Five Daugh­ters (BBC 1, 25th, 26th, 27th April) told the stor­ies of Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alder­ton, Paula Clen­nell and Annette Nich­olas, who were murdered in Ipswich in 2006. It was based on testi­mony of those involved. The five women were sex work­ers (or ‘Vice Girls’ to read­ers of some news­pa­pers) work­ing on the streets to fund drug addic­tion. Teela Sanders (2005) shows how women work­ing in the indoor sex mar­ket aim to get a reg­u­lar cli­en­tele as a way to man­age risk, both the obvi­ous risk to per­sonal safely, but also the risk of not hav­ing any cus­tom­ers, and so not mak­ing any money. A punter’s appear­ance, age and eth­ni­city are used to indic­ate trust­wor­thi­ness, as is their com­pli­ance with instruc­tions (2005: 57–70). In Five Daugh­ters, once news of the first two murders is out, the women work­ing the streets whis­per to each other: reg­u­lars only. It makes sense. Less risk.

In the show cus­tom­ers (‘punters’) are shad­owy fig­ures: one walks into a café, later we see one of the sex work­ers being punched from inside a car. Steven Wright, the man even­tu­ally sen­tenced for all 5 murders is almost dis­em­bod­ied in the show; we see his car prowl­ing, then we see his hands on the wheel, and even­tu­ally his face, his body, his voice emerge. This rel­at­ive invis­ib­il­ity makes it easy not to con­sider who are the punters. If we did, we’d see that they are very ordin­ary men, they are men you know.

Steven Wright, convicted of murder. Photo: PA/Suffolk Police

The other punter who appears in Five Daugh­ters is Tom Steph­ens, the ini­tial sus­pect. He lurks with flowers at the edge of a police cor­don, later we see him driv­ing away with one of the women, hop­ing to pro­tect her from the unknown threat. The real Tom Steph­ens was inter­viewed by the Sunday Mirror:

Michael Duffy (inter­viewer from Sunday Mir­ror): You seem a smart, well-educated man. How is it that you can spend time with these people? How is it that you can find com­mon ground with them?

Tom Steph­ens: I’m sad and lonely. I made com­prom­ises on my mor­als to go down (to the red light area) the first time, so I sup­pose get­ting involved with them isn’t a huge leap.

Michael Duffy, Sunday Mir­ror, 17/12/2006

Duffy and Steph­ens con­spire to deny that punters play any part in the moral den­ig­ra­tion that they eas­ily ascribe to the pros­ti­tutes. For Duffy ‘these people’ are the inverse of smart and well-educated, they are abject. Steph­ens knows the red light dis­trict is a damned place, but it holds such an attrac­tion for him. In this way, neither recog­nises what cus­tom­ers con­trib­ute to the moral status of those who sell sex. In my research into Pun­ter­net, a web­site where men write cus­tomer ser­vice reviews of com­mer­cial sex, this is quite com­mon. Men speak of brothels as good when they are clean, safe and dis­creet and of pros­ti­tutes as good when they offer gifts bey­ond the formal con­tract. And they speak of each other as poten­tial harm­ers, who could dam­age ‘good’ girls if they don’t treat them right. It’s never them who cause harm.

Wac­quant says this sort of thing shouldn’t sur­prise us, it is “unex­cep­tional” to say we all live in a moral world (Wac­quant, 2002: 1472). Pub­lic dis­cus­sions of pros­ti­tu­tion tend to cir­cu­late a sterile debate between ‘free choice’ and ‘traf­ficked’ exploit­a­tion in a way which neg­ates the com­plex­ity of pros­ti­tu­tion by present­ing it primar­ily as a ques­tion of worker’s agency. Address­ing pros­ti­tu­tion is impossible without address­ing cus­tom­ers, and address­ing cus­tom­ers requires under­stand­ing of how they con­sti­tute the mar­ket as moral and nego­ti­ate their own roles and iden­tit­ies within that.

Ref­er­ences

  1. Sanders, T. (2005) Sex Work: A Risky Busi­ness. Cul­lomp­ton: Willan.
  2.  Wac­quant, L. (2002) ‘Scru­tin­iz­ing the street: poverty, mor­al­ity, and the pit­falls of urban eth­no­graphy’. Amer­ican Journal of Soci­ology, 107(6) 1468–1532.