A few basic facts
There are a lot of trafficked or exploited sex workers in this country. Not all of them are foreign as this weeks jailing of Nicholas Moxham shows. Online reviews of the girls he used show they were identified as being at risk, but were simply regarded as barebacking junkies and left to get on with life.
But besides cases like that, it's a simple matter to look at Vivastreet or Adultwork, do a bit of online research cross-correlating phone numbers and addresses and suddenly whole groups of trafficked women become apparent. (Some may regard these as "organised" rather than trafficked, but legally organised does mean trafficked.)
It's often asked, why don't the police do more to do this kind of analysis, but the simple fact is they don't have the manpower. Just take Lancashire as an example, VS usually has around 270 listings, often more. AW maybe 60. Around 13 Chinese parlours with multiple girls. Over 20 Thai parlours with multiple girls.
Taken together and removing duplicates you've probably got around 250-300 individual girls which need checking (but remember a lot of them move every week). In reality at any one time between a third to a half would meet the legal definition of trafficked - so assume between 80-150, with the actual girls changing weekly.
That's one heck of a moving target for the police to crack, and don't forget in most forces the anti-exploitation teams who are tasked for this work also are responsible for targeting both "county lines" drugs shipments and taking down cannabis farms. In the last couple of years the numbers of convictions for sex-trafficking actually seems to have dropped nationally, now you know why. All it takes is for a new police chief constable or commissioner to prioritise their forces objectives differently, and all the anti-trafficking work goes out the window.
What does that mean in reality? Well, the police need help. They need reports from the likes of us as to who is at risk, who is trafficked. They don't have the resources to identify victims, they need information and that can only come from nosy neighbours - or the likes of us. And by the likes of us I mean reports of where we've been, physically seen exploited women. They only have the resources to investigate high risk cases. Merely cross-matching a bunch of profiles to one address and assuming trafficking isn't enough for them (even if we know they're trafficked), the police need hard actual tangible reports of real risk - which can only come from punters like us. It's down to all of us to try and remove the trafficking and exploitation from our hobby.
But how to recognise it? I'll return to that in a later post