Salmond and Tory in ‘old boys’ club’
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NICOLA Sturgeon has accused Alex Salmond and a Tory MP who made serious allegations against her as being part of an “old boys’ club”.
The First Minister also said “shifty” David Davis was an “old pal” of her predecessor who used his position to spread “conspiracy theories”.
The row at FMQs comes after Davis used parliamentary privilege to claim emails existed showing that Sturgeon’s chief of staff Liz Lloyd had interfered in the complaints process of women who accused Salmond of sexual misconduct.
Davis also suggested a document was withheld by the Government during Salmond’s successful review of its handling of the complaints against him.
This latter claim was rejected by the Government and a complainer dismissed the allegation about Lloyd as “fundamentally” untrue.
At FMQs, Davidson raised the claim that a legal paper had been suppressed and asked if Sturgeon knew it had happened. She replied it “didn’t happen”, adding: “Having Davis reading out, under parliamentary privilege, his old pal Alex Salmond’s conspiracy theories about the sexual harassment allegations against him must be the epitome of the old boys’ club.”
TORY Davis
VALIANT RICHEY an expert in combating trafficking in Europe
AN argument I hear, and often from the sex industry, is that these sites are safer. They are not. They are easier and easier is not the same as safer.
Just like on the street, nobody knows who the buyer is.
There is simply no way to eliminate violence from this industry.
There are no meaningful safeguards. We know this because the sites are full of trafficking victims.
Governments should be considering policy options to shut down these sites as quickly as possible.
SESTA-FOSTA in the US passed and the market declined by 80 per cent in 72 hours. I’m not aware of any legislation that had such an impact on the market in such a short time.
BRONAGH ANDREW
of TARA, which supports victims
OFTEN traffickers use the profiles or the images as a tool to continue control and coercion: ‘So, if you don’t do as you’re told, I’ll send your mum or your father this profile and they’ll know what you were doing’, or ‘the police will see that profile and you’ve got a big smile on your face so they won’t believe you’ve been coerced’.
Sometimes for women we support they simply don’t know what’s out there to begin looking for it. They don’t know what images are out there and who can access those images.
It’s very difficult in terms of moving forward.
LINDA THOMPSON Women’s Support Project
A LOT of the women we have worked with have said they had no choice in an advert going up.
Natasha, who I worked with, was trafficked into Scotland from Romania.
An advert was placed on her behalf, and it listed what sexual services she was ‘really in to’ and ‘could not wait to offer to men’. She never wrote that. She never agreed to that.
And she talked about punters arriving and she did not speak English. They would have negotiated what was going to happen in that room with her with her trafficker.
A CROSS-PARTY group of MSPs are demanding a crackdown on sleazy websites which have “turbo-charged” sex trafficking.
The inquiry is calling for radical new laws to block access to sex-for-sale websites fuelling exploitation and organised crime in Scotland.
The inquiry said the “pimping” sites granted crime gangs greater anonymity and soaring profits, encouraging more to divert from other traditional illicit trades like drugs.
Evidence showed accessibility drives up demand, with trafficked women, who may have only seen one client a night, now raped by 10 or more daily.
Inquiry co-chair Ruth Maguire MSP said the explosion of online sexual exploitation “vastly outstrips policing capacity to respond to it” and new laws must include a blanket ban on the purchase of sex.
She said: “Online pimping is taking place on an industrial scale in Scotland. The ease and speed with which pimps and traffickers can now advertise their victims to potential ‘customers’ has turbocharged the sex trafficking trade.
“These ‘pimping websites’ fall through the cracks of our outdated laws on sexual exploitation. Website operators are free to enable and profit from the prostitution of others – without criminal sanction.
“The Scottish Government must lead the way in adopting laws against sexual exploitation that are fit for the 21st century.
“That requires making it a criminal offence to enable or profit from the prostitution of another person, tackling demand by criminalising paying for sex, and decriminalising and supporting victims of sexual exploitation.”
Despite lockdown, on one day in February, the group found 570 adverts for Scotland on a single “sexual exploitation advertising” website.
Detective Superintendent Filippo Capaldi, head of Police Scotland’s National Human Trafficking Unit, told the inquiry law enforcement didn’t have the resources or powers to cope with the massive scale of exploitation.
He said: “The difficulty is there is no end in sight. There is no let-up to it. There are new adverts coming on and older ones dropping off every single day. It’s a constant churn.
“It would really require an uplift in resourcing to be dedicated to that particular work.”
Major sites like Adult Works and Viva Street rake in more than £1million a month on UK adverts exploiting the misery of women sold for sex but are breaching promises to self-police.
One convicted trafficker spent £25,000 on adverts on Vivastreet but instead of alerting authorities, the site assigned him a personal account manager. Det Supt Capaldi confirmed
he had “never had a proactive, preventative approach from one of the major sites”.
The traffickers place the adverts under fake names of women, negotiating with clients a list of depraved sex acts they must perform.
There is no way of knowing which women have been trafficked and experts told the inquiry it is a fallacy that sites have the will or the “design mechanism” to weed out criminal activity. There were 84 trafficked women rescued during Police Scotland operations last year, the majority advertised on websites.
Two dozen people were arrested in an international Scottish-led police crackdown on a sex trafficking gang, which used websites to sell women.
The committee’s report is the first parliamentary inquiry dedicated to analysing sexual exploitation advertising websites ever conducted in the UK. It said new laws would stop access to the sites, even if they are based abroad, similar to recent legislation introduced in the US and France.
One possibility is placing the sites on a banned URL list like those already used by internet companies to block web pages known to contain child sexual abuse content. When the US introduced its SESTA-FOSTA ban on the sites in 2018 online prostitution plummeted by 80 per cent in just three days.
Evidence presented to the inquiry said it was not true traffickers would simply divert to the dark web because mass exposure was key to reaching a steady stream of sex buyers.
The report also demanded cash injections into exiting services from sex for sale, calling for criminal records of women and men convicted of prostitution to be expunged and to remove unjust obstacles to legitimate employment.
Rhoda Grant MSP, co-chair of the committee said: “Closing sexual exploitation advertising websites is one important step on the path to ensuring no one is for sale in Scotland.”