Thought for the Day, 5 November 2007

John Bell

Until Saturday, I never knew how many brothels there were in Cambridge. And I had to go to Salisbury to find out. And wish I had taken the Glasgow taxi driver who complained last week about how his money finances all these scroungers from abroad.

But let me unpack a little. I was at a conference in Sarum college. It was one of many which will have been held all through Britain this year to commemorate the parliamentary bill passed 200 years ago which tolled the death knell of slavery in the British Empire.

While the trans-Atlantic slave-trade may have been abolished for a long time, other forms of inhumane coercion still exist. And two of the speakers at the conference addressed the specific issue of the $10.5 bm global industry in which women's bodies are bought and sold as if they were inanimate commodities like tea or sugar.

Britain, as Tim Brain, the Chief Constable of Gloucestershire informed us, is an active layer in trafficking women who are duped into believing that the trip they pay for into the UK will lead to a university education and a lucrative career.

These are not kerb crawlers touting for trade. These are women from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, who like 19th century slaves are confined to quarters where they do not know night from day and may be expected to service 12 men in an evening.

Nor is it the seedier quarters of Soho they inhabit, but respectable neighbourhoods in Cambridge and Peterborough and Sheffield where so called ' personal services' advertised in local newspapers is the euphemism for sex-slavery.

In an operation across the UK and Ireland last year, police visited 515 premises, and rescued 188 women of whom almost half had been the victims of trafficking from abroad.

Few people would be quick to identify a close similarity between the police and Jesus - the more so since he was harassed and arrested by the constables of his day. But I couldn't help remember he story in the Gospels about how he was confronted with a crowd of men who brought a woman allegedly caught in the very act of adultery.

The men wanted him to authorise stoning her to death. And he, knowing that was the legal penalty, invited whichever of them was guilt-free to throw the first stone. They all quickly disappeared, the oldest first.

What's the comparison to the police? Well, they don't treat the women as criminals, but rather see them as victims of an iniquitous contemporary form of slavery organised by well-heeled men who probably, like my taxi driver, despise foreigners for allegedly being subsidised by their tax -bill.

There is little proof of the latter. But there is statistical proof that whenever a British man uses a brothel, the chances are that he is subsidising slavery.