Prostitution, drugs and rape in one Welsh city
The Pill area of Newport has long been home to the city’s unofficial red-light district. Estel Farell-Roig talks to one of the prostitutes who plies her trade there.
Sometimes Ruby goes into crack dens to look for one of her daughters.
Her voice breaking, Ruby describes the chaos in these houses as people use hard drugs.
Ruby – who is now in her early fifties – says she will sit with her back to the wall, as far as she can from the exit, and start to smoke crack. She watches her daughter go with punters, but doesn’t say anything.
Her daughter is deep into a heroin and crack cocaine addiction. She will sell sex for £10 if she needs the money.
“I don’t want her to flee – I need to keep her close,” she said. “If I have to take drugs to spend time with my daughter, I will. But when I come away, I feel s***.
“For a week, I was carrying this needle because I was going to buy some heroin and end it. I blame myself.”
For 30 years, prostitution has been Ruby’s life on the streets of Cardiff, Bristol or Newport.
The place she likes working the least is the place she is from, the place where she says her daughter’s life is now in freefall, the area known as Newport’s unofficial red-light district: Pillgwenlly. Knowing the risks her daughter faces, from violence to rape and the dangers of hard drugs, seeing her like this breaks Ruby’s heart. What she tells us echoes much which emerged from our report into the sex trade on Swansea’s High Street: sex is cheap, rape is common and the women are vulnerable and scared.
Shuttered, boarded-up, crumbling buildings punctuate the array of takeaways, barbers and ethnic food stores on Pill’s Commercial Road.
A busy road with cars parked on both sides, about the only thing that ties together the hotchpotch of old and new buildings is that they all look run-down.
Police say they are aware of 30 women working the streets in this once prosperous and desirable docklands area. One of the busiest parts appears to be the heavily-littered car park next to a shuttered former Kwik Save supermarket.
It’s a hive of activity. On a Thursday evening at around 7.30pm, a woman in a pink, velvety tracksuit lounges in a silver 4x4 with the doors open.
She doesn’t look well and struggles to walk when she gets out, stumbling around the area, but always returning to the 4x4. There are two other black cars, each with a man inside.
Another car drops off a girl in a short, brown dress. She has a can of booze in one hand and a small handbag in the other. She walks unsteadily to the silver car. An hour earlier a different car had dropped her off by the chip shop further up the road, holding a different can.
In the corner, a man in his 20s deals. Several approach and do their business. One doesn’t appear happy. But he buys anyway.
By 10pm, the area is quietening down. Further down Commercial Road, a young, beautiful woman stands on the corner with Portland Street.
White and pale, even in her makeup, she has long blonde hair and wears a jacket and shorts. She is also holding a can of booze.
On a different night, we approach a woman in her twenties wearing jeans and a flowery shirt.
She is standing on the pavement between Frederick Street and Portland Street, and has short brown hair, which doesn’t look very clean, together with big dark bags under her eyes.
We ask her if she wants to speak with us, and she agrees as long as we give her £10. We said we can’t and offer to get her some food. In that case, she doesn’t want to speak with us.
We see her again at 10am on a Wednesday morning, when we find her being picked up. Later that day, I see Ruby. We have met before and she agrees to meet again when she has time to talk properly.
On the day we meet to do the interview, her long straight hair is up in a ponytail and she is wearing make-up.
Ruby is beautiful, and takes pride in her looks. She is wearing black leggings that look old and a baggy jumper which doesn’t hide how skinny she is. When she speaks, she confidently looks straight into my eyes and, sometimes, her face will brighten with a smile, revealing a mouth which doesn’t have many teeth left.
Even after all this time, Ruby – who has several children from five different fathers – doesn’t find this work easy and, whenever she goes to work, she needs to be under the influence of drink or drugs.
How much she charges depends on where she is – when she is on the streets, she charges £40 per service, while to spend a night with someone in a hotel she can charge as much as £500.
Ruby said: “Some of the men are horrible – they are dirty and smelly. Cleanliness goes a long way for me.
“As a street worker, you don’t get much respect and you get looked down on.
“To a lot of people, you are just rats.”
When she first began doing sex work, Ruby went to the Riverside area of Cardiff.
“It was quite scary – I didn’t know Cardiff very well,” she said. “But I needed the money to survive, I wasn’t on drugs or drink at the time.
“I had two kids and I started doing it because I wanted to give them nice things – but it didn’t work out that way.
“The first time I went on the streets I wasn’t sure how I felt. At the time, I didn’t feel dirty, but what I did feel was disappointment.
“The first time you go on the streets, it changes you.”
Ruby is terrified for her daughter. She says she is now injecting heroin as well as taking crack, and stays in tents or crack dens.
“I would rather my daughter was sectioned than being on the streets,” she continued. “Unless something happens soon, I am going to be burying her.”
Ruby says there are many girls like her daughter who will go with punters for just £10 to fund their drug habits. She says some are homeless and live in the crack houses. She says that she knows of four or five such places in Newport.
In Pill, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays are the busiest days. There can be as many as six or seven girls out at any one time, says Ruby. Some of them are as young as 16 or 17.
“It is all for drugs. When you are desperate, you will do anything.
“All of them are homeless, so how can they better themselves? They have no structure. Quite a lot of the workers stay in the flats [the crack houses].
“All they know is going to sell themselves, taking drugs, going to sleep and for it all to start again.”
But there is love in Ruby’s life. She has been in a relationship for the past seven months and, when she talks about her boyfriend, she looks so in love. However, she admits she found it hard at first because commitment scares her and she struggles to trust people.
“I thought that I hated men because of the way they have treated me over the years,” she says.
“An ex-partner used to hit me and he fractured my cheekbone and my nose. I have lost count of how many black eyes I have had.
“I don’t want to be used and I don’t want anyone to try to change me – I just want to be wanted. At the moment, it is drugs that control me.”
Ruby uses many drugs. Apart from smoking heroin, crack cocaine and cannabis, she also snorts cocaine and, in the past few months, has tried other drugs such as MDMA and magic mushrooms.
She has become numb over the years, and she said there was a time in her life she couldn’t cry. These days, she takes drugs not to care about anything.
“I sit in my horrible little bedroom smoking lots of weed or, if I can get hold of gear, I will use it,” she said.
“The crack is something I smoke to get high; the gear I smoke to forget.
“Drugs give me security, and they are the only escape that I have.
“I don’t know what normality is any more. I just want what everybody wants – I just want to be happy and healthy.”
Ruby, who first tried heroin when she was 39, said she had a horrible childhood. Her dad used to drink heavily and was violent towards her mum, who worked in the sex industry, escorting rather than on the streets.
When she was 15, her mum told her she couldn’t look after her financially and suggested she become a prostitute.
Ruby added: “If I could go back in time, I would be a stronger mum myself. I searched for love for many years, and I got married for all the wrong reasons.
“I had my first child before I was 20. I wanted to have kids so somebody would love me, which I think is pathetic now.”
Safety is another problem for sex workers, and Ruby said she has been raped. One night, after she had been working in Cardiff, she was trying to get a lift back to Newport and got picked up on Newport Road by two men in a small van.
They took her into the back of the van, and one of the men raped her before she ran away.
Ruby feels being a street worker is less safe now than it was when she first started, and thinks girls need to work together to keep each other safe, taking registration numbers down.
She knows Pill well – it has been her home for the past 26 years – and
‘These girls do not have anything. When I see them, I feel sad, angry , worried and scared for them’
RUBY
she said it is becoming increasingly dangerous for women to sell sex in the area.
Ruby carries a knife at all times after someone tried to rob her. Ruby said there have been six or seven rapes of sex workers in the past four months. A few of the girls have come forward, Ruby claimed, and the incidents are being investigated by police.
However, some are too scared to go out on the streets at the moment, she claims, and some women who had been in the trade for years have stopped working in Pill because of how dangerous it is becoming.
She says there has been an increase in police activity, but it has made little difference to the street workers.
“It is quiet on the streets at the moment but that is because of how much the police are out and about,” she says. “I think the moment they don’t see the dealers or the girls on the streets they think they have won, but all that has happened is that they have gone to ground.”
There have been many attempts to change Pill. There is a strong sense of community in the area – reflected in the annual carnival on the last weekend of August which attracts crowds.
Last year a housing association announced they would be investing £10m in Pill alone.
Prostitution in Pill isn’t anything new, and both businesses and residents have previously spoken out about the area’s problems.
Ann Barton, of AB florist, in Commercial Road, said the situation isn’t any better now.
Mrs Barton said workers have started knocking on doors of people they think live on their own.
“They don’t seem to go away, they seem to be here 24/7 now,” she said. “They are off their faces and some can’t walk.
“The situation is certainly no better and there are lots of new girls.
“What are the police doing? They don’t seem to be doing anything.”
Mrs Barton said some of the workers can be quite “pushy”, especially towards older people.
Some people end up giving them money because they are intimidated by them, she says.
“They are approaching people’s cars, people do not want to come down here,” she adds.
“The drugs are really bad as well – there is no shame at all.”
Mrs Barton says that some of the workers do not seem to look old enough to be working on the streets, adding they are now using the car park in Asda to work.
“It is really sad,” she says. “The police are doing action days – but that is only for one day. We are right behind the police station, but that makes no difference.”
Gwent Police’s Superintendent Ian Roberts, local policing commander for Newport and Monmouthshire, says the force has to balance the need to protect the vulnerable women in sex work with the distress it causes people who live nearby.
He says: “Sex workers are generally vulnerable and exploited people. Our first port of call is to get them to engage with agencies and how to divert them away [from sex work].
“If these individuals refuse to engage, we have to deal with them in a different way. If they are soliciting for sex work, they are committing an offence, so we would consider using the law to take enforcement action.”
Mr Roberts says enforcement is their last resort – research shows it doesn’t help, it just pushes it underground. He adds they haven’t had to take enforcement action recently as most of the sex workers are positively working with agencies, adding it is only a small minority that are not engaging. “We need to tackle the kerb crawlers and the pimps and, in the last two months, we have issued 13 or 14 community protection warnings,” he says. “It gives them a warning not to return to the area for a period of time.”
Mr Roberts says they are also planning a number of operations to deal with the people that are controlling the sex workers, the pimps.
He says he is putting investment into the area for extra foot patrols working with the council to tackle some of the issues that make Pill more attractive for sex workers and drug dealers, such as poor lighting or alleyways.
He says: “We are listening to what people are telling us and responding – I am more than happy to meet and discuss this with people.
“It is not that we aren’t doing anything about it – tackling vulnerability is a priority for us.”
Statistics released to WalesOnline under FOI show there has only been one arrest for loitering and soliciting in Newport since 2014. This arrest was in 2018, but the force wasn’t able to clarify in which area it occurred.
There have been no arrests for kerb crawling under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 since 2014; however, Gwent Police says it uses the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 to warn kerb crawlers about their behaviour instead.
In the past two months, Gwent Police have issued around 13 or 14 community protection warnings, which warn people not to return to the area for a period of time.
Some think that there should be a formal area for the women to work.
Matthew Evans, leader of the Conservative party in Newport, agrees.
Speaking during a litter pick in the area in October, he said: “Personally, I think we need to revisit the issue entirely and provide a safe area where they can work from and take it away from criminals.
“I understand the residents being up in arms about it, but we have not solved the problem.
“It is a hot potato and there are people who are uncomfortable talking about it but we have to recognise it is going on.
“Let’s have an open and honest debate. It seems to be the elephant in the room that some people are unwilling to discuss.”
Mr Evans said that, if there was an area where the workers could operate from, police and others, such as outreach workers, would know where they are and they would be safer.
He said it wouldn’t be easy to find an area where the workers could work, but that at the moment there are women being approached in Commercial Road. It would have to be an area away from residents.
Ruby also thinks a space should be provided, maybe do up a derelict building, where they could work.
She said: “These girls do not have anything. When I see them, I feel sad, angry, worried and scared for them.
“I want to be a voice for those that do not have one. I understand how residents feel because they do not want their partners being approached.
“But there is nowhere safe for them to go. If I saw a girl in a corner, I would go up to her and ask her if there is anything I can do to help.
“Someone is going to be murdered out there.”