As police search for a serial killer, yvonne roberts explains why women turn to prostitution |
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The Suffolk police are calling it "real-time crime". As they hunt for the killer, the tally of dead prostitutes found over the past 11 days has risen to five. A reward of £250,000 has been offered for information.
The danger to other prostitutes working in Ipswich could not be more clear and present. Yet even after the first dead girl, Gemma Adams, was found, young women were back on the streets. They included Paula Clennell, who gave an interview to a television journalist on December 5 about the chances she was taking – and then disappeared. Her naked body was one of the two found yesterday in countryside south of Ipswich.
Why take such a monumental risk? The answer lies in what propels women and teenage girls onto the streets to sell their bodies in the first place.
I began interviewing prostitutes in the late |
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| Paula Clennell gave an interview on December 5 about the risk she was taking. Her body was found yesterday |
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1970s, when the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, murdered 13 women, including eight street prostitutes, in the north of England.
Many of the women I met had been sexually abused as children and had been raised in children's homes. Some had been ejected from the family at 14 or 15, often kicked out by a mother who had a new partner. They had never had the chance to value themselves.
A pimp promised the love that had, so far, proved elusive – and then replaced it with violence if, once on the streets, the woman failed to make enough cash each night.
Ten years ago, I interviewed women working in the red-light district of Leeds, where another killer was at large. Some, in their early 20s, were dressed like schoolgirls in short socks. A number worked for themselves without a pimp but they were caught in the same cycle that brings prostitutes onto the streets of Ipswich now. They had children to raise and, often, a chronic drug problem, plus fines to pay 
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