Mark Clarke is the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Tooting.
Two years ago in Tooting a brothel was raided by the police. They found a 15-year-old Estonian girl who had been trafficked and kept as a slave. Ironically, this occurred on the 200th anniversary of the supposed abolition of the slave trade, the campaign for which was started in Clapham, barely half a mile away.
Following this I set up with some local churches and Carol Freeman, a former charity worker for a Human Trafficking charity, an organisation called the “Wandsworth Anti Slavery Campaign”. We wanted to see if this was a one-off or if there was a systemic problem with trafficking in our area. Initially, people told us that these issues were not really significant in suburban Tooting – this was a Soho problem. How wrong they were.
Research by local church volunteers uncovered a dozen brothels within half a mile of Tooting Broadway. The majority had indicators of trafficking – very low pricing, an indifferent attitude to safe sex and not one English woman. They were embedded in our community. One was on the same road as the local police station; one was opposite the Labour MP's office, one was in the same building as a refugees’ charity. We identified over thirty women whom we believed had a reasonable likelihood of being trafficked. With research suggesting that each woman is required to have sex with around ten men a day, that equated to potentially 300 rapes a day in Tooting.
The local churches organised prayer walks around Tooting to pray for those involved and with the church leaders we approached Wandsworth Council and the local police Borough Commander and gave them full details of the intelligence we had gathered and asked them to take action.
Wandsworth police were superb. They raided every single brothel, made several arrests, identified common management across some brothels, and found women who have been raped and assaulted. They have also asked the shop owners to remove advertisements from their windows. And they have much more activity planned in the coming weeks about which I can obviously not go into further detail.
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