Another banal and utterly pointless article in the Echo re street prostitution:
External Link/Members OnlyA couple of quotes in their article worthy of comment:
1. "It is particularly prevalent in the York Road and Ambleside Drive areas."
Ambleside Drive is the most common location to find a street worker (it's very good of the Echo to keep publicising this fact to their readers!). York Road
was the "go to" place in the 90's, but the girls have moved on to the surrounding roads since then. Being a rather prolific user of girls in the Southend RLD I can honestly say that in the last 10 years I've only ever spotted a few girls working in York Road.
2. "The group of greatest and immediate concern are the vulnerable women involved in selling sex on the streets... This group are often high and dependent users of drugs and alcohol, other vulnerabilities may include mental health, depression, vulnerable housing status, domestic abuse
and previous experience of the criminal justice system."
In other words, a lot of the street workers are still working the streets in order to pay off fines from previous arrests for solicitation.
3. "Various
police operations have succeeded in moving the women selling sex from one road to another and
various organisations have tried to support women selling sex, but no intervention has had a significant impact on reducing the number of women selling sex or on the numbers of men buying sex."
I know through experience why most women on the street are selling sex. It's predominantly to support a drug habit. I've only ever in 35+ years of punting met one woman who has said she works for a pimp and she was a woman who was sent down from London to work Southend in the summer months. Every time she was cautioned by the police she'd move to a different location within the RLD.
Do any of the "organisations" mentioned in the article have any idea how much money a street worker can earn in a week? Let's say that a basic blowjob punt lasts for 15-20 minutes (bearing in mind the time taken to find a quiet spot and the girls desperate need to get the punt over with) will cost between £30-£40. That's a potential earning on a very good night of £90 to £120 an hour. How many "normal" job positions could a woman with a limited number of teeth interview for and attain for that kind of hourly rate?
I don't want to come across as some kind of hardnosed wanker in this debate. I've gotten to know a few local street girls very well over the years and they're basically very nice women who have been hit particularly hard by the shit that life has thrown at them. What the majority of them need is proper support, emotional and financial, from the relevant authorities. If the authorities that are brought on board to manage this situation can't provide that, then they're dead in the water before they've even started.
4. "There is also a significant impact on the local community with high levels of anti-social behaviour as a result of the women selling sex and the men in the area who are pimping the women or buying sex, including drug-dealing, hazardous litter, and noise nuisance."
Another pretty much bullshit fact:
a. From what I've observed the girls working the area nowadays are very quiet and respectful of the people living on the streets they're working on. No, I wouldn't particularly like them working from the street that I live on, but then again when I bought my house I did a few checks to make sure it wasn't in the red zone of the local red light district.
b. As a long time punter on the RLD I've never spotted a pimp or a drug dealer working the area. These people tend to keep themselves as distanced as possible from the illegal activities happening on the streets. The Echo yet again have made it sound like there are a group of black guys in long fur coats wearing pink fedora hats lurking in the shadows to offer drugs and a life of prostitution to anyone passing by.
c. Noise nuisance? From the passing cars, maybe, but then again, you should hear the noise caused by all the noisy cunts wandering drunkenly down my road most nights.
