In the brothels in the West End of London, I came across a particularly poignant statistic. Whereas 10 or 15 years ago a rich man who wanted to take a cane to the back of a young prostitute would have had to pay £100 for each stroke, he can now do so for only a tenth of the price. It’s a matter of supply and demand: there is a market surplus of desperate young women.
This simple statistic is a clue not only to the material hardship of the young women – aggravated almost inevitably by the chronic abuse of crack cocaine and alcohol – but also to a more fundamental and less tangible result of the new poverty that has invaded Britain in the last 20 years.
The key point about poverty is that it is not just a question of having too little money in your pocket. That is only the beginning. What really matters is the damage which poverty inflicts on the 13 million men, women and children in this country who suffer it. I spent several years tracing human stories which reflected this: the physical damage which kills 115 people every day; the emotional damage which screams through the chaotic lives of street gangs and child prostitutes; the social damage in the epidemics of crime and drugs; and, finally, most significantly, a profound spiritual damage. Which is where the young women being beaten in brothels are so important.
There is a brazen loss of humanity in their lives. The men who beat them treat them merely as objects. The same is true of the people who run the brothels. (One of the pleasures of my work on this was to expose the most powerful figure behind this business, who turned out to be a little old lady in carpet slippers who had been peddling girls to the rich and perverted for four decades, protected by a bodyguard of bent cops.) What soon became clear, however, was that the young women on the receiving end of this exploitation treated themselves with the same cynical indifference.
In the many months I spent in ghettos and red-light areas and crack houses, this became the most striking single point – that people were being driven to treat themselves and each other as mere objects. It was there with the child burglars who target homes which have ramps or handlebars outside, because they know they will find the old and vulnerable inside them; with the two junkies who woke up to find their 15-year-old companion dead on the bed beside them and who reacted by fixing another needle and going back to sleep; with the group of homeless men who set themselves up as ‘taxmen’, extorting money from beggars in the West End of London; and, over and over again, with the boys and girls I found in almost every city in England, selling themselves assiduously to passing men as if their bodies were unwanted property to be risked and discarded at will.
It is not that they themselves are inherently bad or inhuman. That is simply the self-serving fiction of the rich. The truth profoundly is that poverty is bad for people. It brutalises them. It has produced a mutant society. And the final point about this, is that there is a kind of contagion about it.
How can the affluent step over the body in the street, ignore the beggar outside the opera, drive straight past the endless devastated housing estates unless they take their compassion and junk it? So they have done, and one government after another has endorsed them. Every time a government minister from any party stands up and declares war on the welfare state, every time some respected thinker jeers at the idea of equality, or contrives a case for stripping the poor of yet more benefits, they give a cloak of credibility to this hardness. So the mainstream society succumbs to a coarseness of values, a trivialisation of care. More than that, the poverty of their 13 million neighbours is a constant warning to the affluent of what can happen to those who fail, an invitation to work with more selfishness, a reason to care less about the unfortunate – to live by the morality of the brothel.
Nick Davies’ book Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain is published in paperback this week by Vintage, price £7.99.
