Top vice cop condemns newspapers for carrying sex ads (From Croydon Guardian)

Top vice cop condemns newspapers for carrying sex ads

12:00pm Friday 10th April 2009 in News

The Metropolitan Police’s top vice cop has backed the Sutton Guardian’s campaign to stop local newspapers, such as the Sutton Advertiser, from profiting from vulnerable women in the sex trade by running sex advertisements in its papers.

Detective Inspector Kevin Hylind, who heads up the Met’s vice unit, targeting brothels and prostitution rings trafficking women from abroad into the capital, said newspapers were directly fuelling the misery of thousands of women trapped in the sex trade.

He said: “Some of these adverts actually fuel the trafficking of women who are put into horrible circumstances and I think it’s both a moral duty and the responsibility of newspapers not to join that sort of activity.

"You would not accept people advertising drugs or stolen property. But the selling of sexual services for gain or control is illegal. These newspapers are advertising an illegal act.”

He said people working in the newspaper industry knowingly advertising sex for financial gain could be prosecuted if cases against them were provable.

The Sutton Guardian, and its publisher Newsquest’s 305 titles nationwide, took the lead in banning all adult advertisements in July 2008, having been persuaded of the clear link between the ads and women being trafficked for sex.

But nine months on, the Sutton Advertiser and its sister paper the Post are continuing to take money from those advertising women for sex.

DI Hylind said every business advertised in newspapers his unit investigated turned out to be a brothel run by pimps, and most contained women who had been trafficked from eastern Europe or southeast Asia who were being held against their will.

He said the conditions women were kept in the brothels were “horrific”.

In some cases women were forced by their pimps to have sex on the same day they had been made to have abortions, and have sex every day for up to six months, he revealed.

The Sutton Advertiser has been asked to justify why they are still running sex ads, but have so far declined to comment.

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