14th June 2024

Dear CANDIDATE

If elected, will you speak up for the most marginalised women in Holborn and St Pancras?

I write as CEO of a small charity in the constituency of Holborn and St Pancras regarding your candidacy to be our next Member of Parliament. I want to ask what action you will take if elected on behalf of some of the most marginalised women in our area, including those affected by prostitution and sexual exploitation.

Women at the Well is a unique women-only support service based in the King’s Cross area for women whose lives are affected by prostitution, trafficking and related forms of sexual exploitation. For nearly two decades we have run a women-only drop-in centre where there is food, hot showers, laundry, clean clothes and an advice service – we would describe the services we offer as basic needs which all women should readily have access to. Another branch of our support service is to take referrals from external agencies and go out all over London to where women are rough sleeping or facing other risks. Our small team of advocacy and support workers provide dedicated one-to-one support with women, for as long as it takes, to help them tackle problems with housing, addictions, legacies of abuse in childhood, access to healthcare and much more. Last year there were more than 2,000 visits to our drop- in centre in King’s Cross, and our team supported more than 600 women with advice and casework. No statutory service delivers anything like what we offer. We are a unique part of the local community and civil society.

What we see in the lives of Holborn and St Pancras women - Our vantage point running this specialist service gives us strong insight into the lives of some of the most vulnerable women in our community and by listening to their voices we have a better understanding of the gaps which need to be filled to meet their needs. We work with women who are trafficked to London by organised criminal gangs who move them quickly around temporarily rented properties with alarming levels of threat and harm; women engaged in street prostitution in several London neighbourhoods, which can be high risk and usually involves extremely excluded women; women exploited through ‘sex for rent’ and ‘survival sex’ where sexual acts are ‘exchanged’ for basic material needs and safety; women experiencing the forced occupation (known as ‘cuckooing’) of their housing for exploitative purposes, and where sexual coercion often features; and women forced into begging, drug runs and shop-lifting for individuals and gangs who move them around. Our support workers tell us that there is a great need across the capital, for supported social housing. I am sure you would agree that secure housing is needed by all, universally. The women we support tell us that without the right support their housing can become another route into exploitation.

We hope that if elected you might use your power as a legislator and policy maker to tackle some of the injustices the women using our service face at a system level and for the long-term.

We hope you that if elected as our MP on 4 July you will:

• Support the renewal of the now longstanding national strategy on ending and preventing Violence Against Women & Girls, and maintain its specific recognition of the risks and harms of prostitution and the continuum with other forms of sexual exploitation. We will urge the next Government to consult with organisations like ours to map the ever- growing cluster of harmful sexual exploitation practices we have described above to inform this plan and the barriers to women exiting. We need to start bringing the prevention and protection lens, which is increasingly normalised in the approach to others forms of abuse, to prostitution and sexual exploitation.

• Ask questions about women’s needs during key public policy debates where this can be missing, eg health, housing, poverty and criminal justice. In any one week we see local women who cannot access women-only hostel space, women who cannot access mental health support that is women-only or which responds appropriately to the abuse they have experienced, and women who are problematised by criminal justice agencies for their present and historic criminal record, when they are also victims of crime who remain at high risk. It is beyond time that questions about women’s specific experiences and needs entered policy-making in all these areas and more.

• Push for a review of the law and policing approach to prostitution, trafficking and all forms of adult sexual exploitation. Given the scale and nature of the harm being committed, it is time to look at how we as a society approach these issues and whether we can live with the targeting and exploitation of particular groups of women around whom there seems to be impunity. We urge you to look in detail at the approach taken by France, which among other countries has changed its laws to criminalise those who try to ‘buy sex’ rather than those ‘selling’/soliciting. This legislation is proven to change public attitudes and create conditions where the “market” is of much less interest to traffickers. It has a strong emphasis on statutory exiting support services which are much needed to support some of the most marginalised women. We believe this model would make a huge difference to the women we support and to wider society.

• Support local charities to survive, thrive, innovate and serve their communities. Organisations like ours are critical to developing the knowledge and models of support needed for the provision of prostitution exiting support services which stand any chance of success. No part of state services provides anything similar, and neither are they trying to understand or develop exiting programmes. We have specialist expertise, we make an enormous difference to the hundreds of women we work with every year, but we are funded entirely from charitable and private sources. We hope you will speak up for the unique value and contribution of charities like ours to the community, and support policy which can help protect us and make us sustainable for the long-term.

Thank you for your attention to our letter during this busy election period. We didn’t want to miss the chance of communicating with you as our potential next MP at this critical opportunity. We hope you will recognise that all our work and our appeal to you is about the dignity and human rights of local women and of all women.

We would be very happy to welcome you, or your constituency support colleagues to visit our Kings Cross premises after the election and to hear more about what we do, and the lives of the women we work with, to help improve understanding of these complexities.

This is an open letter to candidates and we are sharing it, along with any replies we receive, on our website and with our partners. I repeat that you are always welcome to visit our service. Thank you for your attention to our questions.

Yours sincerely,

Sarah Green
CEO, Women at The Well
54-55 Birkenhead Street, Kings Cross, London, WC1H 8BB Tel 020 7520 1710
https://www.watw.org.uk/