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In less elevated circles, such as the website Punternet, where one can imagine obscure versions of Wayne Rooney or Hugh Grant or Jeffrey Archer seeking helpful tips or information, men who buy sex submit their reports in much the same righteous, easily aggrieved tone as the Good Food Guide's amateur inspectors, gittishly rating prostitutes for warmth of welcome, interior decor, value for money and whether or not they would recommend the individual in question to future users.
Clearly, standards in the domestic sex trade are not always what they should be. "She's Polish but her English isn't brilliant. Only been with the agency a couple of days," notes a discerning consumer whose fee was collected by "an agent". Communication seems to be a common problem: "English not her strongest language, but her personality more than compensated," comments another customer. On the plus side, the eastern European monoglots seem to be younger than the home-grown product. "If she wore a school uniform, she would have looked 16," gloats one report, whose author guesses that the woman in question was actually around 19 years old. The same age, then, as one of the Lithuanian girls whose auction last year, at the Costa Coffee concession at Gatwick airport, was described in a report on a sex-trafficking case in yesterday's Daily Mirror.
Much, quite rightly, was made of the vileness of the swarthy human traffickers who had duped these innocent girls into coming to Britain. Sentencing them to 21 and 16 years respectively, the judge, Trevor Barber, this week told Tasim Axhami, a Serb, and Emiljan Beqirat, a Lithuanian, "You have no moral values, scruples or compassion. Neither of you has any place in this or any other normal society."
In practice, Axhami and Beqirat found a warm welcome in some parts of this society. The shamelessness of the Punternet correspondents indicates that they, at any rate, would be affronted by any suggestion that they are not supremely normal. And yet without men like them, there would be no market for the traffickers and the women brought here to be raped, sold and imprisoned. One of their victims, a 19-year-old from Moldavia, has described how she was raped and subsequently installed in a City flat with six others. Their clients were generally married, and able to pay the women's pimps at least £100 per visit. The girls received nothing. It was after she appealed to one of these clients, a man in his 50s who gave her £200, that the girl escaped. The client had thought she was there voluntarily.
Perhaps the language barrier explains why so few of the men who are using - effectively raping - women who have been trafficked in this way never wonder if their young, obliging Moldavian, Lithuanian and Estonian companions might not prefer to be here as au pairs, or even to be back home, instead of submitting to sexual abuse from 30 strangers a day. If so, there are other clues and telltale signs they might watch out for.
For example, they might look around the massage parlour, or brothel, and, as well as awarding marks for neatness, wonder: are these girls obviously held captive? In the recent raid on Cuddles, the Birmingham massage parlour where 19 women were immured, police had to use battering rams to knock down locked internal doors, windows had been boarded up, and an electric fence stopped anyone trying to escape from the back of the building. What kind of person lives in a house like this?
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In reality, it is probably the extreme powerlessness of these complaisant, identity-free foreign girls, who could never talk back even if they wanted to, that renders them such appealing members of a trade in which women are commodities. The indulgence extended to glossier participants in the lap-dancing end of the sex industry cannot account for the thousands of law-abiding British men for whom the abuse of a trafficked teenager constitutes a satisfying sexual encounter. But perhaps the two things are not wholly unrelated.
Continues: www.theguardian.com/society/2005/oct/20/penal.comment