Pimps have gone online with catastrophic consequences | Politics

PIMPS have gone online and made it as easy to “order a woman to exploit” as it is to order a takeaway, a former rugby international who is now campaigning for women’s rights in Westminster has warned.
Tonia Antoniazzi, who played international rugby for Wales, is fighting for a change in the law to stamp out “predatory pimp websites”.
The Labor MP has drawn support from around the world over the political divide. She wants to make it a criminal offense to “enable or profit from the prostitution of someone else, online or offline.”
She warned that laws “against sexual exploitation of adults are outdated and ineffective.” Pimps and traffickers, she added, have “moved online where they are free to advertise to their victims, making it as easy for sex buyers to order the exploitation of a woman as ordering a takeaway.”

Former Conservative MP Miriam Cates also urged change, saying: “We need to update sexual exploitation legislation to provide vital protection for vulnerable women and crack down on the enormous amount of sexual predation that exists online.”
Ms Antoniazzi wants paying for sex to be criminalised, alongside measures that “decriminalise victims of sexual exploitation”.
She said: “We know that sexual exploitation is fueled by demand. Men who pay to sexually exploit women make a choice, and that choice is influenced by a range of factors, a major one of which is the risk of criminal penalties.”
The Not for Sale campaign claims that “pimps and gamblers enjoy near impunity” because “convictions for exploiting people through prostitution have fallen sharply since 2010”. It claims that England and Wales are seen as “low-risk, high-value destinations for sex traffickers” due to a lack of “government action”.
Home Secretary Jess Phillips acknowledged that “adult services websites are now the main catalyst for human trafficking for sexual exploitation”.

She said the Online Safety Act means businesses must “put systems and processes in place to identify, assess and address these breaches”.
“We must ensure that law enforcement agencies use every tool they can to pursue perpetrators and that victims are supported to recover from this horrific abuse,” she added.
A further priority is to ensure that people who want to leave prostitution “have every opportunity to find routes”.
Last year, a cross-party inquiry by the Home Affairs Committee warned of the “huge scale of human trafficking for sexual exploitation” enabled by websites advertising prostitution. It condemned the “blatant facilitation of human trafficking” made possible by allowing individuals to “advertise multiple women for prostitution.”