Julie Bindel - How Leeds enables 'paid rape' - new Unherd article

[secular111]

Online publications like Unherd and including Reason, Spiked and The Spectator have taken-up the slack left behind when The Guardian chose to adopt misogyny as its raison d'etre.

So Julie's writing finds such new homes. I imagine The Guardian long ago would have been a natural outlet for her most recent article. No longer though.

This piece published today, investigating Leeds City Council's efforts to transform their city, in particular the 'Holbeck Zone', using it appears, the 18th century St Giles Rookery of London as a template, demonstrates that powerful writing on social issues is still being produced. It just doesn't get published in the same place it used to be.

How Leeds enables 'paid rape'

But LCC and WYP had a choice: the money spent on containing the problem could have gone into exiting and drug rehabilitation services, for instance. Instead, the authorities have made it easier for pimps and punters to exploit the women, abandoning the prostitutes to a life of hell — and making residents feel unsafe.

There have been a number of rapes and sexual assaults within the zone, and in 2015, a few months after it became operational, Daria Pionko was murdered by a punter there. Pionko’s murder thrust Holbeck firmly into the national spotlight and saw serious questions being asked about the long-term viability of the experiment. And yet it continued. A few years later, in 2018, a Holbeck woman was raped on her way home from work by a group of men who assumed she was a prostitute

Julie still gets published in the Guardian: www.theguardian.com/profile/juliebindel

But never anything gender-critical.

I have worked in a healthcare capacity with some of the women in the Leeds managed area. I see both sides of the coin and don't profess to have an answer but what I can categorically say is that redirecting funding towards drug treatment would not have been a magic wand here. There is no lack of VERY accessible drug treatment available to the women on this area, which includes out of area detox and rehab. Dedicated drugs workers do the most fantastic outreach work in this area and the women have access to a very comprehensive range of services. This problem isn't solved by simply directing money in one direction or another. Lots of the women just aren't ready to be drug free and would be unable to sustain this due to a host of complex issues. It can take years for the women to be in a position to be ready.

I don't know the answers but I know that re-criminalising the area would not prevent hardly any of the women from street sex working, but would likely make them much less visible to services and less able to access services which have been set up to directly meet their needs

Thanks secular111. Bindel is such a good writer who really knows her stuff. So disappointing that despite repeated evidence that the Managed Zone is a failure for women it is given the go ahead, mainly by men. The #WarOnWomen continues, more power to the women fighting against this harmful trade.... What can we do to help CELST I wonder?