Tea and trafficking
The British state's collaboration with prostitution mega-sites
Imagine for a minute you’re a government minister. Or senior police officer; either works. You’ve become aware that enormous prostitution advertising websites are operating in the UK. Substantial evidence is mounting that these platforms are facilitating sex trafficking on an industrial scale. What do you do?
You know that the websites operate trafficker-friendly (and eye-wateringly profitable) practices like: enabling third parties to advertise multiple women for prostitution concurrently, allowing single phone numbers to be duplicated across networks of nominally independent prostitution ads, and facilitating the people paying for these ads to use anonymous payment methods. (As a KC told the Home Affairs Committee: “Frankly, if one person is paying for more than one profile, that is controlling [prostitution for gain]” – a criminal offence. Same with duplicated phone numbers, which are “inferentially pretty strong evidence of controlling”.)
If anyone - civil servant, police officer, government minister - was still in any doubt as to the kind of enterprise being facilitated by these sex trade sites, a steady stream of news reports documenting the organised crime gangs and sex trafficking victims at the other end of adverts is providing full-colour illustration.
So, what do you do? Do you launch a criminal investigation into the platforms on suspicion of facilitating factory-scale sex trafficking? Do you look to close any legal loopholes that allowed these vast online red-light districts to be set up? Or, do you invite the people running these massive prostitution operations in for a meeting and ask if they would like to input into Government policy and train police officers? Because that last option is what the Home Office and National Crime Agency went with.
These two great arms of the British state responded to the rise of giant prostitution advertising websites by establishing, in the words of a former Home Office Minister, “a collaborative working relationship” with them. The purpose of this relationship, HM Government explained, was to “raise industry standards”. ‘Industry’ being, as precisely no one has disputed, the mass advertising of women for prostitution. ‘Standards’ being, presumably, not facilitating almost every organised crime group trafficking women for sexual exploitation in the UK. It’s something, I guess.
What this “collaborative working relationship” has actually entailed has been seeping out, slowly, via dogged questioning by a few parliamentarians, all too rare interrogations of officials and, most recently, a series of Freedom of Information requests I submitted as part of academic research.
The Home Office
On the Home Office side, the relationship has involved giving the operators of prostitution mega sites - which they prefer to call ‘Adult Service Websites’ (well, you would, wouldn’t you?) - regular access to Government officials and privileged opportunities to input into policy, as well as support to access and influence Britain’s online safety regulator. Mind-bogglingly, the Home Office appears to have been offering something akin to PR advice and emotional support for beleaguered prostitution ad site bosses.
That collab in practice:
Home Office officials have met with prostitution ad site operators on at least 25 occasions in recent years, including through quaintly titled “quarterly catch-ups”.
The Home Office introduced one prostitution ad site to Ofcom officials so they could feed into the regulator’s statutory guidance on the Online Safety Act at least one year before the draft rules were subject to public consultation. There was also a bonus offer from Home Office officials to accompany the site operators to their meeting with Ofcom. An official wrote:
“I have had a chat with the bill team, who have advised that OFCOM would be happy to have a meeting with you ahead of any wider planned stakeholder engagement. The OFCOM teams details are below, feel free to reach out, and if it’s helpful for us to be there please do copy us in.”
So thoughtful! Naturally the sex trade site rep replied: “I’m grateful for your offer to join the introductory meeting which we think would be extremely beneficial.” Damn right it would.
When BBC Panorama investigated the prostitution ad site, Home Office officials suggested some text its owners might like to include in their PR response. The Home Office’s email to the site read:
“Thanks for letting us know about the panorama programme, it’s always helpful to be given a heads up.”… “[Redacted] are happy for you to reference how we work together to try to raise industry standards”.
And a bonus tip: “you could signpost the action in the VAWG [Violence Against Women and Girls] strategy. Here if helpful.” But, whoops! The Home Office official appears to have forgotten to include the legitimising text it would be beneficial for the prostitution mega-site to include. So they emailed it again: “Re-sending in case not seen. I have also pulled out a relevant paragraph within the VAWG strategy below.”
After the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee interrogated a representative of one of the biggest prostitution advertising websites in the UK about sex trafficking on the platform, a Home Office official – from the Modern Slavery Unit – emailed the site to offer consolation:
“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.”
Of course, multi-million-pound prostitution ad sites don’t need PR tips and wellbeing check-ins from Home Office civil servants. What they need is for Government to keep publicly asserting that their operations are legal, refuse to outlaw the sites and, ideally, grant the platforms the legitimacy needed to quell any notion their operations should be subject to investigation. And that is exactly what they’ve got.
The police
The police, for their part, haven’t exactly required hostage level negotiations to talk them down from an investigation. The officials leading the National Crime Agency and National Police Chiefs’ Council’s (NPCC) response to online sex trafficking have been key architects of the state’s “collaborative working relationship” with prostitution mega-sites. (It helps, of course, now that a public spokesperson for one of Britain’s biggest prostitution advertising websites is a former police officer – who wishes to highlight to the police that he is a former police officer.)
Relations were clearly off to a good start when, in 2018, the National Crime Agency co-hosted a conference for police officers about ‘Adult Service Websites’ – with the operator of one of these massive prostitution operations invited as a speaker. A policing newsletter dutifully reports:
“Key topics tackled through the presentations included: …Why it is important to maintain good relationships with ASW [Adult Service Website] operators to support the work of the industry.”1
One prostitution ad site now offers training for police forces; Freedom of Information requests revealing that a few, at least, have taken them up on the offer.
Questioned as to whether all this “collaborative working” had resulted in police obtaining greater intelligence about the operations of prostitution ads sites – like how many individuals were advertising multiple women on the sites and what proportion of the adverts were identifiably part of organised networks – the head of the National Crime Agency’s Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Unit told Scottish parliamentarians:
“So we work closely with them. The engagement we have is kind of at a high level where we educate them and help them identify indicators of trafficking. What we don’t do is ask them for those kind of figures, probably because it’s quite intrusive.”
Ah yes. It would indeed be quite improper for the police to ask a massive prostitution operation about the scale of organised crime being facilitated on their platform.
The result?
The Home Office and National Crime Agency’s “collaborative working relationship” with prostitution ads sites is so truly awful that you might reasonably expect they at least have something positive to show for it. If not stopping the sites facilitating mass sex trafficking, at least reducing the scale of that trafficking or increasing convictions of organised crime groups using the sites.
Yet none of these things have happened. When grilled by the indefatigable Dame Diana Johnson MP (and my former boss), the National Crime Agency and NPCC couldn’t point to a single indicator that the scale of sex trafficking via prostitution advertising websites had reduced. They couldn’t even say how many traffickers using the sites had been convicted; they didn’t know – and no one is counting.
For at least seven years, the Home Office and National Crime Agency met with Britain’s biggest prostitution ads sites, giving them privileged access to officials, issuing supportive public statements and inviting them to train police forces. And at the end of all that, the same prostitution platforms they’ve been sipping tea with and meeting to chew the legislative fat continue to allow individuals and ‘agencies’ to concurrently advertise multiple women for prostitution, permit single phone numbers to be duplicated across large networks of adverts, and enable the use of anonymous payment methods.
It would almost be comforting to think this could all be explained by some Chief Wiggum-worthy ineptitude. But there’s no evidence those orchestrating this approach have bumbled into it. They’ve pushed for it, defended it, stuck to it.
What’s changed?
While it may suit some to claim Britain has turned a page in its approach to prostitution ad sites - new Government, new Online Safety Act, new commitments to tackle violence - nothing’s actually changed. Prostitution mega-sites continue to operate, their owners persist with the same old practices that enable organised sexual exploitation, and they still get invited to train the police rather than their answer questions under oath.
A current Government response to queries about its approach to sex trafficking is that a new provision in the Crime and Policing Bill will enable police to suspend IP addresses and domain names for 12 months. Which reasonably begs the question: and what? Police already have powers to prosecute people for facilitating sex trafficking – an offence that carries a life sentence. The legislation that’s lacking is a statute clearly stipulating that websites peddling industrial-scale prostitution can’t set up shop in the first place.
And so, it’s business as usual for Britain’s prostitution ads sites, with no evidence their state relationship has meaningfully soured.
