Specialist teams including social workers, interpreters and housing officers have been created to offer assistance to foreign women who have been caught up in the sex trade.
The Home Office – which usually demands women from non-EU countries are deported as soon as possible – has given Glasgow City Council special dispensation from usual immigration rules, only the second time such an arrangement has been made in the UK.
It is thought between 2000 and 6000 women and girls are trafficked into the UK to work as prostitutes each year. Almost all will have had their travel documents taken from them, and many are raped, beaten and intimidated into working as prostitutes, usually after being duped into believing they would be able to start a new life in Britain.
Even after the women have been rescued from the traffickers, many are too frightened of reprisals on themselves or their families to talk to the police or give evidence in court.
Glasgow council will now offer them a 30-day “reflection period” to recover, receive medical assistance, legal guidance and counselling.
“Trafficked women in Glasgow are a small but significant problem, which we expect will grow over the coming years,” said Ann Hamilton, of the city’s Corporate Violence Against Women unit.
“We have an agreement with immigration and the police that if women seem to be from overseas then we will treat them as if they have been trafficked. It’s about stopping the harm to women – we would give them a number of weeks to receive help and to consider what they want to do.
On September 29, 19 women were “rescued” by police from the Cuddles sauna where it was alleged they were locked up and prevented from leaving by an electric fence at the back of the property.
However, the nationality of the women taken from the house determined whether or not they received help from social services, or were treated as illegal immigrants.
The day after the raid, immigration officials went to the police station where the females were being held and demanded that six women whose country of origin is outwith the EU be immediately taken to the Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre in Bedfordshire.
The other two women were initially placed in a fast-track stream of asylum seekers while they were being held at Yarl’s Wood, but one of the women has since gone missing. She disappeared after immigration officials took her to a railway station, gave her the exact fare for a ticket and told her to make her own way across London to a hostel for asylum seekers, changing trains several times along the way.
Poppy Project manager Natalia Dawkins praised the Glasgow efforts after visiting officials two weeks ago. She said: “We are impressed and pleased with the work being done in Scotland – it’s really refreshing to see some joined-up thinking about this issue.
The 30-day reflection period that Glasgow is to implement is a core tenet of a recent Council of Europe directive on the trafficking of human beings. Despite the concessions for Glasgow and the Poppy Project, the UK government refuses to sign up to the directive.
A Home Office spokeswoman said the government “is concerned” illegal immigrants will simply claim they have been trafficked into the UK and will then be given extra time to claim asylum.
The influential committee has just launched an investigation into why the government has refused to sign the declaration. “It is well known that victims need some time to recover. It is outrageous we haven’t signed it and not doing so has potentially harmed victims of trafficking,” Harris said.
Sarah Green of Amnesty International, which is behind a long-running campaign on people trafficking, welcomed the moves by Glasgow but urged the government to sign up to the European directive.
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