Websites ‘selling prostitutes’ across Scotland must be shut down, an MP has said.
Tracy Gilbert — Labour MP for Edinburgh North and Leith — argues that offending sites are facilitating travel for the purposes of prostitution and therefore fall foul of anti-trafficking laws.
Writing in The Scotsman, Gilbert said she has notified Police Scotland of what she believes “to be the biggest sex trafficking operation in modern Scottish history”.
‘National scandal’
The MP explained: “Enormous websites advertising prostitution are operating in Scotland, pimping thousands upon thousands of women every year. They are doing so openly, brazenly, and in direct violation of our anti-trafficking law: the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015.”
“This is organised crime on an industrial scale, and the owners of these pimping websites are making millions from it, while some of the most vulnerable women in society are paying a horrific price. We have to act.”
Gilbert described the sites as “giant online brothels”, a “magnet for sex traffickers”, and “a national scandal”.
Dehumanising
In January, the Northern Ireland Assembly’s newly formed parliamentary group on human trafficking launched an inquiry into ‘pimping websites’.
In a debate, Peter Martin MLA — Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group — called on Stormont to recognise “the significant impact of commercial sexual exploitation and human trafficking of women and girls facilitated through adult services websites”.
He explained that the sites “allow the advertisement and purchase of sexual access to women in a way that mirrors online retail”, thereby reducing “human beings to commodities”. He added that the sites “normalise the idea that access to another person’s body can be bought on demand”.
Ruth Breslin, Director of The Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute, told the BBC that pimps use the “prevalent” websites to advertise “often very vulnerable women, many of whom have been sexually exploited and trafficked”.
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