Question for our English Brethren about Ipswich?

[Milo Christensen]

So just how may sex workers are there in Ipswich?

Apparently at some 117,000 souls, Ipswich and Lansing, Michigan are similar in size and I don't even know where I'd find a hooker in Lansing, there's some "gentlemen's clubs", but I'm not the right color to go to any of them. I'm sure there are some, but I've never seen any plying their trade on the street. This whole serial killer thing focused on sex workers leaves me wondering about what's going on with the sex trade in Britain. Not the view of the country that I grew up believing, anyway. Or maybe America is more hung up on sex than the rest of the world.

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

slightly fewer than heretofore.

[Milo Christensen]

Is ACB on holiday? He lives over that way, doesn't he?

[Katherine]

I don't even know where I'd find a hooker in Lansing, there's some "gentlemen's clubs", Oh good lord.:rolleyes:

[Milo Christensen]

What!? You got a problem with me not knowing how to find a hooker in Lansing?

[Katherine]

I'm just wondering what prompted this thread.:eek:

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

Kath;
http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article2070146.ece

Milo - That is indeed ACB's stomping ground - and was once mine - usually it is a fairly typical quiet(ish) English town - a sort of dormitory suburb of London.

This sort of stuff goes off now and again - not common but not unheard of either - maybe the police will catch the perpetrator - and maybe not.

[Meerkat]

Funny thing about the word "Ipswich" - the "w" is silent. So, if you've been to Ipswich and your lips itch, you have a problem. ;) :D

[Popeye]

i use ipswitch software , opening it i thought the thread was about ASCII mode data connection

[John Meachen]

In the absence of ACB,who lives just up the road from the town in question,I will try to offer a little information.Please bear in mind that being removed from the unpleasantness by 40 miles may mean that I lack a little local knowlege.The local tv and radio news broadcasts have focused very heavily on the sucession of murders.By any standards,to have so many streetwalkers killed and dumped in a few weeks is extraordinary.As has been said elsewhere,it happens from time to time to the odd individual in this line of work.The scale of this series of murders is causing the local police to mount an investigation which is without precedent in their history.The striking fact to emerge from the media interviews with the women still plying their trade is that they are working to support a drug habit,each and every one of them.It has been very sad to hear the families of the victims admit when interviewed that they had no idea of the factors that drove their daughters into a sordid trade which resulted in their deaths.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

(takes deep breath)

First, the incontrovertible facts. Ipswich has a population of around 140,000. It lacks the distinction of Norwich, having neither a Romanesque cathedral, nor a castle, nor a once-great shoemaking industry, nor a still-great motor car builder. It was the birthplace of Cardinal Wolsey, had, in the 1840's, the biggest wet dock in Europe, built, in WW2, a particuarly dreadful fighter aircraft, and, since WW2, has twice, under Alf Ramsey and Bobby Robson, produced a football team that astonished the nation by winning everything in sight, despite the small size of its home town. Architecturally, it is throroughly undistinguished. I cannot think of anywhere with quite so many bog standard semidetached houses and bog standard terraces.

I live in a nice, or twee, depending on your p.o.v., town of 11,000 nine miles northeast of the centre of Ipswich, which is grimly determined not to be sucked into it and become a mere dormitory suburb.

Until a couple of weeks ago, what I knew of the seamy side of Ipswich was more or less this:

1. There are a couple of huge "night clubs" attracting hordes of the Yoof of Today; these look like bad places to me - "no way is a child of mine going near one".

2. The residents of one small part of the town were regularly up in arms over the activities of street walkers and kerb crawlers; from time to time the Suffolk Constabulary took steps..

3. Not that many immigrants, as compared to the big cities. Certainly no racial tension that I ever heard of.

4. Some "rough" pubs; probably a drugs trade going on in them.

Now we find that five women have been murdered:

a 19 year old whom her parents' neighbours thought was very polite

a 25 year old from a rather comforably middle class background, who according to her parents took up with the wrong boyfriend when she was 15 and started on heroin at 17, but who had managed to get a qualification and a decent job in an insurance firm, before losing it two years ago

a 24 year old from Harwich, background not really clear but certainly not a happy story

another 24 year old from the North of England, who was interviewed on television after the first bodies were found but who said she had to go on working

a 29 year old single mother, who had qualified at the local college, was known as being extremely houseproud and who had been on the point of setting up her own business

The common thread being that all five were prostituting themselves on the streets to pay for heroin; some were supporting a boyfriend's habit as well.

We are all horrified. We find that there are maybe 20-30 such women, that the town has some "massage parlours" which certainly I never knew about... and obviously there is a serious drugs problem.

The local reaction seems to be pretty much this:

1. Support for our local police force.

2. Sympathy for the victims

3. Horror at what has been going on in our midst

4. I think, a dawning determination to do something about it.

[Meerkat]

An aside please: is what you call a "terrace" like one of our apartments/flats or is it more like a row house?

If, as I suspect, it's like an apartment, what distinguishes an apartment from a flat (aside from promoters)?

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

Terraced.
http://www.anglesey.info/Rhondda%20Terraced%20Houses.jpg

[Milo Christensen]

ACB: Thanks ever so very much for some local perspective. Not an extremely large number of sex workers, then. One media report had an interview with a women identified as "head of the sex workers collective", so I really had to wonder about how many prostitutes there were.

All the victims involved in illicit drugs, but you implied many residents didn't realize the extent of the drug problem.

[Meerkat]

Terraced.
http://www.anglesey.info/Rhondda%20Terraced%20Houses.jpgAh, Row houses or townhouses on this side of the pond. Ta! :)

[Wild Wassa]

Canberra, where I am is the sex capital of Australia ... it is all vey classy of course, there nothing that leaves a nasty taste in one's mouth.

The TV advertising would be very boring if the hookers, the brothels and the sex shops didn't advertise their main features each night. I find it offencive whencompanies like McDonalds, GM and Kellogs misslead the public and interupt the honest advertising.

It is pretty liberal here, I must admit.

Milo, you must become more visually awhere, get to know your community better... and to quote Borat, "In America, there are great job opportunities for all. For men, they can become firemen, policemen or accountants. For women, prostitutes."

I hope this helps.

warren.

[Meerkat]

Any major US city that doesn't have a red light district?

[Paul Pless]

Meerkat, They must be quite different than the red light districts in Europe.

[Stiletto]

there nothing that leaves a nasty taste in one's mouth.

Wouldnt that depend whether you were the buyer rather than the seller?;)

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

ACB: Thanks ever so very much for some local perspective. Not an extremely large number of sex workers, then. One media report had an interview with a women identified as "head of the sex workers collective", so I really had to wonder about how many prostitutes there were.

All the victims involved in illicit drugs, but you implied many residents didn't realize the extent of the drug problem.

Milo - the "head of the collective of prostitutes" is a "self-appointed" (do they vote?) extreme feminist politician on the national level; who has been grandstanding on the Ipswich horrors; not surprised people are confused.

I think most of us are horrfied by what has been going on. My personal "take" on it, which I think many may share, is that the opening, in the early 1990's (at least, I don't remember them before then) of very large "night clubs) in Ipswich has some hand in all this. We had a "drug related" murder by shooting in the biggest of them last weekend - first time that ever happened in Ipswich, but the news was drowned out by the other murders - and it turned out that all those involved came from London!

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

This raises an interesting question.
Where are the boundaries of "London"?

Is Chingford separate? Romford? - twenty years ago you could have argued that Chelmsford was really part of Greater London - in that almost all of the housing sales were to commuters.

Where are the boundaries now? Brighton, Swindon, Peterborough, Ipswich?...

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

In a rather depressing sense, the boundaries of "London" now extend halfway across Suffolk, in that people like me commute to London and in the sense that the "London underworld" evidently sells drugs in Ipswich. I was using the term in the more mudane sense that all those hit by bullets in the night club shooting came from Sarf Lundun, but you have a point.

[martin schulz]

sex worker ?

You mean prostitute or whore right?

It doesn't get better when we use nice words, does it?
So lets just cut out that rediculous use of minced oaths.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

With you all the way, Martin.

It is better that a young woman stops being a prostitute than that she carries on being one but is called something rather nicer.

[The Bigfella]

Ipswich has ..... the biggest wet dock in Europe,

:eek: :eek: We are talking about the sex trade, after all!



built, in WW2, a particuarly dreadful fighter aircraft,

More info please - which aircraft?


On the original question, good old Rupert's local press says the town has 30 sex workers.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

I was thinking of the Bouton Paul Defiant, a waste of a 700-odd Merlin engines and about as many aircrew lives, as it flew slowly and was almost impossible to bale out of, but on checking I find that more of it was made in Norwich.

I suppose Rupert's boys and girls have counted them all.:(

[The Bigfella]

Oh yes - the Defiant.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Well, a man has been arrested. 37 years old, lives round the corner from the best local chandlery, about two miles from where the last two bodies were found and works at my local big supermarket (which we try very hard not to shop at!)

[Milo Christensen]

The suspect in detention was giving interviews before he was arrested? He was talking about how he knew these girls? O.K. make yourself a person of interest in the largest manhunt in recent British history. Do you have the death penalty across the pond?

[Meerkat]

No death penalty. The Brits have a quaint notion, fairly recent AFAIK, that one must give evidence in police interviews that might be detrimental to one's case or be found guilty of a different offense if one does not (this is NOT the same as obstruction of justice!). ACB or the Newt can explain it better than I. I find it to be a most peculiar (and undemocratic) practice.

[Milo Christensen]

David: I meant gving interviews to the media.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Milo,

Parliament voted out the death penalty in the 1960's.

There has never been any doubt that most voters want it back, but I suspect that we will only get it back when the cost of keeping so many lifers inside becomes too much to be borne - though the reason will be dressed up a bit more.

This fellow's behaviour has certainly been odd - giving a "background interview to the BBC and an on the record one to the Sunday Mirror, but, whoever the killer was, he was well enough known to the last two victims for them to have trusted him sufficiently to get into his car, when they knew that two of their fellow prostitutes had been murdered. The last two bodies were dumped about two miles from the house that he was renting.

His time as a special constable (unpaid police volunteer) would have taught him something of forensics.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

David, I'm not sure that I follow your point.

There was a time, 30 years back, when the police were notoriously inclined to select a "target criminal", and adjust the evidence to fit, making extensive use of confessions ("verbals") of the "I dun it, guv. It's a fair cop, and I'm glad you caught me.." variety, but things have changed a very great deal and Chief Superintendent Gull appears to be one of the new breed of coppers who proceed by fitting the suspect to the evidence, not the evidence to the suspect.;)

[Meerkat]

Andrew; I recall some years ago the passage of a Brittish law to the effect that a suspect must give information that might be detrimental to his case, that it was an offense not to and that possibly the defendent could not later use information withheld from the police in his/her own defense. As I said, I'm not exactly clear on the details, but I was struck with how alien it was compared to our protections under the US Constitution.

It was not my intent to suggest that the police were measuring the suspect to fit the crime as it were.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Our (current) Police caution, given when a suspect is arrested, is:

"You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence."

You are correct; we don't have your Fifth (?) Amendment, but, as you see from the caution, we have something similar but a little different.

[Meerkat]

Thank you for the clarification, although an idea of how it works in practice would further clarify it for me.

Our equivelent is: "You have the right to remain silent but anything you say may be taken down and used as evidence against you in a court of law." There is, at least in theory, no onus on remaining silent*, nor would it be detrimental to a later defense. On the other hand, if you're a witness and withold material information that might later attract a charge of obstruiction of justice (aka: hindering a police investigation).

*"Taking the 5th" on the witness stand is often/usually taken as a tacit admission of guilt, but it's not supposed to be.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Let us suppose, for example, that the suspect says nothing to the Police about an alibi, and only mentions it in Court.

The prosecution will be entitled to point out that the alibi was not mentioned when the suspect was questioned, and may draw the inference that it is bogus and based on perjury.

You are right; this is a fairly recent change.

We have also just repealed the double jeopardy rule; an OJ Simpson would not be "safe" here.