Very interesting.
However I find it puzzling that – with the long-term concerns about Vivastreet that you identify – there haven’t been more attempts to tackle the situation.
The politicians are starting to wake up and I think you'll see more public pressure soon.
I accept that cracking "outcall gangs" would be far from easy. Indeed that may be one reason why, as I have observed elsewhere, Vivastreet advertising has increasingly been moving away from incalls to outcalls.
Very hard to tackle outcall only gangs due to the logistics involved
However making life difficult for “incall gangs” – such as the outfit who use the 07365-697992 number in Portsmouth – surely wouldn’t be difficult?
Make a fake appointment. Raid the premises. Check the girls’ paperwork. And proceed accordingly.
I appreciate that low-level operations like this wouldn’t net any Mr Bigs (and indeed perhaps no male miscreants at all); but they would be disruptive.
Such raids would be illegal on several grounds.
They'd effectively be fishing trips, and that's banned. Raids can only happen if there's evidence giving reasonable suspicion.
Sending in an undercover agent could lead to claims of entrapment. And if an undercover agent booked a visit in the expectation of finding trafficked or underage girls, then that visit becomes an illegal act.
But maybe the authorities have other priorities?
And perhaps rightly so. (Drug-use in south Hampshire, particularly in Gosport, is of epidemic proportions...)
Some police commissioners clearly do. But I think the real issue is the problem is so big, WTF do you start?
12,700 escort profiles on Vivastreet, 80+% will be foreign and probably mobile.
At a rough guess that probably equates to around 4-5,000 trafficked / forced overseas girls. Add an unknown number of street girls, parlour girls, chinese massage girls who are marketed below the horizon, and you can easily double that number.
The number of potential victims is too big to resource. Just how do you do it?
