the Anti Slavery movement and the enslavement of women within the Sex Industry

One hundred years ago Josephine Butler, the Anglican Champion for the rights of those caught in prostitution to be treated as equal citizens, tirelessly called on church leaders, politicians and ordinary men and women to look afresh at the horrors entailed in commercialised sexual labour. A cornerstone of her work was to seek legislation to limit what she saw as the State recruitment of women into Prostitution for the benefit of the armed services across the Empire. On the centenary of Butler’s death it is salutary to note that the British Empire might have passed away, but the horrors and degradation of what Butler saw in Prostitution has continued and been transformed in the contemporary scourge of trafficking for sexual exploitation and a commercialised sex industry. Recent events in Suffolk have made many of the issues Butler was confronting even sharper.

Amongst those with whom I have personally had contact, there are many whose bodies have been polluted for as little as £25 per half hour. This purchase of women’s bodies by morsels of half hour acts of exploitation, as many as sixteen to twenty times a day, six days a week, leaves a woman exhausted and spent by her experiences in the centres of so called development and contemporary 'cool'. Her life sold on in airport lounges, strip clubs, erotic bars and the back rooms of terraced suburban houses, for £2,000 - £8,000 pounds when she is fresh, to as little as the price of an old beaten up Corsa when used, non compliant or pregnant is our contemporary defilement of humanity taking place on the streets of Britain today.

In 2007 this is the new slave trade. A trade in which enslavement through loss of control of one's destiny, of one’s movement and use of one’s body twentyfour hours a day, seven days a week is now defiling our common humanity and the image of God amongst us. One of the difficulties in confronting prostitution as the abuse that it is, is because it is linked with an ancient practice of violence against women’s bodies which has passed into cultural normativity. Phrases such as ‘the oldest profession in the world’, the idea that prostitution entails some form of choice whereby women are able to earn more ‘on their backs than on their feet’ means that prostitution and trafficking for sexual exploitation are still relegated to minority interest status in our ethical world of outrage and not in the forefront of contemporary Christian ethical thinking. Consider only for a moment when you last heard a sermon on the ethics of sexual relationships and the purchasing of bodies for sexual gratification, said a prayer written for such a purpose by liturgists, or sang a hymn in which the radical equality of women’s bodies with those of men were celebrated and sanctified?

2007 will see the launch of a new Sunday for attention to be focussed on issues of sexual abuse, violence against women, and the multiple exploitation which occurs within Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation.

Not for Sale Sunday

will be an opportunity to begin the movement for a second abolition which Josephine Butler longed for. The abolition of the double standard, where women’s abuse was neglected, male demand for prostituted services disappeared from public gaze, and pimping and grooming cycles lay uninvestigated. CHASTE will be instigating a range of initiatives around the ubiquity of demand and its links to Contemporary abuse of women on both a national and a global scale. 2007 will be a year when to cry freedom will include the faces of women trafficked into the sex industry – and a year when yet again our value sets will face gospel transformation. For more information on the work of CHASTE and her partners log onto www.CHASTE.org.uk

Revd Dr Carrie Pemberton;
Chief Executive of CHASTE,
Board Member of the United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre.

We know too from the work of the National Children’s Society that it is not only young girls but boys as well who are picked out and ‘groomed’ for this appalling trade. As we march and repent for the sins of our forebears in promoting the slave trade, let us be aware of what still needs to be done in the 21st Century to get rid of slavery in the world.