The BBC documentary opens with various descriptions, talking vaguely about how “it” is everywhere. We’re supposed to assume the “it” is sex trafficking, of course. A woman says “It’s in any town, any street, any normal looking house, right under your nose, and most people probably not aware,” and then we’re shown footage of the police forcing their way into a house we are supposed to assume is one of those being described. It’s then stated that, “you go in and then, it’s not normal at all, just a bed… semi-naked woman in there… boxes of condoms and some sex toys and that’s all that’s there,” with footage interspersed of police asking a woman if she has clothes after forcing their way into where she works.
The documentary is relying on the fact that most people know nothing about sex work or sex trafficking and opens with this to put certain ideas in viewers heads from the start. People are supposed to tie together the idea of anyone selling sex in the circumstances described with force, coercion and control. What they’re actually describing is conditions that plenty of people selling sex work will do their work in – people who have not been trafficked or forced but are merely working for the same reasons anyone does. For money.
I’ve worked in several places exactly like those which are described and depicted in this opening sequence. I’ve worked in several brothels, some where the only furniture was a bed and a side table. The reason I was there was not trafficking or force, it was that I needed money. The person who owned the building did indeed take a cut of my money, almost half, and made a significant amount of money across various properties. It was exploitative in that he was profiting from my work without doing anything himself but owning the building I was working from. This kind of exploitation, where you have a boss who makes more than you simply because he owns where you work, also applies to most people’s jobs.
The reason brothels operate this way, even when every single person there is selling sex as a job like any other, is because so many of the things surrounding sex work are criminalized in a manner that means we cannot risk doing it from our own homes. If we sell sex from home and not somewhere with “just a bed” (as the narrator talks about with horror) then the police who are breaking into the brothel would be breaking it our homes instead and would know where we live to monitor us forever! It’s also, notably, illegal to run a brothel… which means we have to rely on people willing to commit those crimes and give up a portion of our income if we don’t want to risk imprisonment.
… not a great start to the documentary.
The next line we get is: “In every corner of the country, women and girls are being kept as slaves and sold for sex… and Romanian girls are now big business,” which is immediately followed by a few short accounts from victims of trafficking or people who’ve sold sex (it’s not clear in all cases what their circumstances are), translated with text shown on screen. One woman talks only about how much money she made in a day, I suppose to illustrate Romanian girls being “big business”? As if Romanian sex workers aren’t specifically charging lower rates than British sex workers in the UK, specifically because clients are xenophobic against Romanian women and are unwilling to pay as much. No mention of this, of course. Another woman describes the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of traffickers – her trauma is used only for this soundbite and we hear no more about her story.
After a short discussion about victims of sex trafficking, in the words of people who work with them rather than the words of victims themselves, the documentary goes right back to the police involvement. The way the UK defines sex trafficking is so broad that it includes practically anyone who immigrates or travels to the UK with the intent of selling sex, especially if they ever have a manager or “pimp” the same way people have bosses in most jobs. What definition of trafficking this documentary is using isn’t stated for the audience.
I want to take a moment, though they don’t, to talk about victims who are primarily young women and girls who meet more common-sense definitions of trafficking – people who are forced into selling sex. There are people in the UK who are forced to sell sex, who are threatened or beaten and controlled either in brothels or on the street. The majority of them have this done to them by a partner, just like how other kinds of sexual abuse are usually from partners or family.
In cases where people are kidnapped or sold to “trafficking rings” or “pedo rings”, they’re not generally placed in brothel-type environments. In the specific subset of cases where the trafficking mimics typical prostitution (people in a brothel, seeing clients who call or text and come to meet them), usually vulnerable people are found and offered help and then forced or tricked into selling sex once they get to a location (whether that’s overseas or not). One of the obvious ways to help with this problem is to help people not be vulnerable by pulling them out of poverty, giving money and resources and support. These people need help and they’re not being given it.
“With police in the UK struggling to cope, I want to know how this brutal trade is being allowed to thrive,” the BBC narrator says, outlining the supposed point of this documentary. The police aren’t “struggling to cope” with the sex trade at all – they’re terrorizing sex workers, raiding our workplaces, and not helping people who are forced either! They’ve made so many things surrounding the trade illegal that sex workers can’t work together without the threat of arrest and raids and the country doesn’t have a social safety net that’s good enough to stop women and girls from being made vulnerable to traffickers via poverty.
They show the police raiding a brothel, traumatizing women who are in their underwear when they break in and aren’t given time to clothe themselves before having officers rush into the building. This raid is treated as if it’s supposed to be helping the women, all of whom are sent to a centre to be interviewed. I guess we’re supposed to think this is helpful? The thing is, as someone who’s worked in brothels with people in various degrees of desperation and bad circumstances, we were all far more terrified of a police raid than even of violent clients. The police don’t help sex workers when they do this.
Of course, the lack of help is implied to the police being too lax on sex work, “because sex work is legal in the UK, Brian and his team now have no choice but to send the girls back to the house.” What’s curious about this is the patronizing way these women are talked about. They’re called “girls” even though we’re explicitly told they’re all adults and we’re told the police “send” them back to the house instead of letting them leave their custody. For people are supposedly concerned about the autonomy of these women, they sure love talking about them like they’re children or even objects. That aside, this statement is left hanging, with no explanation of what “legal” means or how it contributed.
The buying and selling of sex are legal in the UK but operating a brothel is not, though police have discretion over whether they arrest people and consider them responsible for running one. In this case, since all these women are seen as victims, we’re not shown any being arrested. If this brothel were a worker co-op with the police believing no-one was involved in controlling them to any degree, the workers could be arrested for that even though that situation is notably less exploitative. As it stands, criminalization benefits traffickers and brothel managers of sex workers alike. This is why sex workers and our organisations overwhelmingly support full decriminalization.
It’s treated as a given that more trafficking victims are Romanian than any other nationality. No consideration at all is given to the fact that police target certain groups over others and that negative sentiments and xenophobia towards Romanians will drive police to target them more. Additionally, no consideration is given to where the tips that the police get are coming from. A neighbour is a lot more likely to report a group of immigrant women in a home where clients are frequently entering than they are to report their English neighbour. Poverty drives prostitution, and get the person we’ve had narrating so far goes to Romania planning to investigate without giving us any information on the economic conditions of Romanian women in general or of those in the UK.
Finally, the documentary gets into the experiences of some girls who’ve been forced and groomed into selling sex. We don’t hear from them directly, we mostly hear their stories from a woman running the shelter, but the victims, in this case, are children and victims whose anonymity needs to be protected and likely don’t wish to be filmed. We hear about how they’ve been groomed and some harrowing things about the abuse they’ve suffered. This is a huge problem, and it’s one mostly experienced by children from poor backgrounds who are more often left alone due to parents having to work to provide for them. Poor children are easier to groom by offering them things they don’t otherwise have access to, like food and safe shelter, and so they’re targeted. Finally, I think maybe we’ll get into some of the root of this problem, poverty alongside pervasive misogyny.
They don’t.
What we get next is an account of a horrific experience of being trafficked by a new woman, Elena, where she was forced to come to the UK under threat against her mother and child. Instead of us hearing from her what she thinks would have helped her to escape sooner or what resources she wishes she’d had access to, we hear about her trauma and then what sites her traffickers used… only for the documentary to move on from Elena to make claims about the site, which in this case was Vivastreet.
Vivastreet is criticized with the comment, “by advertising online, the girls can be kept off the street and hidden in houses, making them harder to find”, completely ignoring that sites like Vivastreet allow so many sex workers to be able to work for themselves and find our own clients instead of having to rely on “pimps” or abusive partners or exploitative brothel managers to find them for us. The street is far more dangerous than selling sex from a house, and yet the commentary being made suggests they’d prefer us on the street just to make it easier for police to perform checks that sex workers don’t want! For those who are trafficked, these sites not existing only means that traffickers use other channels to find clients… and that doesn’t mean sending all the people they control onto the street. No mentions of how Backpage going down made so many things worse for sex workers!
There is so much focus throughout the documentary on how “normal” these brothels look, with comments like “people will have neighbours who are victims of sex trafficking”. People are pushed to care because of how it might impact them or to be shocked and outraged because it could be happening close to them… close to “normal” people. As if it would be okay if it were all happening where the victims and poors were all sectioned off.
At one point, we’re shown a police officer posing as a client. He arranges to meet her without disclosing that he’s a police officer and then tells her that he’s a cop. She’s terrified. The police officer assures the viewer that he always tells these sex workers (or victims, as they’re always presuming these women to be) as soon as he gets to the door. In this case, he yells “don’t worry, don’t be scared!” at her as if her fear is unreasonable and begins interrogating her in a patronizing tone.” At the end, when he finally leaves her alone, we’re told, “the girls refuses to accept help”. Refuses to “accept” help? Or didn’t want or need it?
I’ve had a police officer do this to me, where he showed up and then later admitted to being a police officer. He waited until we were in the bedroom and I asked for payment, but it was a similar thing. I was terrified, pissed off that I’d wasted time and turned down another client for this timeslot for this cop who wouldn’t pay me when I desperately needed money, and had to ask him several times to leave while refusing to answer his questions. He tried to enter other rooms and I had to tell him “no” over and over.
Another time, a police officer showed up and didn’t say he was a police officer doing a check until after he’d paid me and had me suck him off. He made vague threats about how he could get the brothel shut down if he wanted to, how he was sure there were other people working there. Showed me proof he was an officer. The point was to scare me, and it worked, and he stayed a fair amount past the time he’d paid for. Ultimately, no raid ever happened after, so apparently I was a good enough lay that he wanted the place to still exist in case he ever wanted to return for sex, which was essentially what he conveyed to me was how I could avoid the shutdown of my workplace. The tactic that the police officer in this documentary uses is exactly what gives way to these kinds of abuse.
The police officer then speculates, “Romanian women in general, there’s very little trust of the police. The experience they’ve probably had with their police in their own country can be really really poor.” Romanian women aren’t just scared of the UK police because of experiences with Romanian ones, they’re scared of the UK police because of what the fucking UK police are like. They raid brothels in traumatizing ways, kill women like Sarah Everard, and they abuse women like Dr Konstancja Duff during strip searches. Every sex worker I know in the UK is fucking terrified of the UK police, for good reason.
The documentary goes over a heart-breaking story about a child who was kidnapped from her family and abused, talking about how the police didn’t help, but they act as if this is a problem specific to Romania. Police in the UK fail to help victims all the time. Constantly. What they’re discussing is a horrific event that deserves coverage and the family deserve support, including in holding the police accountable for failing them. It is the framing that this is somehow exceptional to Romania that I find deeply frustrating, especially when it’s used to argue for restrictions on sex work in the UK that won’t benefit these people at all.
For a while, the documentary talks about Alexandra Macesanu, a 15-year-old girl who was killed and whom the police utterly failed. When she called for help, the operator told her they had other calls and refused to stay on the line with her even as she begged and talked about her terror. This illustrates a huge issue with the police in Romania, of course – it’s interesting to me that while this is a British documentary there’s no point where they talk about any such cases in the UK, where women have been failed by the police or missing children aren’t looked for.
When we get near the end of the documentary, checking in with victims who were discussed earlier and finding either that they’ve been taken by traffickers again or that the UK police have failed to bring any case against their traffickers, things start to be wrapped up. To my mind, only one point has been made well by the documentary: people are being harmed and exploited in numbers we do not know, including sex trafficking victims, and the police are making things worse rather than any better by either failing to help or actively causing more trauma.
I wait for any suggestions for what can be done to help the women and girls that Jean Mackenzie talks about in this documentary. I wait for her to consult any organization campaigning for change, for her to cite what sex worker rights organisations in the UK are screaming out will help those who are being exploited in the sex industry. I wait for her to talk about how poverty has caused these issues instead of suggesting it’s a matter of tougher or better or faster policing.
It doesn’t come. The documentary just ends, with Jean asking a police officer if he thinks it’s a losing battle and her having the father of a girl who’s been trafficked talk about how much he wants her back.
The documentary “Sold: Sex Slaves Next Door” lacks any definition as to what sex trafficking is, treats groups of women as victims without knowing whether they are or not purely assumed because they’re immigrants and sex workers, and regularly has throwaway lines complaining about sex work being “legal” in the UK as causing issues or complaining about the existence of escorting sites.
Members of the public know very little about sex trafficking or about sex work, and this documentary does nothing to educate them about it. The BBC feed people a bunch of misinformation or vague comments about sex work, interspersed with the real and important trauma histories of sex trafficking survivors whose experiences are used to imply we should do things that would in reality make them less safe. This documentary was irresponsibly produced and will do much more harm than good.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 