Mega-Brothels 2.0
The operators of Paradise, a notorious ‘mega-brothel’ in Germany, thought it a good idea to throw open their doors to the world’s press. Journalists and documentary-makers duly filed in, cameras aloft, capturing a cautionary tale of what happens when the state pretends that prostitution is work: multi-story mega-brothels whose promise of immediate, unconditional sexual access to young women for a small fee attracts thousands of male patrons every year. Outside the brothel’s clientele, this public glimpse of mass-produced sexual abuse inspired wide revulsion (and that was before the police turned up, promptly jailing its owner for filling the brothel with trafficking victims). The only meagre reassurance offered by dispatches from mega-brothels has been that the ultimate architect of this factory-scale exploitation is legalisation – a sweep of laws that let the brakes off the sex trade, brothels and pimping included. It couldn’t happen here, UK onlookers naturally conclude, brothel-keeping being illegal.
Except, industrial sexual exploitation is happening here - on a scale that utterly eclipses provincial prostitution outlets like Paradise. Britain’s version of the mega-brothel offers customers access to over fourteen thousand women every day, at the click of a button. Accurately dubbed ‘pimping websites’ by MPs, euphemistically labelled ‘adult services websites’ by the Home Office and National Crime Agency, prostitution advertising websites are the Amazons of the sex trade; towering over bricks and mortar shopfronts like Paradise - in profits, in size, in suffering.
It’s not hard to see the appeal of these platforms for punters. Rather than run the inconvenient risk that a passerby witness how he treats women, the British sex buyer can skip the corporeal queue, simply take out his phone and log on to one of Britain’s giant prostitution ad sites. Here, he can gaze leisurely, privately, at the photos of thousands of unknown young women, filtering adverts by the woman’s location, age, ethnicity, price; one allows buyers to filter women according to whether their pubic hair is shaved or not; and by a detailed list of sex acts he can pay for. Once his anonymised online kerb-crawling is complete, the sex buyer simply calls a number in the advert to make his booking. The process is, as observers tend to point out, about as onerous as ordering a takeaway.
But who are the women in these ads? How did they end up on that website? How do they feel about having sex with the 53-year-old man they’ve never met, currently sat on his sofa scrolling through image after image of anonymous young women’s bodies? The promise of prostitution, of course, is that the sex buyer doesn’t have to concern himself with questions like these. Questions about consent, about coercion, about organised crime. All the website requires is that, when the mood takes him, he logs on and makes his order, delivered to his door or other agreed location.
And men are logging on with sufficient enthusiasm and in sufficient numbers to make some prostitution ad sites multi-multimillion pound ventures. The most recent official reckoning of sex buyer numbers found 3.6% of UK men had paid for sex in the previous five years. Few now drive down darkened streets to make their selection.
And where sex buyers go, sex traffickers follow. Websites advertising prostitution have long been dubbed by Government and law enforcement officials as “the key enabler of sexual trafficking and slavery”. The grim accolade is well deserved. They perform a critical function in the human trafficking chain, and they do with remarkable efficiency. For a relatively small fee, traffickers can outsource the heavy lifting involved in building their customer base, marketing victims and connecting with buyers. (Some platforms even throw in complementary lobbying for a conducive legal context.) None of these tasks are trivial. They take time, resources, knowledge. All the exploiter has to do is log in and complete the fields in a ready-made advert - or adverts. Britain’s biggest sexual exploitation sites welcome individuals or ‘agencies’ wishing to advertise multiple women concurrently.
And yet, any old sex trade site won’t do for today’s professional exploiter. Any old sex trade site doesn’t explain the rocket these platforms have put up the human trafficking trade. The key to understanding their importance to modern-day sex trafficking lies in a dynamic observed again and again in countries these sites operate: a market leader or two emerges, establishing itself as the go-to digital red-light district for sex buyers nation-wide. Demand is centralised, the customer base concentrated. Traffickers can then quickly and easily tap multiple local markets in succession, prone as they are to moving their ‘supply’ around different towns and cities - to avoid detection, to keep victims isolated, to profit from demand for women ‘new in town’. All the trafficker has to do is click a button to alter the location their victims are listed as available. When viewed as the digital equivalent of mega-brothels, the ‘mega’ part really matters. Mega enables movement.
Organised crime groups are in the business of bringing money in. But look at the sums they shell out advertising victims on the most popular prostitution advertising websites and you start to appreciate the value these platforms hold for trafficking gangs (and how the website owners are yearly able to amass profits of many millions). In 2018, it was revealed that a criminal network had spent £25,000 advertising their young Romanian victims on one site; small fry, compared to the £290,000 spent by one Chinese organised crime group disturbed by police.
Britain’s sex trade sites are not merely a new medium for an old problem. As Scottish and UK Parliament cross-party groups have found, these platforms function as a market-expanding force. Investigations into the phenomena by regional security body the OCSE, with its 57 participating states, led its Coordinator on combatting human trafficking to conclude that these websites “increase the scale and profitability of the market dramatically.” It’s why claims that outlawing online prostitution platforms would simply displace adverts of trafficking victims, rather than deplete their numbers, flatly fail to recognise the unique power that the biggest sites hold to incentivise and scaffold industrial-scale sex trafficking. They are, in large part, the problem.
Prostitution advertising websites have been able to establish a deeply profitable foothold in Britain not just because there is unbridled demand, but because they have been allowed to. This isn’t a story of a few plucky pimps exploiting gaps and cracks in the legislation - like the statute that prohibits prostitution ads in a phone-box but doesn’t mention websites. Factory-scale prostitution businesses have been quietly, but unmistakably, state sanctioned.
Until recently, the operators of one of the UK’s biggest prostitution ad sites was enjoying “Quarterly Catch ups” with the Home Office (the subject title of the emails exchanged to arrange them). Freedom of Information requests I submitted reveal a Home Office official – from the Modern Slavery Unit no less - emailed one of these operators to commiserate after they were grilled by the Home Affairs Committee during a human trafficking inquiry: “the Committee did not give you an easy time – which hopefully didn’t come as too much of a surprise to you, but nonetheless it’s never a nice feeling – so I do hope that you were ok afterwards.”
The trafficker’s paradise created by HM Government’s open embrace of prostitution mega-sites makes the attempt by Paradise’s operators to build the promised land for sex buyers look positively dilettantish.
To this day, prostitution profiteers remain free to peddle sexual abuse on an industrial scale, their online platforms untouched by Government or police; women and girls continuing to pay a horrifyingly high price.