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Workers were warned yesterday that they faced more random drug testing in the workplace after it was revealed one company sacked more than 10 per cent of employees it screened for cocaine and cannabis use.

Laing O'Rourke, the construction group, like many other firms, has introduced testing of its 23,000 workers on the grounds that its industry is "safety critical" and employees need clear heads.

Out of 1,500 checked this year, the company said 165 were sacked after traces of cannabis or cocaine were found in their blood.

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While critics agreed that in cases of public safety such as construction and transport testing was necessary they feared many firms are introducing the schemes to keep a "Big Brother" eye on staff.

Gareth Crossman, director of policy at Liberty, the civil rights organisation, said: "What people do — whether legal or not — in their own time is not for their employer to dictate unless of course it directly impacts on work. They are not the police.

"The danger is that firms without a public safety criteria think that would be useful to weed out the workforce and increase productivity. That would be wrong."

Harry Shapiro, spokesman for DrugScope, the drug awareness charity, said: "The employer's job is to ensure profits and a safe environment for working. Neither of which is necessarily going to be impaired by someone smoking a joint at the weekend."

Nigel Stanley, spokesman for the TUC, said: "We think that employers should treat alcohol and drugs as a health related issue. If you suspect someone has a problem with them then rather than sack them you should send them to the company GP."

The use of screening for existing staff and new recruits is on the increase and seems to be following the American trend where up to 40 per cent of employers use random drug testing.

It is increasingly being used away from industries solely interested in safety and into other areas such as the financial services sector and the City.

The cost of illegal drug use to industry has been estimated at £800 million a year while absenteeism and loss of productivity through alcohol misuse is estimated to cost up to £6.4 billion.

About 16 per cent of UK businesses tested employees randomly in 2003 a figure which is said to be increasing.

Laing O'Rourke began testing in 2005. It employs a company called Medscreen to carry out the procedure which costs around £100 per employee.

Medscreen also tests for rail companies, the Jockey Club and most of the major oil and gas suppliers.

Laing O'Rourke claims to have seen a dramatic reduction in on-site accidents as a result of the clampdown. A spokesman said: "This is all part of making the site safer."

Out of the 165 sacked, 124 were for the alleged use of cannabis, 41 for the alleged use of cocaine and 21 allegedly had traces of both drugs in their system.

The murders of five women in Suffolk, all of them addicts, have served to highlight Britain's growing heroin problem. Opiates have moved from being the preserve of the few to the drug of choice in towns across the UK

Mark Townsend, Anushka Asthana and Denis Campbell
Sunday December 24, 2006
The Observer

They were offering Christmas specials on the south coast last week. Two wraps of heroin for the price of one. Buy a gram, get a hit of crack for free. Mike was unable to resist. Another year would soon pass with the 48-year-old from Hastings, Sussex, still enslaved to the 'brown'.
Heroin has never been as cheap or as easily available in the 30 years Mike has been injecting opiates into his skinny, mottled arms. 'These days it is easier to score than cannabis. I could go into any town in Britain and score within a day. Try the social security building, look for street drinkers or people using drugs support centres and you'll soon find it,' he said. His eyes were glassy. He looked dog-tired. He had just injected half a gram of heroin.

'It becomes your best friend. When you have £10 in your pocket and there is no electric in the house and no food you'll still go out and buy a bag. You would choose that brown powder over your partner.'

Mike is white and working class, the precise socio-economic classification that the syndicates behind Britain's ever-powerful £10bn heroin trade are targeting. If one thing became clear following the murder of five women in Suffolk, it was that each of their lives had been wrecked by the drug. They were part of a new semi-rural class of taker, not from the mean streets of the big cities but from everyday roads in everyday towns up and down the country. As one prostitute interviewed in Ipswich said, if she had to choose between food and heroin, heroin would win every time. Just as it does with Mike.

Senior police officers are now warning that with record amounts of heroin flooding the streets, readier availability and all-time low prices will increase the number of addicts drawn from the most impoverished margins of society.

An expanding alternative economy driven by the profits and crime generated by heroin is being documented by experts. The narcotic subculture is no longer largely confined to metropolitan Britain, but instead has spread to hundreds of towns. Anyone could pitch up in any town at any time and, without too much effort, score, according to experts.

Harry Shapiro, spokesman for charity Drugscope, said: 'If you look at areas of high unemployment that also have high crime levels you will find heroin. It almost feeds off itself. If you visit any market town and ask for heroin you will find someone able to help you out.'

The most recent analysis has found heroin being sold for as little as the price of a cappuccino. Wraps have been sold for £2, often as a 'taster' for potential new users who traditionally would have been priced out of the heroin market. Its price is less than a third of what it was when Mike began flirting with the drug during boozy sessions on the King's Road, during the summer of 1976. Its falling value has alarmed Whitehall. Heroin's street price is the surest indicator of whether Britain is winning its war on drugs.

Heroin's current standing is a far cry from when opiates were associated with the aristocracy or creativity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's masterpiece 'Kubla Khan' was inspired by opium. Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater secured him praise rather than pity among his peers.

Materially, Mike never had as much to lose as such literary icons of the nineteenth century. But what he did possess, has long gone. 'If I had never touched heroin I would have a totally different life, with a nice house, 2.4 children, a wife, car and holidays abroad.'

His days are spent alone. He does not speak to his wife. He has lost contact with his daughter. Hepatitis C, a common complaint among intravenous heroin users, plays havoc with his health. Friends are bound by a shared addiction to heroin.

One punched his mother in the face and stole her money. Another ran into a pharmacists with a syringe full of blood and threatened to infect staff unless they handed over money. Most prefer pushing pensioners to the ground and making off with their shopping. Some friends have disappeared. One committed suicide while going through heroin withdrawal.

Last Thursday, Mike gazed at the small counselling room at the Hastings branch of Addaction, a charity that supports users of class A drugs,and shook his head. Opposite sat Ben Fitzpatrick, the man tasked with helping Mike go 'clean'. It was like trying to persuade someone to turn their back on a lover they could not live without. 'It is quite common for people to describe their relationship with heroin in a similar way to an intimate relationship,' said Fitzpatrick. 'The idea of giving up can be terrifying.'

Amid the flat emptiness of the southern Afghanistan desert, thousands of British troops will spend today re-reading messages from their loved ones.

Many will be written by families and friends who hail from the streets and estates of towns corrupted by heroin. Here, in arid Helmand province, is where the opium is grown that feeds Britain's heroin habit. A direct line can be drawn from the wilds of Helmand to Hastings and hundreds of places like it.

Nine in every 10 grams of heroin sold in Britain originates from Afghanistan. Officials from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, protected by British troops, will spend Christmas working with the Afghan authorities to try to dismantle the heroin supply into Britain. So far, the network of tribal leaders, criminal syndicates and hundreds of thousands of subsistence opium farmers has proved impossible to crack.

Britain remains the world's biggest customer for Afghan heroin and its most voracious consumer in Europe. And, now, there is more Helmand heroin than ever before. The land for poppy cultivation in the country had increased by 59 per cent to 165,000 hectares, according to the United Nations, despite Britain's attempt to eradicate its growth.

Tim Hollis, chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers' drugs committee and chief constable of Humberside admitted that Afghanistan continued to cast a shadow over attempts to control heroin abuse throughout the UK. He said: 'The fact is that the heroin crop is one of the biggest on record. One factor is that the criminal markets are very fluid and once one of the routes is blocked then they will try and find another. The worry is that there is more on the streets and the price has fallen.' Latest figures indicate there are 327,000 hard-drug users, although drugs charities worry the figure could be as high as 500,000.

Shapiro said that all evidence points to the fact that the most disenfranchised have become the most vulnerable to heroin. 'We know about the aristocratic heroin users but those at risk of becoming chronic heroin users come from poor backgrounds, are homeless or have mental health problems. Areas of deprivation are the most vulnerable. You are more likely to have addicts in Middlesbrough and Grimsby than, say, Richmond. While the absolute numbers have not skyrocketed like in the Eighties or Nineties. The distribution of heroin has spread a lot more evenly across the country.'

Scoring heroin, he said, may have become too simple. Eventually, though, most addicts, find themselves beholden to a dealer who will use intimidation to ensure their custom, a practice pushers call 'powder power'. Purity fluctuates wildly. During the summer, when the supply was lower, the quality fell to as low as 0.2 per cent of heroin compared to five per cent which is the highest purity level British users expect.

Its strength has improved recently though Mike warns that such changeable purity levels offer an omnipresent threat. One sudden, strong doseage can kill. But, as always, cost remains the key factor. On London's King's Road in 1976, heroin cost Mike £100 a gram. Last year it fell to £58. Police sources believe its current price of half that may yet fall further.

Since the tail-end of the Eighties, addicts have been able to receive free clean needles and daily doses of the heroin substitute methadone. The strategy was called 'harm reduction'. Its aim was to curb the spread of the HIV virus among Britain's addicts. Initially controversial, the strategy eventually became the standard approach.

But has it worked? If anything, what was meant to have sated Britain's fondness for junk may only have exacerbated its appetite. One academic specialising in research into illegal drugs concluded last week that Britain's drug problems have escalated during a period when it should have been improving.

Prof Neil McKeganey, director of the Centre for Drug Misuse Research at Glasgow University, said that the current approach - which has been intensified under Labour - had produced 'only modest success'. 'With approaching 15 years experience of harm reduction we have a situation in which not only the number of problem users has increased substantially, but the prevalence of problem drug use has escalated substantially,' he said.

Mike's experiences are, McKeganey found, the norm. His report found that around 40 per cent of drug users in Britain are Hepatitis C positive with thousands dying from drug-related causes. Drug use, he added, continues to fuel high levels of offending and scar entire communities.

Hollis concurs that the chronic reoffending of a hardcore of heroin addicts needs to be urgently tackled and remains a persistent source of exasperation to officers on the front-line.

Perhaps those best qualified to comment are those who have felt heroin's grip - the diarrhoea, the aching limbs, the burning vomit and the long, feverish nights. Only one solution remains workable to those like Mike; heroin must be legalised and offered on prescription if the cycle of crime and community breakdown is to be broken. Even so, the price will be high according to those who have seen heroin's damage first-hand. 'It might mean writing off a generation.'

Heroin

· Used widely as a painkiller in the 19th century in Britain, heroin can be smoked - 'chasing the dragon' - snorted or injected.

· Acutely addictive and fast-acting, it is described by users as giving them a feeling of warmth, relaxation and detachment within seconds.

· Addicts spend an average of £10,000 a year feeding their habit. Famous users include John Lennon and Charlie Parker.

· Also known as brown, china white, dragon, gear, H, horse, junk, skag, smack and jack.

· A Class A drug, it is an opiate derived from the dried milk of the opium poppy. Heroin is made from morphine.

· Afghanistan supplies 90 per cent of heroin found in the UK.

· Methadone is the main treatment for heroin addicts, although it is an addictive drug in itself, producing feelings of euphoria and sedation, but to a lesser degree.

Amnesty offered to drug dealers as police reveal what victims were wearing

· Heroin and crack suppliers may hold vital clues
· Officers refine database of red light district clients

The Guardian: 18.12.06

Drug dealers plying heroin in Ipswich were given a temporary amnesty yesterday by detectives hunting the serial killer who has murdered five women working as prostitutes in the town.

The inquests on four of the young women are due to open today at Ipswich crown court, but as yet police have a cause of death for only two of the victims - Anneli Alderton, 24, who was strangled, and Paula Clennell, 24, who died of compression to the neck.

Senior police officers are looking at whether the killer knew the women, all of whom were addicts, through the drugs trade. The absence of any signs of a struggle on the women's bodies leads police to believe they may have been incapacitated, perhaps with a large dose of narcotics, before being killed.
Officers believe dealers who provided the women with heroin and crack cocaine on a regular basis could have vital information which would help narrow down the list of murder suspects. Police offered the amnesty yesterday in the hope that dealers would come forward.

"Clearly, dealing class-A drugs is a serious offence," Detective Chief Superintendent Stewart Gull said yesterday. "However, our priority remains finding the person responsible for the deaths of these five women. I am not interested in other offences at this time. No one has got anything to fear in coming forward and providing us with information."

Tania Nicol, 19, Gemma Adams, 25, Annette Nicholls, 29, and Anneli Alderton and Paula Clennell, both 24, were stripped naked before their bodies were dumped within 10 miles of each other. As sex workers the women knew each other and would have used a variety of dealers, according to police.

One former sex worker told the Guardian that she and her friends would use up to 10 drug dealers, most of whom came from Colchester, London and Liverpool. She said details of the dealers' numbers were on prostitutes' mobile phones.

So far none of the phones that belonged to the women has been found. But detectives have traced the mobile numbers of Ms Adams and Ms Nicholls and are using the cellphone footprint to piece together their final movements. Both phones are now off-network, which suggests they have been disabled or destroyed.

The other key part of the investigation is focusing on the women's clients. A specialist team of officers from the 500-strong inquiry is building a database of clients. The men come from all walks of life: they include the unemployed, as well as professionals with well-paid jobs and careers. All of these men were warned again by detectives yesterday to contact the police or face "a knock on the door".

Fearful the killer will strike again, the police seem to be building a database of sex workers to ensure they can be identified if necessary. A 16-year-old who works in the red light area said police asked her for details of any distinguishing marks on her body, including a tattoo or scar.

In the past 24 hours another 1,500 calls have been received from the public with information. More than 10,000 calls have been received since the start of last week.

Police yesterday revealed details of the clothing the women were wearing when last seen. But as yet, and despite 200 calls about discarded clothing in and near Ipswich, none of the clothes found matches the description of the items. This boosts the belief that the killer may have kept the women's clothes as a trophy.

The release of a CCTV image of Ms Alderton has provided police with more information about her movements seven days before she was discovered dead in woods at Nacton, south of Ipswich. She is seen checking herself in the reflection in a window of the 5.53pm train from Harwich to Colchester on Sunday December 3. Detectives said yesterday further CCTV footage and witness statements revealed she got off that train at about 6.15pm at Manningtree station. They believe she then caught the 6.43pm train to Ipswich and could have gone to the red light area.

Last night police boarded the 5.53pm train to talk to passengers who might have seen Ms Alderton on board two weeks ago. Officers were also at Manningtree, Dovercourt and Ipswich stations last night in an attempt to piece together her movements.

Addiction that drove victims to life on the street

A desperate craving for heroin or crack drove all five victims to sell sex, reports Esther Addley

The Guardian : 16.12.06

Stacey Rolfe is resolved to remember the good times with her friend Netty, when she lived across the road from her and they would have waterfights in the garden with her daughter and her friend's little boy. Or the times when they were at beauty college together, and Netty would lend Stacey clothes and do her eyebrows and makeup before they all went clubbing in Ipswich town centre. Not the bare, sorry facts of an almost unrecognisable friend, reduced to climbing into strangers' cars in a desperate attempt to buy heroin.
"I just keep thinking why, why it all happened," she says. "She didn't need to do that. She was so lovely. She didn't need to do that."

Annette Nicholls - Netty to those who loved her - was yesterday confirmed as the last of the five women whose bodies have been dumped in the past six weeks in the countryside around Ipswich. But while police look for the murderer, for the families and friends of the five women, almost as pressing a question this week has been that terrible why. Why five young girls, remembered again and again by schoolfriends, siblings and parents as lively and loving young people, grew up to become sex workers, some of them homeless, vulnerable to a monstrous killer.

The crude answer to that question is what Tania Nicol's grieving parents yesterday called the "secret world" of drugs. All five of the women were addicted to drugs, mostly heroin, though Anneli Alderton is reported to have avoided opiates in favour of crack cocaine. Netty Nicholls, by the end, was so desperate for heroin that even her fellow sex workers disapproved of the lengths she would go to in order to get it.

Two days before she was last seen, she stole a phone from a customer and sold it for £20 to a dealer. On one occasion she agreed to join Paula Clennell, another of the murdered women, in "doing the double" with a client whom Ms Clennell had robbed to buy drugs in an attempt to placate him. Her friend Suzanne, another sex worker, had fallen out with her shortly before her death because she offered to sleep with Suzanne's boyfriend if he would just give her heroin. She had a "sugar daddy", says one of the women, and sometimes would stay with him. At other times she would have nowhere to sleep at night.

It was a simple question of survival, says Brian Tobin, manager of Iceni, an independent drugs treatment centre in Ipswich. Like others working in drugs services in the town, he wants to respect the women's privacy after their deaths and prefers not to say if any of the five had used the centre's services. But while they treat 60 people at any one time, and between 20 and 30 women each year working in the sex industry, including escorts and parlour workers, only five or six street workers would come for treatment in any one year.

"They are tremendously difficult people to connect with, just because of the desperation of their circumstances," he says. "Men can commit the physical crimes, burglary for instance, if they are desperate for money. But with these women, if they have sunk this low, all they have left is their bodies. People have got to understand the potency of addiction."

Ipswich has had sex workers for decades, says Mr Tobin, and they have always used drugs in some form. The difference in the past three to five years is that dealers from London and other big cities have come to regard small, rural market towns as their next big opportunity. Ipswich is the second cheapest place in the country to buy crack, at £20 for a rock, according to the national drugs charity Drugscope. Heroin is £20 a bag. A 10ml dose of methadone, sold on by someone supposedly withdrawing but apparently still desperate for heroin, costs £1. In September the charity identified a rise in the town of "speedballing" - mixing crack and heroin together before injecting. Since the effects of crack wear off quickly, users find themselves injecting more often, and in greater amounts.

Ten or 15 years ago the people he saw with serious drugs addictions were 40 or 42, Mr Tobin says. Today they have terrible problems by their 20s. "For some I would say the average life, once you're a heavy heroin user, is about five years. Death isn't rock bottom for most of our clients. I have seen the desolation and the lack of hope. There's no life left in some of these girls."

Since drug-using sex workers started being murdered, Ipswich's drugs services have begun to fast-track those who want treatment; instead of having to wait up to three weeks to get a methadone prescription, those who want one can now get it within a day.

But, says Harry Shapiro, editor of Druglink magazine, helping women like these out of heroin addiction is much more complex than simply getting them on a "script". "It's not life-threatening to withdraw from heroin, but for people who have little or no support, it's something many of them cannot face trying to go through. The problems are what happens afterwards."

Sex workers can access sexual health services, drug addicts can get drug treatment, homeless people can find hostel accommodation. But if you have all three problems, and especially if you throw mental health issues into the mix, your problems can quickly appear too complex to manage. Most women's hostels, for instance, will not accept drug users. Addicts who are verbally or physically abusive to their doctors can find themselves barred from the surgeries and thus denied medical treatment.

"The system breaks down when you have people with these kinds of problems together," says Mr Shapiro. In Ipswich, a survey two years ago found that more than half the street sex workers were homeless, 93% were heroin users, 82% used crack. Of 21 women with children, only three had not lost them to the care system or placed them with families. More than half were being treated for depression. Some of the murdered women took part in the survey.

Neither Annette Nicholls's large, close-knit family, her many friends, nor the women with whom she worked will ever really know how she found herself in the terrible position she did before her death. Her cousin Tanya has described the change in Annette as "like flicking a switch". Sue Hindle, who knew her from when their children were at nursery together, noticed when she saw her a few months ago that she had lost a lot of weight. Her uncle, David Nicholls, blames an old boyfriend who, he says, introduced her to heroin before he was jailed a couple of years ago.

Adrian Carpenter, another old friend, last saw her a couple of months ago when she called round at his house. "She had been a really stunning woman. When she knocked at the door I said, 'Is that the same woman?'

What did he think had happened? "I didn't want to think about it."

These bilious outpourings

We do victims of murder a disservice when we appropriate their deaths to prop up our prejudices

The Guardian : 16.12.06

So who is responsible for the murders of the five young women in Suffolk? In the Daily Mail, AN Wilson suggests that Kate Moss, Peter Doherty and Mick Jagger should end up in the dock beside the murderer. They "all have the blood of these young women on their hands," Wilson writes, because they are associated with the glamourisation of drugs. Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express believes "politically correct indifference" to drugs and prostitution has created a climate that has led to their deaths. Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph blames the "cadre of liberal opinion formers" who have made drugs acceptable and thus helped to enslave the unfortunate "tarts" on the street.

In 1949, Britain was transfixed by the arrest and trial of John George Haigh for five murders which were also carried out with sinister brutality. He claimed to have taken his victims' blood from their jugular veins before dissolving them in acid. Three years earlier, the country was equally fascinated by the case of Neville Heath, who killed and mutilated women in unspeakable ways. Every night of the week in London, if you are so inclined, you can go on a Jack the Ripper tour of the part of the East End where he carried out his own murders in 1888. "For the ladies, it's a great night out," says one of the many competing "ripper" tour companies on their flyers.
All of these killings took place long before drugs were an issue. And cadres of liberal opinion formers were a big feature neither of Victorian society nor of the immediate post-war era. Vulnerable and desperate young women have been on the streets of Britain since there were streets. Vicious and sadistic men have been killing and mutilating women since there were men and women.

Simon Heffer says that most prostitutes are now enslaved by drugs: "Ask any policeman and they will tell you it is true." If you were also to ask said policeman - and any policewoman, as they do, amazingly, now exist - they will tell you also that what really fuels violence in the Britain of today is alcohol.

Some boring statistics: alcohol is involved in 48% of all crimes of violence (drugs in 18%), in 60% of attacks on strangers (14% drugs) and 53% of all domestic violence (11% drugs.) So should journalists who patronise off-licences, who serve their dinner guests wine, or who drink too much beer at cricket matches be up in the dock alongside every violent mugger and wife-beater? Do we all have blood on our hands?

When Fred and Rosemary West were finally arrested in 1994 for the murders of more than a dozen young women, there were similar charges made against a liberal and permissive society. Yet the Wests were just the sort of people to win the stamp of approval from the conservative commentariat: they were a married couple with a large family, Fred was in work, and neither drugs nor cadres of liberal opinion formers played much of a part in their world at 25 Cromwell Street.

This week has seen the conclusion of an inquiry into another tragic death of a young vulnerable women in which accusations, many of them absurd, have been made, not least by one of the newspapers listed above. Pointing fingers is a dangerous game. We can argue about what the best way is to deal with drugs and with prostitution, although both debates have been largely sterile recently, but assigning blame should be a complex procedure.

We do not know the man, or men, who is, or are, carrying out these murders in Suffolk. We do not know what motivates or drives them. We do not know if they are driven into a frenzy by reading regular outpourings of bile about permissiveness in some of our daily newspapers, or by constantly seeing pictures of famous drug-takers in those publications. And Moss and Doherty didn't ask their "friends" to rat on them to the press.

When the perpetrator is finally caught, we can hope to learn some lessons, but one lesson that need not wait for it is that, very sadly, there are murderous people at large now, as there were in the last century and the century before. And we do a disservice to the victims by trying to drag them from the murder scene to display them casually as exhibits for our personal moral prejudices.

Harm caused by sex worker stereotypes

The Guardian: 16.12.06

The murders of sex workers in Ipswich (Report, December 12) have led to the repetition of stereotypes that dehumanise women in the industry and make them more vulnerable. There is no evidence that 90% of UK sex workers are addicted to heroin and/or crack, or that 45% were abused as children. These data are attributed to the Home Office consultation exercise, Paying the Price (2004), but we have heard nothing about the many responses that refuted these stereotypes in detail. Our research in London followed sex workers from the mid-1980s to 2000. We have shown that:

Drug use is widespread and problem drug use is associated with multiply disadvantaged women. Injecting drug use was uncommon in our studies (for example, 7% of women attending our project from 1998-2002 reported ever injecting drugs) and crack use declined towards the end of the 1990s. Alcohol use, however, is a condition of work in some sectors such as clubs and "addiction" has become more common.

Violence is found throughout the industry. In our study, two women were murdered, and both worked indoors. Research participants described assaults across all sectors of the industry.

British policy makes sex workers vulnerable, outdoors and indoors. In the last 10 years these policies have become more punitive through the use of Asbos, street "cleaning" purges, fines, imprisonment and deportation. We endorse calls for decriminalisation and amnesty from those who organise and work closely with prostitutes. These will be key measures towards stopping the violence.

The most significant health problems reported in our studies related to stigma and criminalisation. Reports in the media this week about drug-abused victims from broken families forced to expose themselves to madmen on the streets will simply exacerbate their problems.
Sophie Day
Goldsmiths College, London
Helen Ward
Imperial College London

In the overall scheme of things, the MEP Sarah Ludford (Letters, December 15) is doubtless correct that the "principal identity" of the Ipswich murder victims is as women rather than as prostitutes. In the context of the murders, however, the fact of their occupation must be of paramount importance because the perpetrator of these crimes has chosen to target prostitutes rather than women in general. The same would apply if the victims were female accountants, female shop assistants, or even female MEPs.
David Montrose
Blythe Bridge, Staffordshire

Sarah Ludford finds it disturbing that the Ipswich murder victims were identified as prostitutes: "Their principal identity is surely as women." We haven't quite got there yet, have we? Their - and our - principal identity is human being.
Si Butler
Horsham, West Sussex

Ipswich prostitutes are paid to stay off streets

· Charity provides money to keep women safe
· Police investigate whether killer drugged victims first

The Guardian: 15.12.06

Prostitutes in Ipswich are being given money by police and drug workers to stop them risking their lives by touting for business on the streets, it emerged yesterday.

As officers continue to hunt for a serial killer feared to have murdered five women, it was revealed that women who work in the red light area of the Suffolk town are receiving cash handouts.

Detective Chief Superintendent Stewart Gull urged prostitutes to stay off the streets, saying: "It's not safe to engage a client or punter at this time."

He would not say how much money the 30 to 40 women who work in Ipswich were being given, but added that because of the "financial support" there was "no reason to go with clients".

The money has been handed over by an unnamed charity to the multi-agency group, including police, which oversees community safety in Suffolk. Drug workers are also making sure prostitutes are receiving all the money they need. Julia Stephens, of Suffolk County Council, said the money was being used by the women to pay bills or meet loans repayments.

Police are considering the possibility that the women may have been incapacitated before they were murdered, possibly by being drugged. One line of inquiry will be to focus on the drug dealers they regularly used. Officers confirmed that toxicology tests were being conducted.

Mr Gull warned there was a chance that the killer could be forced into other areas by the massive manhunt taking place. He said neighbouring forces were taking extra precautions to make sure prostitutes working in cities such as Norwich and Cambridge were protected.

Questioned about the progress of the inquiry, detectives said they had made no arrests, executed no search warrants and seized no vehicles. They dismissed the suggestion that the killer or killers may have been taunting the police by continuing to target women in the midst of a huge manhunt.

But Mr Gull, who is overseeing the operation, said it was possible that the killer, who removed the women's clothes before dumping their bodies, might be keeping their clothes as a trophy.

Police denied some media claims that the victims' body hair had been shaved, a detail which had appeared to link the killings with an unsolved murder in East Anglia more than a decade ago.

Police have now established a cause of death for one of the two women, Paula Clennell, 24, whose bodies were found near Levington, east of Ipswich town centre, on Tuesday. She died as a result of "compression to the neck". Detectives also revealed they had learned that Ms Clennell was seen working on the streets in Ipswich in the early hours of Sunday morning - confirmation that the killer was confident enough to strike again even with dozens of officers already working on the deaths of three women whose bodies had been found by that time. Ms Clennell was seen at 12.20am in Handford Road, near where she lived.

The second body found near Levington, thought to be that of Annette Nicholls, 29, was removed from the scene yesterday and was being examined by a pathologist. Earlier this week it emerged that Anneli Alderton, 24, whose body was found on Sunday, had been asphyxiated. Toxicology tests are being carried out on the bodies of Gemma Adams, 25, and Tania Nicol, 19.

The investigators continued to receive a deluge of calls - 5,500 as of yesterday morning - and more than 1,000 emails. Many messages concerned the women's clothes and other personal belongings.

Officers are combing hours of CCTV footage and records of vehicles captured on number plate recognition systems. They are also examining phone records to try to find out who the women spoke to in the weeks before their deaths and to attempt to pinpoint their movements.

Police would like to speak to a woman who claimed she had seen Ms Alderton speaking to a "chubby-faced man with spectacles" driving a blue BMW, although the driver of the vehicle has been interviewed by police.

Sex workers forced into the shadows

The Guardian: 14.12.06

In 1987, I developed one of the first outreach projects in Britain aimed at reducing drug-related harm and preventing the spread of HIV infection among Liverpool's street sex workers. In the time I worked with these women, I got to know them well, I also got to know many of their families, friends and partners.
Sadly, since this time, nothing has changed. The murders of the women in Ipswich (Report, December 12) have once again highlighted the vulnerability of women who become involved in the street sex trade to feed their drug habits. It is a sad testament to society that women are still forced to sell their bodies in order to buy drugs, which even for a short time helps them escape the tragedy that is their lives.

First and foremost those that have been murdered are women - they are somebody's daughter, mother, sister. The insensitivity of the media in the way they have reported these heinous crimes with the continuous use of language like "prostitutes" and "vice girls", is a further violation to their memories.
Draconian policing of the problem of street sex work only drives such women further into the shadows. Yes, the law is the law; but when laws endanger some of the most vulnerable women in our society, then they are clearly at odds with humanity and wrong. Making women work longer hours to pay fines, hide in the shadows while trying to work undetected or serving ASBOs on them to prevent them from working make the laws and society complicit in the murders of these women.

These women do not have a voice; they remain invisible until their names become front-page headlines, their bodies dumped in a river, a field, the side of a road, like chip paper or an old tin can. Society makes them feel worthless, society tells them it is true.

My heartfelt sympathy goes to the families and friends of the murdered women, but my thoughts are also with those who are still forced to stand on the streets, trying to hustle the money for a bag or a rock. They have no choice. There is no pleasure in their drug use, there is no pleasure in standing on a street corner because you don't want to rob an old lady or burgle a house. All over Britain street sex workers remain unprotected, vulnerable and scared. How many more women must die?
Lyn Matthews
Liverpool

The recent spate of murders in and around Ipswich adds weight to the argument that heroin addicts should be able to get their fix on the NHS. Had the addicted women in Ipswich been able to get their fix for £6 a day, they wouldn't have had to prostitute themselves. It is also one of the cheapest drugs available in the world. If it was available on prescription, the profits of the dealers would collapse, and fewer women would be forced into the sex industry.
Pete Gay
Bristol

This is no life for anyone

For women like me, prostitution is about a lot more than drugs, and getting out isn't easy

Yasmin Jackson

The Guardian: 14.12.06

I've been selling sex since I was 18 and I'm 41 now. I ran away from home when I was 14 because I was terrified my mum was going to put me in care, and ended up living with fairground people for three years. Like so many girls in my situation, I drifted to London. Having no skills, I ended up working in a hostess bar, then moved down the prostitution food chain and worked for an escort agency.
By the time I was in my early 20s, I was working on the streets - and have worked there ever since. I didn'tstart using heroin straight away, but I fell in with a bad crowd and they introduced me to it. Later, when crack exploded on to the scene, I began using that too.

Crack has brought about a completely different way of working on the streets. Most of the girls I know don't use more than £20 of heroin a day, but they can use up to £200 of crack in 24-hours. Funding a heroin habit is manageable, but with crack the craving is so strong there's no limit on what you can smoke. So girls need to do a lot of punters to pay for their drugs.

All of us are terrified that the killer of the Ipswich women will move to our area, and a lot of us are only doing regular punters who have our phone numbers. But the reality is that if women need money for drugs, and regular customers don't get in touch, they'll go out there anyway.

I've cut down on my crack and heroin use and so am going out on the streets less frequently. But for those of us with habits, there is a sort of independence to being able to step out on the street at any time and earn enough money to buy the next rock.

A bit less hypocrisy might help too. Thousands of women on the streets service an average of 30 punters a week. Wives, mothers and sisters all say that none of their loved ones would pay for sex, but these men are coming from somewhere.

The attitude of the police makes this work so much more dangerous for us. At the moment, in the area where I work, the police have got a purge on street prostitution. The place the women in my area usually work is all cameraed up so we feel safe there - but when the police move us on, it means that we take more risks.

Because of the awful murders in Ipswich, attention has turned to the problem of women who work on the streets. The vast majority are drug users, and many use heroin and crack. Whether women start on the drugs first and then go on to the streets to pay for their habit, or start working and then turn to the drugs to numb themselves from the awful nature of this work, the end result is the same.

Some suggest that if heroin was more easily available on prescription women would be more able to leave the streets. That might work for some, but I think that many would sell their prescription on the streets to buy crack instead. Many of us are emotionally damaged, and counselling might help. However, some women don't want to face their problems and the pain in their lives - and that's why they turn to drugs in the first place.

I've never met a woman yet who has liked working on the streets, but getting out isn't easy - whatever support services are made available. I've only ever known three women who've made it out. The rest of us are either stuck on the streets, in prison, or in a coffin.

It's not just about having a drug problem. We have difficulties that can't be overcome overnight. Many women have lost their children because of their lifestyle and are bereaved. Counselling, drug programmes, housing and job opportunities may help some of us. I really hope I'll be one of them. I've been doing this work for 23 years now, and it's no life. The author is a street sex worker in south London.

· Yasmin Jackson is a pseudonym

The Ipswich killings have exposed attitudes to prostitutes that haven't progressed in centuries

Catherine Bennett
14.12.06: The Guardian

As well as an estimated 80,000 prostitutes, this country has a surprisingly large number of shadowy individuals whose profession is described in a variety of ways, from the colloquial "real-life Cracker", to the flexible "reader in personality", more formal "criminal psychologist" and catch-all "profiler" or "leading criminologist". Between lurid criminal events, little may be heard from these individuals, as they ply their trade in obscure corners of the semi-academic world. Indeed, in the absence of eye-catching crimes, some of these experts on the deviant mind may struggle to survive, diversifying into comments on football and celebrity, stress and compulsive shopping.

In recent days, however, many of these men have been restored to prominence and prosperity by the murders in Suffolk. It has become a media convention that the most atrocious crimes should not just be reported, but analysed by scholarly experts. Once a new perpetrator had come to light, it was, for example, only a matter of time before the Daily Mail's consultant, Colin Wilson ("leading criminologist"), came up with a clinical assessment: "he probably used local knowledge to conceal the bodies before dumping two of them in a stream". Such has been the demand for skilled, academic input that the Daily Telegraph was forced to send out for a contribution from Dr Joseph Diaz, of Fayetteville State University, who announced, by way of credentials, that he had "witnessed executions". "The first thing that struck me about this crime is the frequency with which the victims are being found," he noted. This point was also stressed in the Sun by Dr Glenn Wilson, of the University of London ("The killer seems to have embarked on a rampage") and by David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of Central England (conclusion: "This is a man who is now capable of anything").
Occasionally described as "the real Cracker", Professor David Canter is probably the most celebrated of these working men and is surely the most prolific, contributing not only to the News of the World, where he was appointed resident "crime expert", but to more scholarly tabloids such as the Times. In the first of two commentaries on the Suffolk case he stressed that investigative psychologists now prefer to be called "behavioural investigative analysts". As for the killer, Canter took the prevailing, prostitute-mad line. "Crimes like these grow out of a festering anger that is aggravated by a distorted view of women as either paragons or whores . . . even within our own society there are men who harbour the same confused perspective." How true. On the day that Canter's article appeared, one of our most prolific behavioural investigative analyst colleagues, Dr Michael Berry, of Manchester Metropolitan University, shared insights with Radio 4's PM programme. "I think quite clearly this guy has been targeting prostitutes rather than women", he said, "and I think at the moment he'll carry on killing prostitutes. He's got something against them".

If Berry's guess is correct (and the murderer is not just picking on the only women who will get into his vehicle), then perhaps there is, for once, a chance for him, and for like-minded members of the commentating community to get inside the mind of the murderer. Leave aside the festering anger and it seems they may share some of the perpetrator's supposed feelings about prostitutes, vis-a-vis women. In the case of the police, there may even be some common language.

Although detectives are unlikely, these days, to make regrettable comments about "innocent women", they are still happy to use the kerbcrawly, Punternet-approved term "working girls" to describe the Ipswich women. Is this usual practice? You do not hear them pubicly allude to "matey", say, or to "toerags", where other offenders are concerned.

Thus encouraged, the media have followed suit. Every-where in the past week, reporters referred to "working girls" - that is, when they were not describing the women as simply "girls" or "vice girls" or "hookers", as in the Mirror's "Hooker No 2 Found Dead", or "tarts", courtesy of the Telegraph's Simon Heffer.

Elsewhere, less festering, but still pointed, distinctions have repeatedly been drawn, between the state of these ruined, "destroyed", "pockmarked" losers, these specialists, in case you could forget, in "selling sex" and that of the more wholesome - and, you infer, more mournable - women they might have been. Curiously, for these women with no careers, the most significant thing about them is thought to be their careers. You would think they were Nicola Horlick, not prostitutes. But that they were prostitutes cannot be said often enough.

Only in the last couple of days was it revealed that the prostitutes left behind not just prostitute-shaped spaces, but bereaved children and friends, siblings and parents. One dead prostitute, it was mournfully pointed out, is survived by a sister "living a normal life", ie, not a prostitute.

The Telegraph instructed readers to care - even if the victims had carelessly "fallen into a world of vice". Meanwhile, the British media tumbled, en masse, into Madame Tussauds. The killer was, naturally, a "Ripper". Forget the details: centuries-old, penny-dreadful tradition holds that this is what serial prostitute-killers are called.

While it would be idle to expect the slaughter of a chaotic drug addict to be attended by the same sort lavish press obsequies as the destruction of a promising lawyer or a devout young matron, the murders of - as the Mirror would put it - Hookers Nos 1-5 has exposed attitudes towards prostitutes which seem, in some cases, scarcely to have progressed since they were stalked by Gladstone. We can only hope that, just as prostitutes are said to differ from women, a similar gulf exists between those who have been lost to behavioural investigative analysis (amateur and professional) and people.

'I've never done anything for less than £15. You can get a bag of heroin for £15'

A former sex worker who knew the murdered women talks to Esther Addley

The Guardian : 14.12.06

It was only the fact that she was abused as a child, Jackie says, that ever enabled her to go through with the sex. She hated the sex, she says, really hated it. "But I was abused when I was a kid, and when you have been abused by a bloke you just learn to turn yourself off. When you come out on the game you turn your feelings off."
Most of the women working on the streets of Ipswich have been abused, she says, and they all feel the same. "Everyone has the same past. I can't name one girl who likes the job."

A heroin habit also helps. "Heroin stops you feeling, it really does. If you want to cry, you just can't cry. The feelings are just not there. I know. And when your feelings are suppressed, that's when you come out to work."
Jackie was a street sex worker in Ipswich, on and off, for three years until a few months ago, and knew all of the women who are known or believed to have been murdered except Tania Nicol.

Most of the time, she says, she would come out every night. A good night would mean she'd take home between £40 and £80, representing two punters wanting full sex and paying full price. On a bad night there would be between 15 and 20 women working, and the customers were scarce or, worse, willing to exploit the women's desperation.

"The refugees - I shouldn't say this - but the refugees were the worst. They would offer you £5. Especially at this time of year, when it's freezing and the men know you need the money. But I've never done anything for less than £15. You can get a bag [of heroin] for £15."

Jackie, 34, doesn't use heroin any more - or at least not very often - and she's no longer working the streets. In March a man with whom she was living and who, she says, kicked her out every time she went to work, finally locked her out. "I thought, to hell with that, I'm worth more than that." That moment coincided with getting a methadone prescription from drugs services allowing her to reduce her habit, and gradually she stopped working. "I was determined not to go out again. But it was hard, it really was."

Jackie agreed to talk to the Guardian yesterday on Portman Road, the boulevard alongside Ipswich Town's football ground. Though one former cruising street was blocked off some years ago, and new, shiny glass buildings - among them the new homes of the borough council and Ipswich crown court - have sprung up on former wasteland, these streets have remained the sex workers' terrain, at least until the murders terrified many into staying away.

Like most of the women who have worked here, Jackie knew a number of the dead and missing women well.

Annette Nicholls's last official sighting was last Tuesday, but Jackie says that on Thursday or Friday, she can't remember which, Ms Nicholls knocked at her flat and shouted through the letter box. Because her partner was asleep she ignored her. "I feel really terrible about that. It's preyed on my mind ever since." Ms Nicholls, as far as Jackie knew, was homeless. So what did she do? "I think she would go home with the punters."

Paula Clennell was last seen on Sunday evening, and Jackie says she saw her the day before. In the summer, Jackie found a keyring belonging to Ms Clennell, which had pictures of her three daughters on it, all of whom had been taken into care. She returned it after bumping into her a few weeks later. Anneli Alderton, meanwhile, became a friend in prison a couple of years ago. Jackie last saw her a couple of weeks ago, dressed in white boots and hotpants and clearly heading out to work. As for Gemma Adams: "She was one of the good ones. Kept herself to herself, didn't really cause the punters trouble."

She doesn't like to criticise them, Jackie says, but Ms Clennell and Ms Nicholls occasionally resorted to tactics some other women never would. "They used to rob the punters, and that just gives us a bad name." Last Tuesday, she says, the day on which she was last officially seen, Ms Nicholls had stolen a customer's phone and sold it for "gear".

Jackie discovered heroin quite late, aged 28, after the father of her third child introduced her to the drug. "I had a three-bedroomed house, a front garden, two boys and a girl, everything I needed in life. As soon as I got into that life everything got taken off me."

Her parents, discovering she was on heroin, persuaded her to come to Ipswich, where they live, from Sunderland. Soon, however, she was living in a women's hostel, then, on and off, with a partner; at one point she lived in a tent in a cemetery. She lives with a new partner, but her two teenage sons are in foster care, her daughter has been adopted.

Recently, a newspaper report of an arrest for shoplifting called her a prostitute, a word she loathes. "We call ourselves 'working girls'. When you say 'prostitute' it's a dirty word." Neither of her parents have had any contact since. "They haven't even texted," she says.

So what does she hope for the future? "I hope to not go back to that way." All the same, she says she feels guilty. "I don't know why, it's just that the feeling's there. That's what I keep saying to my partner. I could have been out still working and it could have been me."

Tolerance zones plan in tatters

The Guardian: 14.12.06

Two years ago the Home Office was preparing for an overhaul of the laws on prostitution for the first time in 50 years and it looked as though it was going to sanction red-light "toleration" zones in England and Wales.
A wholesale Home Office review of law in this area, Paying the Price, published in July 2004 estimated that there were 80,000 people working in the sex industry in Britain, with 95% of the women involved dependent on crack or heroin. It described the London market as "saturated".

It was enough to convince the then home secretary, David Blunkett, that it was time to let local authorities decide for themselves whether to allow legal red-light areas to be set up. At the same time a system of licensing sex workers and regular health checks was to be introduced. Cities and towns, including Liverpool and Ipswich, were pressing to be allowed to go down this road.

But two home secretaries later and reforms are in tatters. The only change likely in the imminent criminal justice bill is a scheme to replace the "ineffective" fine for soliciting with a new "intervention penalty" designed to ensure sex workers get help with drug problems as part of rehabilitation.

The move towards red-light zones was ruled out in January by Charles Clarke and his minister, Fiona Mactaggart, saying they could not turn a blind eye to a problem that caused misery to people living in or near red-light areas.

Instead the Paying the Price proposals produced widespread support for the idea of changing the law so that two or more women could work together without the premises being classed a brothel. This proposal was intended to help women protect themselves and make off-street prostitution safer. But the Home Office acknowledged that the current law on brothels encouraged women to work alone.

Home Office ministers said they supported the idea of these minibrothels and it was widely backed even by those who did not wish to see the wider decriminalisation of prostitution. Ms Mactaggart also wanted to scrap the legal terminology of being a "common prostitute" arguing it is offensive and outdated.

But when asked yesterday what had happened to these proposals both Downing Street and the Home Office gave no hope of action. Instead, in the face of a tabloid campaign of opposition both stressed that any question of introducing "managed zones" had been ruled out and said a new round of consultations with residents' associations and other stakeholders was to be held over the "mini-brothels" plan before any action would be taken.

When the Liberal Democrats' leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, yesterday challenged Mr Blair at prime minister's questions to set up a new wholesale review to ensure the safety of sex workers, he made clear he would "learn the lessons" but would only think about a more considered policy response to the Ipswich murders at a later date.

"This is a difficult issue. We're balancing different and conflicting needs," said a Downing Street spokesman.

A different death but the cause is the same
Daily Telegraph: 14.12.06

There has been a sixth murder in Ipswich in the past 10 days, but the killing has gone largely unnoticed.

It should not have done. The reason the young Londoner died in a shoot-out at the Zest nightclub on Saturday is believed to be the same reason why five young women took to working on the streets, leaving themselves exposed to a killer.

That reason was drugs. The bloody confrontation at the nightclub, which also left three people with gunshot wounds and one slashed with a knife, was suspected of being a clash between drugs gangs involved in a "turf war".

Although police insist that the drugs situation in Ipswich is no worse than in the bulk of rural towns in England, anecdotal evidence from locals suggests widespread problems in estates to the south and east.

All five of the serial killer's victims were addicted to either heroin or crack cocaine. They turned to prostitution to support their habit and, even last night, other young women addicts were plying their trade on the streets of Ipswich despite the all too obvious fact that it could end in death.

"What that shows really is that a lot of these women are in desperate —extremely desperate — situations and things like drug dependency and poverty are pushing women into this sort of activity," said Simon Aalders, of the Suffolk Drug Action Team which works with prostitutes in Ipswich.

Apart from in the town centre, where drugs such as ecstasy are as freely available as anywhere despite official efforts at a clampdown, pushers of hard drugs live in outlying estates already plagued by crime and anti-social behaviour.

It was here that several of the dead women first began experimenting with crack and then heroin. By then, they had the addiction that was to cost them their lives.

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