La investigación más importante en el Reino Unido sobre el tráfico de mujeres para el ejercicio de la prostitución se ha saldado con un rotundo fracaso. Ni una sola persona ha podido ser condenada en los tribunales por forzar a mujeres en la prostitución a pesar de cientos de redadas y los esfuerzos conjuntos de varias agencias, departamentos y fuerzas policiales durante seis meses (las cinco condenas obtenidas corresponden a individuos detenidos en anteriores investigaciones).
El periódico The Guardian ha sacado a la luz este fracaso después de una larga batalla legal por obtener un análisis interno de la policía que cuestionaba las cifras oficiales. La policía había anunciado públicamente el arresto de 528 criminales asociados con el tráfico de personas. El desglose real de cifras es como sigue (énfasis mío):
The analysis reveals that 10 of the 55 police forces never found anyone to arrest. And 122 of the 528 arrests announced by police never happened: they were wrongly recorded either through honest bureaucratic error or apparent deceit by forces trying to chalk up arrests which they had not made. Among the 406 real arrests, more than half of those arrested (230) were women, and most were never implicated in trafficking at all.
Of the 406 real arrests, 153 had been released weeks before the police announced the success of the operation: 106 of them without any charge at all and 47 after being cautioned for minor offences. Most of the remaining 253 were not accused of trafficking: 73 were charged with immigration breaches; 76 were eventually convicted of non-trafficking offences involving drugs, driving or management of a brothel; others died, absconded or disappeared off police records.
Although police described the operation as "the culmination of months of planning and intelligence-gathering from all those stakeholders involved", the reality was that, during six months of national effort, they found only 96 people to arrest for trafficking, of whom 67 were charged.
Forty-seven of those never made it to court.
Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking, including two women who had originally been "rescued" as supposed victims. Seven of them were acquitted. The end result was that, after raiding 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours all over the UK, Pentameter finally convicted of trafficking a grand total of only 15 men and women. (...)
Internal police documents reveal that 10 of Pentameter's 15 convictions were of men and women who were jailed on the basis that there was no evidence of their coercing the prostitutes they had worked with. There were just five men who were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes. These genuinely were traffickers, but none of them was detected by Pentameter, although its investigations are still continuing.
La noticia es relevante porque el Parlamento británico se propone aprobar una ley que prohibirá contratar los servicios de una prostituta que trabaja para otra persona, y que ha sido acogida con protestas por parte de las trabajadoras del sexo. Para defenderla los políticos han aludido a la existencia de miles de mujeres que son importadas al Reino Unido y forzadas a trabajar como esclavas sexuales. Pero como indica The Guardian en referencia a los resultados de esta ambiciosa operación, las declaraciones de los políticos están basadas en distorsiones o son puras invenciones.
Un artículo en Spike enlaza el fracaso de la operación con una defensa de la libertad de inmigración: ‘Rescue’: a new PC term for repatriation
