Search Results for: poppy project

I wonder who is doing the Poppy Project\’s PR?

Because they\’re certainly very good at it.

This long piece in The Guardian today for example.

That there is trafficking, in the proper sense of people being kidnapped and then being held as sex slaves, I have no doubt of. It\’s vile, illegal and should and must be clamped down upon, of course.

However, we would also like to know how prevalent it is. That we\’ve one case described here which meets that definition does not mean that it is as prevalent as the Poppy Project says it is.

But much more importantly, the existence of trafficking does not mean that the Poppy Project should be in receipt of taxpayers\’ funds.

That someone should be, yes, for it is indeed vile and something needs to be done about it. But that\’s not the same as saying that these specific people, Poppy, need to be the people doing it nor that what Poppy wants to do about it is the thing that should be done.

It\’s those latter two hurdles that need to be leapt before Poppy gets the keys to the Treasury and it\’s those latter two that both this piece and the campaign in general (for those who haven\’t noticed, Poppy lost i\’s funding. The Sally Army is getting it.) haven\’t addressed.

Essentially, Poppy is saying \”something must be done so give us money\”. The correct question is \”something must be done so what do we do and who does it?\”…..something which does already seem to have been asked, the answer being \”not what Poppy does and not by Poppy\”.

And I would even hazard a guess as to why the answer came back as \”not Poppy\”. Quite a lot of people have actually noted the lies and disinformation around the definitions of trafficking, the lies and disinformation about the extent of it, the ludicrous research carried out by the likes of Julie Bindel and the policy based evidence making that was fed through Harry Harperson to lead up to a change in the law.

Quite frankly m\’dears, what did you expect? You fuck over the rest of us with your lies and what do you expect to happen? Quite, first chance we get we\’re going to return the favour, aren\’t we?

It\’s that reap:sow interface in action.

On the Salvation Army taking over the Poppy Project

The government budget for rescuing fallen women* has been awarded to the Salvation Army.

This is going to cause huge amusement methinks. For as the Heresiarch says:

At least the Salvationists are up-front about their religious motivation. If anything they tend, as individuals, to be considerably less judgemental than their ideologically-driven counterparts in the feminist movement.

The Sally Army may well want to convert them but they\’ll help with or without conversion. The feminists, not so much…..

* Err, OK, trafficked sex slaves

Poppy Noor and statistics

Well, yes, this is The Guardian but still. On wages:

This year, prices in the private rental market dropped for the first time in six years, with the UK average rent falling to £921 a month. ONS data puts the average UK wage at around £27,000. This figure is skewed upwards by the small number of people who earn disproportionately more than the average,

She links here to show us those wages:

In April 2015 median gross weekly earnings for full-time employees were £528,

Just in case any Guardian writers should stumble upon this the median is where 50% of the population (here, the population being defined as full time employees) get less and 50% more. This number is not subject to distortion by those who earn disproportionately more than the average. That form of average would be the mean, which can indeed suffer from such distortion.

Our Cambridge graduate in politics and sociology doesn’t understand this. To the point that when she tries to explain it she gets it the wrong way around. Note further that the Guardian’s subs and editors are equally clueless for allowing this to go to print.

but if even you are lucky enough to earn that, you’re still spending around 50% of your wages on rent every month.

That’s a slightly different little statistical trick. The average rent is, at least I think it is (altho it doesn’t in fact matter that much for this point, it still stands if it’s the median) the mean rent across the country. And it’s the mean rent for all types of households. Four bed houses in Chelsea, bedsits in Hull.

And how many one earner households (which are in a minority note) are occupying the average amount of dwelling space for the country?

I don’t actually know, this is a guess, but I would suspect that the average (mean or median) British dwelling is a 2 or even 3 bed house. We should be comparing the rent of that against a single wage earner why?

There’s also this:

I currently live in a three-bedroom house with four other people (luckily, I live with couples) in order to bring my rent down. Far from being fancy, it was one of the cheapest places I could get – on the top floor of a council estate. Even so, I need to work at four jobs in order to afford the rent and still eat each month.

Umm, yeah. Average rent in London is higher, yes, £1,200 perhaps. Note again that’s per dwelling, not person. That rent would be split 3 ways perhaps, normal enough to split by bedroom not number of people, so £400 a month? Hell, let’s call it £600 a month for Poppy alone.

Four jobs? Umm:

Currently a Policy Officer in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Soon to be a Frontline Social Worker (July 2015 Cohort). Previously managed the QA Review for Challenge Partners. Co-founder of the Letsspeakclearly blog. Contributions to The Guardian Newspaper, Channel 4 News, The Evening Standard the ‘Yet We Still Rise’ UpRising Blog and the MyPersonality Wiki. Features in The Mirror and Varsity. London Board Member for UpRising. Pro-bono tutor for The Access Project, occassional runner for the GoodGym and an alumni of the Future First Network. Founding member and ex Vice-Captain of Trinity College Women’s Football Team and the Trinity College Politics Society. Ex-Access Officer for Trinity College.

OK, maybe she’s not updated Linked In.

Poppy Noor is a London-based freelance journalist. She writes about class, politics, inequality and education, and has provided social commentary for Channel 4 News and Newsnight.

Err, what’s her definition of a job? Freelance? Or is she counting doing a piece or two for The G as a job, doing bits for Newsnight as a job, Channel 4 another? She does get the concept of freelance, does she? By her seeming definition I’ve got 7 jobs as regular gigs……

We’re used to numeracy not being a requirement at The G but surely they still demand at least a tad of logic?

Driven mad by feminism

No, not me, Rose George:

Rose George: A devious plan painting domestic violence as solely a women’s issue
Rose George
There it is, just behind my toilet, in a discreet washbag. The means for women who are being brutalised, raped, assaulted by men (in 2011-2012, according to the CPS, 94% of defendants in violence against women cases were men) to be protected, by a small piece of cotton that I stick up my vagina to deal with an unavoidable biological event.

That a tampon should be taxed is baffling and infuriating enough. But that George Osborne has chosen to divert the £15m raised by the “tampon tax” (actually VAT on what is ridiculously called “feminine hygiene”) towards funding women’s shelters and refuges is even more so.

It’s brilliant really, because how can I be against women’s services getting funding, when their money has been slashed, when the amazing Eaves and their Poppy project have had to close? Refuge’s funding has dropped 80% in four years. How churlish it would be to object to them getting money, even though it’s money they should have been getting in the first place; even though it’s money that is coming from a woman-only tax.

Women will now fund services that protect them from violence perpetrated almost entirely by men. Hey, men, not only do you not have to pay for violence that you inflict on women, but when we get raped, abused or brutalised, we won’t cost the state anything either! What message is that sending other than violence against women is some kind of “women’s issue”? It’s not. It’s largely a male issue.

So, Gideon, don’t stop at the tampon tax. Get £15m from a tax on Gillette Mach 3 or that Friday pint or on the wages of Premier League footballers, who could lavishly fund women’s services and not notice. But that won’t happen, and Osborne has made it almost impossible to object to his apparently generous announcement. And that is just bloody devious.

So, it’s EU rules that mean that tampons are taxed at 5%. We’ve given away that power to lower that tax rate. And look at the bonkersness of the actual complaint.

And then think about the level of knowledge of the tax system you would need….sorry, ignorance of it…..to complain about a 5% tax on tampons when razors pay 20%, beer more like 60% and Premiership footballers some 53 or 54%.

Anyone would think she’d lost her rag or something.

That three women slaves story

Hmm.

180 years after abolition, why is it the slave trade is booming?
We equate slavery with a bygone age. But as the case of three women found in a London house shows, it is far from dead

Uhn hunh:

Look around – modern slavery is more common than you might think
The timescale of the slavery case in south London is shocking, but we should be more alert to cases of extreme exploitation

Right:

Modern slavery: in an ordinary house
A society that experienced the Jimmy Savile caseload should not make rash assumptions that current events are a one-off

That’s just one paper on one day. You don’t think that the campaigners might be trying to use this one case to revive the Poppy Project sort of nonsense do you? The nonsense that was so ably blown apart in this very same paper, The Guardian?

And the lies about Operation Pentameter just keep on coming

Apparently we really do need to do something about the trafficking of sex slaves.

Campaigners against sex trafficking call today for a major crackdown on the thousands of brothels in Britain amid accusations that government indifference to the issue is encouraging pimps to target the UK.

But, umm, didn\’t we actually find out that the trafficking of sex slaves, while it is vile and real, is also minor?

Abigail Stepnitz, national co-ordinator for the Poppy Project support service, said police should urgently target the brothels masquerading as saunas, massage parlours and private flats. Almost 6,000 have been identified in England and Wales.

Stepnitz said: \”The focus on trafficking has been to remove immigration offenders or to prosecute organised criminal networks. From our experience the focus has not neccessarily been on addressing the presence of brothels that create an environment where trafficking can thrive. That has never been the focus.\”

But didn\’t we go and check all of this? Try to find out how many people were in fact trafficked into such brothels?

The last major crackdown, Operation Pentameter 2 in 2008, saw 822 premises visited and the arrest of more than 528 individuals.

Why, yes we did, didn\’t we.

And that\’s where the lies start. For the implication there is obviously that 528 people were arrested for trafficking. Which happens not to be quite right:

The analysis, produced by the police Human Trafficking Centre in Sheffield and marked \”restricted\”, suggests there was a striking shortage of sex traffickers to be found in spite of six months of effort by all 55 police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together with the UK Border Agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish government, the Crown Prosecution Service and various NGOs in what was trumpeted as \”the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking\”.

The analysis reveals that 10 of the 55 police forces never found anyone to arrest. And 122 of the 528 arrests announced by police never happened: they were wrongly recorded either through honest bureaucratic error or apparent deceit by forces trying to chalk up arrests which they had not made. Among the 406 real arrests, more than half of those arrested (230) were women, and most were never implicated in trafficking at all.

Of the 406 real arrests, 153 had been released weeks before the police announced the success of the operation: 106 of them without any charge at all and 47 after being cautioned for minor offences. Most of the remaining 253 were not accused of trafficking: 73 were charged with immigration breaches; 76 were eventually convicted of non-trafficking offences involving drugs, driving or management of a brothel; others died, absconded or disappeared off police records.

Although police described the operation as \”the culmination of months of planning and intelligence-gathering from all those stakeholders involved\”, the reality was that, during six months of national effort, they found only 96 people to arrest for trafficking, of whom 67 were charged.

Forty-seven of those never made it to court.

Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking, including two women who had originally been \”rescued\” as supposed victims. Seven of them were acquitted. The end result was that, after raiding 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours all over the UK, Pentameter finally convicted of trafficking a grand total of only 15 men and women.

Police claimed that Pentameter used the international definition of sex trafficking contained in the UN\’s Palermo protocol, which involves the use of coercion or deceit to transport an unwilling man or woman into prostitution. But, in reality, Pentameter used a very different definition, from the UK\’s 2003 Sexual Offences Act, which makes it an offence to transport a man or woman into prostitution even if this involves assisting a willing sex worker.

Internal police documents reveal that 10 of Pentameter\’s 15 convictions were of men and women who were jailed on the basis that there was no evidence of their coercing the prostitutes they had worked with. There were just five men who were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes. These genuinely were traffickers, but none of them was detected by Pentameter, although its investigations are still continuing.

Two of them — Zhen Xu and Fei Zhang — had been in custody since March 2007, a clear seven months before Pentameter started work in October 2007.

The other three,  Ali Arslan, Edward Facuna and Roman Pacan,  were arrested and charged as a result of an operation which began when a female victim went to police in April 2006, well over a year before Pentameter Two began, although the arrests were made while Pentameter was running.

I agree that trafficking in sex slaves is vile, should be stopped, that we have laws (not least those of rape and assault) with which to deal with them and that we should do so.

But I really do wish that the Poppy Project and all who sail in her (this includes the likes of Julie Bindel and Mrs. Dromey) would simply fuck off. I\’ve simply had enough with being lied to by those with an agenda.

Go on, hop it. Scram. Find something useful to do like make me a sammich. Or at least get with this masculine, patriarchal, shit like evidence instead of hormonal witterings.

Prem Sikka

The real problem is the nature of neoliberal democracy.

Well, glad we\’ve got that settled then. We\’ll obviously have to abolish the system then eh? Perhaps replace it by rule by civil society? Those who thrust themselves forward rather than those we elect?

Corporate interests have become central to domestic and foreign policymaking. With minimum public scrutiny, legislation demanded by corporate interests is enacted. Legislators are available for hire through consultancies and are only too willing to do their bidding. Little attention is paid to the long-term issues, or even consequences for the people, or the economy.

And of course that never happens when it\’s non-corporate interests, does it? We\’ve never seen unions getting their way, never seen absurd pressure groups like the Poppy Project influence policy? No, no, it\’s only those evil corporates.

Short-selling of securities was considered to be a major blot on the financial landscape, but is apparently OK now.

That\’s a bloody stupid thing for a Professor of Accounting to say. Short selling is a vital part of the financial markets: it underpins the entire system of convertible bond issues for example.

On share buybacks, yes, there is the influence upon bonuses and so on but again this is a damn fool thing to say.

The company pays out real cash to buy back its shares. Such cash could have been used to bolster capital, liquidity or research and development, or could even have been put away for a rainy day.

This is making the assumption that companies should be retaining all that money to reinvest (or, at least, some of it). But if we have a liquid capital market then we don\’t need investment to be done by extant firms. We return what profits there are to investors and they make their own decisions as to whether to invest or consume. This has the great advantage that if they decide to reinvest they\’re likely to invest it in new and or different companies.

And, as we know, invention tends to come from new companies. Large and or old companies are indeed pretty good at incremental innovation, but not at the great breakthroughs. So we\’d actually prefer to have a system that made financing the new easier: that is, get the money out of the hands of incumbent management and back to investors who make their own choices. That capital, or at least profits, flow out of extant companies is a damn good thing.

You\’d think that an accountant would know that, no?

Prem Sikka

The real problem is the nature of neoliberal democracy.

Well, glad we\’ve got that settled then. We\’ll obviously have to abolish the system then eh? Perhaps replace it by rule by civil society? Those who thrust themselves forward rather than those we elect?

Corporate interests have become central to domestic and foreign policymaking. With minimum public scrutiny, legislation demanded by corporate interests is enacted. Legislators are available for hire through consultancies and are only too willing to do their bidding. Little attention is paid to the long-term issues, or even consequences for the people, or the economy.

And of course that never happens when it\’s non-corporate interests, does it? We\’ve never seen unions getting their way, never seen absurd pressure groups like the Poppy Project influence policy? No, no, it\’s only those evil corporates.

Short-selling of securities was considered to be a major blot on the financial landscape, but is apparently OK now.

That\’s a bloody stupid thing for a Professor of Accounting to say. Short selling is a vital part of the financial markets: it underpins the entire system of convertible bond issues for example.

On share buybacks, yes, there is the influence upon bonuses and so on but again this is a damn fool thing to say.

The company pays out real cash to buy back its shares. Such cash could have been used to bolster capital, liquidity or research and development, or could even have been put away for a rainy day.

This is making the assumption that companies should be retaining all that money to reinvest (or, at least, some of it). But if we have a liquid capital market then we don\’t need investment to be done by extant firms. We return what profits there are to investors and they make their own decisions as to whether to invest or consume. This has the great advantage that if they decide to reinvest they\’re likely to invest it in new and or different companies.

And, as we know, invention tends to come from new companies. Large and or old companies are indeed pretty good at incremental innovation, but not at the great breakthroughs. So we\’d actually prefer to have a system that made financing the new easier: that is, get the money out of the hands of incumbent management and back to investors who make their own choices. That capital, or at least profits, flow out of extant companies is a damn good thing.

You\’d think that an accountant would know that, no?

Julie Bindel on Trafficking

There\’s a lot of getting hot under the collar here. But not much actual information.

The men were undertaking research for Big Brothel: a Survey of the Off-Street Sex Industry in London, the most comprehensive study ever conducted into brothels in the UK. The project, which gathered information from 921 brothels in the capital, was commissioned by the Poppy Project, the only British organisation that offers support for women trafficked into prostitution.

OK, look forward to the results. How many women are indeed trafficked as opposed to entering the trade voluntarily?

They were to telephone brothels, posing as potential punters, with a list of questions including "What nationalities are on offer tonight?",

Hmm, is nationality proof of trafficking? I think not really….as has been pointed out the move into prostitution rather destroys social capital. Thus people tend to do it away from home rather than at home. In a more globalised world we\’d expect more people to be doing it in the country one or two over rather than just the village over, wouldn\’t we?

Further, given the economic divides between countries….especially here in Europe, where there are no immigration problems….we\’d also expect to see foreigners plying their trade.

We primed the telephone researchers to look for evidence of trafficking. There was plenty. Brothels offered women of 77 different nationalities and ethnicities, including many from known-source countries for trafficking. One researcher was told by a brothel owner, "For no condom and anal, call tomorrow. Eastern Europeans promised later in the week."

Erm and that\’s it. That\’s all the evidence of trafficking given.

That there are foreigners doing the work.

It\’s not the most convincing of evidence, is it?

Trafficking in Prostitution

I was reading the Poppy report on the sex industry in London and found myself being referred to another report to get the definition of trafficking. So here it is.

For the purposes of this report, trafficking will be defined using the United Nations Protocol To Prevent, Suppress And Punish Trafficking In Persons, Especially Women And Children, Supplementing The United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime (2000), commonly known as the Palermo Protocol. Article 3 of the Palermo Protocol states that : (a) \’Trafficking in persons\’ shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs, (b) The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) have been used.

Now I\’m not all that good at bureaucratese but "the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person" sounds to me like "go and sell your body in London, you\’ll make lots of money" is defined as trafficking. And that even if somone agrees to do so, this consent doesn\’t count.

Hmm, wonder how many people actually would include that in their own definition of trafficking?