee launched a new inquiry on the subject by inviting witnesses to tell us about the extent and the degree of this sordid trade and later in the month we will be taking evidence from some of the victims.

These days the sex trade is fuelled and driven by advertising and more and more these adverts have started popping up in some local and regional newspapers. These ads are the most common method of men making contact with women to buy for sexual purposes and given that many adverts refer to women as being from abroad, there is mounting concern that some of the women advertised in back of newspapers could be the victims of international sex trade.

To help combat these types of ad the Governments has just published a new report entitled "Women Not For Sale" which catalogued the extent and the nature of adverts for sexual services.

Britain has become a major focus for the global trade of sexual exploitation of women by traffickers. They trick or abduct young women and force them into prostitution and they have operations in every part of the country.

The small ads have been brought to the attention of the Newspaper Society who share our concerns and are drawing up tougher guidance for local papers on advertising which will include suggestions on what type of ads to refuse; training for staff; consulting with police and Local Authorities and only taking payment by cheque or credit card so accounts can be traced.

I hope that all papers will give this matter serious thought by taking on board this new guidance in their own advertising policy and refusing to carry these kind of ads which essentially sell women for sex.

This modern form of slavery is an evil practice perpetrated for profit with no regard for personal or wider consequences and we don’t want to wait another 200 years or 200 weeks even – to abolish it from the United Kingdom.