Pornography series: the victims
This is like walking down a very long corridor. At the beginning, it is brightly lit, as bold and brash as neon, but the further you penetrate, the dimmer it gets until you reach a point where it is so...
View ArticleSnapshots of poverty – the red-light area
The Anglican Cathedral of Liverpool is like a mountain. Its great brown bulk soars up over the life below and, high above the houses with the boards across their windows, beyond the sight of the shops...
View ArticleA paedophile ring in Amsterdam
It is an ordinary flat. The camera pans around the room catching sight of a bookshelf full of paperbacks, a desk which is untidy with letters and files, a couple of paintings on the wall, a chair or...
View ArticleCrack cocaine and the middle-class addicts
I was sitting in a crack house not far from Kings Cross station in the middle of London. There was Vinnie the pimp, with his bare chest and his cigarette; a skinny blonde prostitute called Beverley who...
View ArticleChild prostitutes and poverty in Britain
It is one of the lingering images of Victorian poverty: the little waif in a ragged dress standing in the lamplight in the foggy darkness of a city street waiting for the rich man in his carriage to...
View ArticleProhibition – a most destructive habit
Guardian blog, December 2006 Everybody knows, of course, why those women sell themselves out on the streets of Ipswich – because they are heroin addicts. As the front page of the Guardian put it...
View ArticleMurder is easy (if you kill the right people)
The Guardian June 2008 When finally they caught him, it was a fluke. He had parked his lorry outside a football stadium in a small town in north-eastern Spain and he was waiting for dark to throw away...
View ArticleHow misinformation flooded the sex trafficking story
The Guardian October 20 2009 There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as...
View ArticleThe sex trafficking trawl which failed to net any traffickers
The Guardian October 20 2009 The UK’s biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers...
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