Behind the red light

Vicky drifts in and out of the shadows around a lamppost in Brunswick Square, the orange light catching her face intermittently under the hood of her jacket.

She is almost bald underneath, having had tufts of her hair extensions ripped out in a vicious attack two nights before. She shows the gap in her teeth where she was thumped before she turns away and crosses her arms as she wraps her jacket around herself and leans back into the shadow.

Her fellow street sex workers loitering around the informal red light area of Bristol – stretching from here in St Paul’s to Eastville – have similarly grim tales.

The abuse is as regular as it is degrading. Gang rape, kidnap, extortion, and violent and random attacks, are treated as no more than occupational hazards for the dozens of women working Bristol’s streets in the world’s oldest job.

Paula is emaciated and wearing ripped leggings as she approaches one of the nightly outreach volunteers dishing out tea and condoms on a recent Wednesday evening. She seems glass-eyed, but coherent. She is living in a tent on her own, she says, before recounting how she came to have a bruise on her face.

She picked up a client last week who agreed a price for intercourse but he then tried to force her into oral sex for just £5. She refused and he hit her three times.

Her cautionary tale is taken down by the charity workers at One25 who drive a van around the city looking for street sex workers, offering them brief respite and spreading news of the latest attacks.

Paula’s report will be circulated to the other women and go to the police who compile a list of “ugly mugs” – men who attack sex workers – and try and find a pattern so they can identify them.

Precious few attacks end up in conviction. It takes a lot of courage for the women to see it go through the court system, and the likelihood a jury or judge will believe their tale is slim given the sex workers’ own chequered backgrounds.

These are some of Bristol’s most desperate and chaotic humans. People whose number one instinct – above caring for their own children, most of who have long been taken away by social services – is to score heroin and crack cocaine to continue the habit which temporarily numbs all the pain.

They make measly sums, a maximum of £40, from the most degrading acts, repeated again and again in one night in dark trading estates, cemeteries, cars, vans and occasionally clients’ houses, until they can knock on the doors of their dealers or pimps (sometimes both) and hand over all their earnings for tiny rocks.

Just down the road a couple of women climb into the outreach van. One is young, with beautiful blonde hair. The other is older and has incredible nails; multi-coloured talons.

They grab sandwiches and condoms and depart. It takes years to build up their trust, say the volunteers. The next step is to encourage them to come to the One25 drop-in centre in Grosvenor Road. Then they can try to engage with the women and encourage them into rehab, and find them housing and support.

On various short trips around Bristol with One25 and with the police, Bristol24/7 traced sex workers and kerb crawlers from St Paul’s to Eastville.

Alongside the harrowing stories from prostitutes were complaints from residents about pimps loitering on their doorsteps in residential areas where sex litter, from condoms to mattresses, is commonly left strewn in the streets.

The good news is that according to One25, the number of street sex workers is falling, down from 360 when the charity opened in 1995 to the current estimate of fewer than 150 women, with only 46 working regularly (more than six times a year).

However, the vulnerability and fragility of those out plying an illicit trade alone shows no sign of fading. But momentum is now finally growing to change legislation which currently criminalises both the sellers and buyers of sex, with the area’s police and crime commissioner and MP both calling for safer, more modern legal systems to protect some of the most vulnerable people in the city from brutal night-after-night violence.

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Opinion: Thangam Debbonaire – ‘Why I’m backing decriminalisation’

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Forty per cent of all street sex workers in Bristol broke away from the trade last year. Lorrie is one of the lucky ones. Her story of slipping into a life of street sex work as an easy option to pay for her spiralling drug habits is a familiar and sad template.

“Recently I’ve been attacked six times. I’ve been locked in somebody’s flat, men getting violent and stuff…” she trails off.

“When you’re out there on the streets you get hardened to a degree,” she continues. “Sometimes men just turn violent and they end up not wanting to pay money, or raping girls and stuff. You’re desperate and you can do nothing about that.

“The reality is you don’t know who is going to get out of that car, and you don’t know if you’re gonna end up coming out of it alive. You don’t know if that’s the last time you’re gonna be out walking on the street coz there’s some pretty dangerous people out there.”

She says she turned to prostitution when her life spiralled away from her and drugs took control. “When addiction grips you, family tend to fold away. I just needed money to keep chasing my next fix.

“It went against my soul to shoplift, so I took myself down that path of sex working. I mean the money, even though it was a dangerous job, the money turned over quickly, when it turned over, so I was getting the fix I needed.”

She adds: “My alcoholism progressed because I needed to be drunk to be able to go there and do that and say I want this amount of money for X, Y and Z, and it was a horrible feeling. I was nervous, agitated. I kind of felt disgusted that this is what I had been reduced to.”

Prostitution is currently not against the law but brothel-keeping, kerb-crawling (buying sex) and soliciting for sex (selling sex) in a public place are. But in Bristol, police use their discretion to take a progressive approach which treats the women as victims and makes arrest for soliciting for sex a last resort.

On a cold night in October, the force’s vice team takes to the streets in one of their four-a-month operations.

From a CCTV control room in the city centre, Tina Newman, the force’s sex work lead, monitors the known loop for kerb crawlers which forms the city’s informal red light area – Brunswick Square to Portland Square, M32, Warwick Road, Stapleton Road, Fishponds Road, and back to Brunswick Square again.

The cameras are trained on the spots where sex workers loiter. Tina also spots any suspicious movements of cars in the area. Once a kerb crawler is identified, they are watched until a lady leans in through the window and a deal is made (the point when a crime is technically committed).

It’s 11.30pm when a white van picks up a known sex worker in Portland Square. The unmarked police car we are sitting in gets a radio call and follows the vehicle slowly through St Paul’s to St Werburgh’s.

As the van slips into Ashley Parade, among the warehouses of the trading estate, our car waits around the corner for the act to get going. And then the officer and sergeant pounce, pulling open the sliding doors of the van to find a makeshift bed and two people “in a state of undress”.

The sex worker is taken aside. Has she been engaging with One25? How much money does she need to make tonight to cover her habit? Has she had any trouble with men tonight? Is she aware of those on the list of dangerous clients to avoid?

Plain clothes officer Mel Furey is also keen to know if she is on the list of especially vulnerable women discussed just a few hours before at a briefing where concerns were raised about a 17-year-old appearing on street corners recently and the condition of two women working for one particularly dangerous “controller”, or pimp.

Checks are run and every new bit of information feeds into building a picture of the lives of those selling themselves on the front line. A tiered system is used to first warn the sex workers, and then give them a “conditional caution” referred them to One25’s criminal justice caseworker. If all else fails police will, in rare circumstances, arrest for soliciting sex.

There is also a “conditional caution” for men, where they are obliged to pay £200 to go on the police’s Change course, a sort of drivers’ awareness course for kerb crawlers.

This client is placed in the back of the police car where he too is warned. A repeat offender, he is formally interviewed and let go on this occasion – only to be caught again just ten minutes later with another woman in his van. Police later tell us he was arrested and will be subject of a court application for a criminal behaviour order banning him from the area.

“When a guy is suspected of kerb crawling there are various options,” explains Emma Slade, the sergeant sitting in the passenger seat, as we return to Trinity Road station. “The difference with the women is we know who they all are. We give them a street warning to identify who they are and what their needs are. If we can help them at that point then it’s more likely we can help them exit prostitution sooner.”

Girls caught loitering more than three times in a month are referred to One25, who they need to meet with at least twice, formally through a conditional caution.

Very occasionally women don’t cooperate, meaning the next step is court where they face an engagement support order which sees a social worker assigned to help them exit. Long gone are the days of fines dished out as punishment, which “would only lead to the women having to work a little bit longer and harder” to pay off.

“From our partnership work we know that to gain the trust and confidence of these women we need to have conversations with these women. There’s no point in just saying to someone ‘what’s your name and what’s your date of birth?’ and issuing them with a slip of paper like a Robocop because actually they are human beings…”

Police and One25 say this softer approach is already showing signs of working. Force statistics, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, show the number of people arrested for soliciting dropped from 322 in 2011 to 10 in 2015 (and three so far in 2016). Cases of paying for sex investigated by police also dropped from 145 in 2011 to 57 so far this year. At the same time, One25 have seen their recorded number of regular street sex workers in Bristol drop to 46, its lowest level since the charity started out. Last year alone, 40 per cent of all active street sex workers were helped to exit prostitution, another major milestone.

This approach has turned heads across the country. It is also an approach which some are looking to formalise under laws which would decriminalise selling sex completely, giving police and charities even greater freedom to adapt.

Sue Mountstevens, police and crime commissioner for Avon and Somerset told Bristol24/7 she was in favour of seeing legislation changed to decriminalise the selling of sex completely. MP for Bristol West Thangam Debbonaire, whose constituency covers the informal red light area in Bristol, addressed the Labour Party conference this year, pushing for a similar change.

But some want to go a step further. At the charity’s drop-in in St Paul’s, One25’s CEO Gill Nowland MBE, who started as a volunteer 15 years ago, says full decriminalisation of both the buying and selling of sex is needed.

She adds that just targeting kerb crawlers is not the answer: “We want to see the men who are violent towards them punished.

“To focus on the kerb crawlers and clamp down on them and remove them is actually just harming the women even more because it puts them at further risk or leaves them with the more dangerous and risky punters who will harm them and prey on them.

“This would drive the whole street sex work scene even more underground and the women would be much more hidden from services like ours.”

Back in the One25 van the last woman of the evening climbs in from the cold. She thought she’d missed us and is freezing.

Clutching a hot water bottle she takes some gloves and socks and nurses a hot chocolate for a moment. She thumbs through the plastic folder on the seat and takes a look at the latest “ugly mug” to make the list.

“Nothing surprises me anymore,” she says, taking her sandwiches and condoms and slipping back into the night to find her corner.

The names of street sex workers have been changed to protect their identities. More information on help for street sex workers can be found on One25’s website www.one25.org.uk.

Watch the police vice squad on a night of action in Bristol:

Click on the picture below to hear the debate about decriminalising prostitution:

Read more: Will it ever end? – an investigation into drug dealing and gangs in Bristol