Who are the key players in Britain's 21st-century sex industry? But the term "sex industry" is a catch-all for such a multifarious collection of sex-associated objects and activities, that there is scarcely an adult in Britain whose life it doesn't touch in some way. The sex industry encompasses anything that joins sex and commerce, be that a plastic toy bought from Ann Summers, a copy of Playboy, dialling a premium-rate number for phone sex, or paying a tenner for a hand job down a back alley, not to mention erotic fiction, porn films, stag-night strippers and lap-dancing clubs.
In terms of prostitution, the stories we tend to hear are the most tragic β such as the murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich in ; a horrific story, but a quantum leap, thank God, from the experiences of most women who sell their bodies for a living β from those working in saunas, massage parlours and brothels to escorts and companions who can earn six-figure incomes.
One in 10 British men has visited a prostitute. Yes, that's 10 per cent. And who is servicing them? Around 80, sex workers, a figure that is said to include 4, women and children trafficked into the country to work as sex slaves. Our laws on paid sex, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith declared, are long overdue for a rethink. Transferring the burden of criminality on to the punters, or "johns" as prostitutes call them, who pay to have sex with anyone who is "controlled for another person's gain", is at the centre of Smith's plan to remove the trafficking industry's market and, with the same blow, shrink the prostitution trade.
The Home Secretary believes making examples out of unthinking punters will scare off those men who do not care whether the woman whom they are paying for sex has been smuggled in from China, or is working for a pimp or to pay off a drug dealer. Women's minister Harriet Harman joined the campaign yesterday, asking members of the Women's Institute to help with the crackdown by complaining to newspapers who print adverts offering sex with foreign women.
Samantha was a teacher until her family ran into financial difficulties, and she began working for an escort agency in the late Eighties. She was subsequently raped and tortured by a client, and won the first private prosecution for the rape of a prostitute in England and Wales.
