Words fail me

This awful article showcases just about everything that's wrong with the world. It describes a Police ban on officers accompanying immigration officials when they visit possibly illegal brothels. The ban follows the death of a brothel client during a 2007 raid.

The raid was being filmed for a reality TV show, and the client jumped to his death from a window to avoid being caught. I hate reality TV of this sort. At best, it's an exploitative freak show that mocks other people for our voyeuristic viewing pleasure. The fact that the Police allowed themselves to be involved in something so unethical reflects some pretty bad professional judgment. The legality of the raid is now being questioned.

Whatever we might feel about clients of prostitutes, most would surely agree that these men shouldn't be hounded to their deaths. And there's a very pragmatic reason why preserving privacy at brothels is important: if men fear being caught in the act at a brothel, they may go to street workers instead. As the deaths of Mellory Manning and others show, sex workers on the street are vulnerable to violence. We've got a societal responsibility to make sure sex workers' work conditions are safe - and encouraging the sex industry onto anonymous, unsupervised streets doesn't achieve that.

But the crowning 'glory' of this article would have to be the comment of former immigration minister Tuariki Delamere, who said that although he supported any action to remove people not allowed to be in the country, the Police had to follow the law. The sex workers which immigration officials were investigating during this disastrous raid were suspected human trafficking victims. It takes a stunning bit of pig-headedness to see flouted immigration laws, not the racialised degradation and enslavement of women, as the key injustice in this situation.