How pimping websites are brazenly flouting the law against sex trafficking in Scotland
Scotland must shut down criminal primping websites, punish those responsible and enable their victims to get justice
I have written to Police Scotland to report what I believe to be the biggest sex trafficking operation in modern Scottish history. It is happening right now, and our police and political leaders need to act.
Enormous websites advertising prostitution are operating in Scotland, pimping thousands upon thousands of women every year. They are doing so openly, brazenly, and in direct violation of our anti-trafficking law: the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015.
This is organised crime on an industrial scale, and the owners of these pimping websites are making millions from it, while some of the most vulnerable women in society are paying a horrific price. We have to act.
Most people will not have come across pimping websites, but they are perpetrating industrial-scale exploitation across Scotland. These profit-driven online platforms are dedicated, either solely or partly, to advertising people for prostitution, with most of them being young women.
These sites function as giant online brothels, allowing men who pay for sex to order a woman as easily as if they were buying a takeaway. Pimping websites bulldoze over the legal and social risks – and the mere inconvenience – that might deter a sex buyer from soliciting for prostitution on the street. It is one of the key reasons why these websites have turbo-charged the sex trade in Scotland.
Operating in plain sight
Time and again, pimping websites have been exposed as a magnet for sex traffickers, eager to advertise their victims to the sex buyers across Scotland who congregate on these sites. One sickening sex trafficking gang, which forced women into prostitution in my own constituency, Edinburgh North and Leith, spent some £200,000 advertising their victims on a pimping website.
Yet until now, the biggest sex trafficking gang of them all – the individuals who run the pimping websites – have managed to avoid the eyes of government and of law enforcement. They operate in plain sight, and yet their activities clearly constitute sex trafficking on an unparalleled scale.
Under the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Act 2015, an exploiter has to tick three boxes for their actions to constitute sex trafficking. Scotland’s biggest pimping websites tick every box.
The explanation for this may sound a bit technical, but the failure to hitherto bring Scotland’s most prolific sex traffickers to justice hinges on the failure to apply our anti-trafficking law to perpetrators who operate online. In essence, the ‘technicality’ of the legislation is everything.
Aiding and abetting
Pimping websites fulfil the first criteria for sex trafficking – taking a “relevant action” – because they are deliberately designed, as the anti-trafficking law puts it, to facilitate “the transportation or transfer of another person”. The standardised prostitution adverts published on pimping websites usually specify whether or not the woman will do “outcalls” – and that means, travel to the sex buyer for prostitution. Site visitors are also able to filter adverts according to whether the person will travel for prostitution by using a sorting function designed and provided by the website. Tick one.
The second criteria for a trafficking offence to be committed is that the exploiter must take the relevant action “with a view to another person being exploited”. What constitutes exploitation? Under Scotland’s Human Trafficking Act, this includes the “control, direction or influence over prostitution by the person in a way which shows that the other person is aiding, abetting or compelling the prostitution”.
Aiding prostitution is clearly the raison d'être of pimping websites. They do not even try to hide it. Their adverts contain a long tick-box list of sex acts that inform sex buyers which acts they can request, as well as sexually explicit images, prices and a contact phone number. The adverts on pimping websites are indispensable to the prostitution they facilitate; they are how sex buyers and the advertisers connect. Tick two.
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The obvious intent
Lastly, to constitute human trafficking, the exploiter must intend to aid prostitution or know (or ought to know) that the person is likely to be exploited. This criteria rests on whether the people running pimping websites are accidental, unwitting hosts of the hundreds of thousands of prostitution adverts that end up on their platforms (and which they take payment for) day after day, year after year, or if this activity is knowing and intentional.
I defy anyone who visits a pimping website to suggest with a straight face that its operators do not intend to facilitate travel for the purposes of prostitution. The intent is obvious to anyone taking even a cursory glance.
Every single prostitution advert is displayed in an identical format, complete with that list of sex acts and the notice about whether the person will do outcalls. This is not by accident, but because the website operators designed them to be this way. So aiding prostitution and facilitating travel for this purpose is built into the architecture of these pimping websites. Tick three.
It is a national scandal that pimping websites have been free to operate for so long in Scotland, in violation of our anti-trafficking law and in full view of the authorities. For years, calls to confront these sites by the Cross-Party Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation, A Model For Scotland, UK Feminista and others have been ignored.
That must end. We must shut these criminal websites down. Hold their operators accountable. And, most importantly, let their victims get justice.
Tracy Gilbert is the Scottish Labour MP for Edinburgh North and Leith