{"id":28161,"date":"2019-01-21T15:56:18","date_gmt":"2019-01-21T15:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/?p=28161"},"modified":"2019-01-21T16:06:40","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T16:06:40","slug":"stamp-out-handsworths-prostitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/2019\/01\/21\/stamp-out-handsworths-prostitution\/","title":{"rendered":"Stamp out Handsworth\u2019s Prostitution"},"content":{"rendered":"

A community group is determined to stamp out Handsworth’s ’24\/7′ prostitution. The sex workers of Soho Road are selling their bodies in what has become an all-day, everyday problem.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is not them who should be ashamed, says Tariq Rashid – co-ordinator for Handsworth Community Action Group (HCAG).<\/p>\n

Some of the women and girls have turned to a life of prostitution because they have been raped, stabbed or worse, he says.<\/p>\n

And now working on Handsworth’s main drag, which sees thousands of commuters pass every day, they are reportedly ‘manhandled’, raped, robbed and forced into non-consensual gang sex.<\/p>\n

Those are just a couple of the horrific tales Tariq and his team of 30 volunteers have heard as they offer support to sex workers trapped in a ‘vicious circle’.<\/p>\n

“But it’s a 24\/7 thing, it used to be it would only be at night. Now, you see them in the day, during the night, and people see them in the morning.<\/p>\n

“A lot of them have got complicated lives and a lot of them are into drugs and need a fix. But when you talk to them, your heart bleeds. If you spoke to them, your heart would bleed too.<\/p>\n

“They’ve been stabbed, they’ve been raped and because of the world they’re into, they have no one to turn to.<\/p>\n

“They’ll use the drugs, when they run out, come out on the road, go to the dealers, buy the drugs then they’re out again in a vicious circle that never ends. That’s the sad thing to see.<\/p>\n

“It’s easy to label them, but who knows what their background is? Some of them have been in such harrowing situations that trying to get them off the drugs is a nightmare.<\/p>\n

“I don’t want them to move away from Handsworth because that’s not resolving the situation. We need to take them off the streets and into a normal life.”<\/p>\n

The group is in talks with outreach charities and homeless organisations to support.<\/p>\n

Since starting the community initiative and spending 290 hours patrolling Handsworth’s streets, the volunteers have seen dozens of kerb crawlers in the act with prostitutes.<\/p>\n

Part of Waverhill Park has become an area of drug and prostitution problem.<\/p>\n

Tariq added: “You’ve got families living on Holiday Road. Can you imagine young children walking through the park and finding all these things?<\/p>\n

“Imagine if your kid walked around and picked up something like that, what they could catch from the harmful substances left around.”<\/p>\n

The park has become a common meeting place for kerb crawlers and sex workers, other men reportedly lure the vulnerable women back to addresses – where a whole gang of them lay in wait.<\/p>\n

“Some of these people are using and abusing the girls, one guy will come out speak to a girl and take her back. And there’s about four, five guys waiting,” Mr Rashid added.<\/p>\n

And it isn’t just prostitution which has the ‘challenging’ inner city area gripped.<\/p>\n

Discarded knives, regular flytipping and drugs are just some of the separate issues the HCAG are battling.<\/p>\n

“Handsworth is a challenge, believe it or not,” explains Mr Rashid.<\/p>\n

“On the first day it just opened our eyes, we didn’t think the problem was that bad.<\/p>\n

“Within the first 20 minutes, we had police with us, someone came running to us, someone had discarded a knife, not a kitchen knife but a weapon.<\/p>\n

“Officers said if you guys hadn’t come out, we wouldn’t have patrolled this area. The knife was taken off the road.<\/p>\n

“We’ve done 290 hours in the last two months and over that time we’ve got 190 issues. They range from kerb crawling and flytipping to drugs and vulnerable people.”<\/p>\n

Tariq has pleaded with any residents who wish to make a difference in the community to come forward and volunteer.<\/p>\n

His vision to fix up the area includes some 100 volunteers – an addition of 70 to his current team.<\/p>\n

“If I had 100, I could run operations throughout the night, I could clear Handsworth within a month.<\/p>\n

“I could get everybody involved, make more complaints, make sure our streets are clean, the word would be spread faster, we could run more street watch operations.<\/p>\n

“We need more women too, we only have three ladies. We need more to come out with us and speak to the women.”<\/p>\n

If you would like to get involved in the HCAG, please contact Tariq Rashid on the Facebook group.<\/p>\n

In July, Insp Iftekhar Ahmed, in charge of Handsworth neighbourhood policing, said: \u201cWe\u2019re aware of the issue with prostitution in and around the Soho Road area, and our neighbourhood policing teams have taken a proactive approach to tackle it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been engaging with the women involved to educate and support them so that they can move away from that life.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re working closely with other agencies, such as the Soho Business Improvement District, to divert women away from prostitution, which can leave them vulnerable to robbery and sexual assault.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe recognise it leaves them vulnerable to robbery and sexual assault, and continue to work with them, while carrying out uniform and plain clothes patrols to tackle the issue.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A community group is determined to stamp out Handsworth’s ’24\/7′ prostitution. The sex workers of Soho Road are selling their bodies in what has become an all-day, everyday problem. It is not them who should be ashamed, says Tariq Rashid – co-ordinator for Handsworth Community Action Group (HCAG). Some of the women and girls have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28162,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,37,3,112],"tags":[1407,1868,994],"class_list":["post-28161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-local-news","category-news","category-top-stories","tag-handsworth","tag-handsworth-community-action-group","tag-soho-road"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}