It seems like every time a World Cup or an Olympics appears on the horizon, so do warnings from the international press, government ministers and police, the BBC reports.
They all express fears that thousands of women will be trafficked to the host nation to satisfy the sexual desires of the crowds.
But will prostitution in London really increase because of the 2012 Olympics?
In January 2010 Tessa Jowell, then Minister for the Olympics in the previous government, told MPs: “Major sporting events can be a magnet for the global sex and trafficking industry; this is wholly unacceptable. I am determined that traffickers will not exploit London 2012.”
And Dennis Hof, who owns the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, a large-scale brothel in Nevada, US, says he expects London to see “1,000 girls to be trafficked in by South East Asian, Albanian and African gangs, violent gangs involved in crime and drugs”.
Hof, who wants to run a legal brothel during the Olympics, bases his prediction on what he said he saw at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.
The Metropolitan Police Service’s Human Exploitation and Organised Crime Command (SCD9) was set up at the start of 2010 to tackle vice, human trafficking and immigration crime. It has a team focusing on vice-related crime in the five Olympic host boroughs –
Newham, Hackney, Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets and Greenwich.
SCD9 was given £600,000 to tackle the potential increase in trafficking in those five boroughs in the run up to 2012.
Conservative London Assembly Member Andrew Boff has compiled the Silence of Violence report which also says there is “no strong evidence that trafficking for sexual exploitation does in fact increase during sporting events”.
He also says raids on brothels were increasing as the Olympics approached, with 80 being closed in the Olympic borough of Newham in the last 20 months or so.
MOL/JR/HE
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