Hookers And Punters Ignore Vice Clampdown

Oct 21 2007 By Steve Dinneen

Prostitutes And Car Clients Ignore Vice Blitz

A NEW BMW 5 series crawls down a dimly lit side street.

It circles the block and stops - a bedraggled prostitute with lank blonde hair dashes from a street corner and climbs into the passenger seat.

This is Glasgow's red-light district only 48 hours after new laws outlawing kerb crawling came into effect.

If caught, punters face fines of £1000 and the humiliation of explaining to their loved ones and their workmates why they were cruising for sex.

They also face the prospect of losing their cars under new laws.

But if our lawmakers thought this would be a deterrent they were wrong.

A Sunday Mail team monitored three of Scotland's most notorious red-light districts - and discovered the reality was as desperate as ever.

We saw drivers prowling the streets of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen looking for sex.

Drivers circled for up to half an hour before choosing a girl.

Our reporters saw hundreds of vulnerable sex workers, most with drug problems, gather for work to risk their lives for ready cash to feed their habit.

No arrests were made last week by any of the police forces.

Glasgow's red-light zone - Bothwell, Wellington and Cadogan streets - began to fill up with sex workers as early as 9pm.

Most of the punters drove expensive cars including company cars.

One driver in a blue Vauxhall Cavalier picked up two girls in quick succession on the crowded Argyle Street-Wellington Street area just after midnight. Another approached a prostitute with a leg so badly injured she could hardly walk before dragging her into an alley near West Campbell Street

In Edinburgh, a girl in Leith said a police crackdown had simply forced them into quieter areas, such as Stockbridge.

A white Clio pulled up beside some girls at 9.30pm. And a blonde hooker got into a people carrier.

In Aberdeen, the laws forced police to scrap a prostitution tolerance zone that has operated at the harbour since 2001 and protected sex workers from violent clients.

But by 9pm we clocked 30 cars crawling the area.

At first, only two young girls plied their trade on the main drag but they were joined by a dozen more. Some looked as young as 16 and all were scantily clad, despite the freezing cold.

A man in a silver Ford Focus, approached girls in Clarence Street at 9.50pm. He chatted to two and one jumped into his car.

The new laws have been criticised as unenforceable and a similar move in England was a failure.

Criminal psychologist Graham Gooch said: "The demand is simply too high for a simple piece of law-making to eradicate it.

"If you look at the motives of the people picking the girls up you can see this approach is useless.

"These aren't just guys out after the pub. They are lawyers, doctors and men from all over society.

"Part of the attraction is the risk and the danger of it. Making kerb crawling illegal will just fuel this."

But a Scottish government spokesman said: "We're considering a publicity campaign to bring this issue to the fore and make sure everybody is aware what a serious crime this is.

"But this will take time to bed in, as all new legislation does. We fully expect to see good results."

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