Commercial Road was built at the beginning of the C19th to provide a direct link for traffic between the West India Docks and East India Docks to the City of London. Its history is as turbulent as that implies. And, as late as the 1960s, to venture there, even in broad daylight was, allegedly, to risk abduction into white slavery. My landlady claimed that she had told her own daughter that she would be disowned if she so much as set foot on its pavement.
It wasn’t entirely clear who would be doing the abducting, but this idea of respectable white girls at risk from marauding hordes of alien men is nothing new. In the 1920s it was the Chinese, in the late 1950s & early 1960s the News of the World was full of stories of Maltese running prostitution rackets in London; one of my friends told alarming stories of quite regularly being accosted by small groups of Cypriots (2 or 3 men) as she walked from the tube station to her student hostel in Bayswater; the point was, though, that they rapidly lost interest when they realised she was never going to fall for their blandishments.
The girls most at risk are those who can be called vulnerable or needy – girls anxious for love which they don’t get – or feel they do not get – from their family or peer groups. Such girls can come from any class or background, but the more affluent & educated are less likely to fall into the trap of being exploited in truly gruesome circumstances. These days, since I read her memoir, Elizabeth Jane Howard usually comes to my mind when thinking about this subject.
We are currently going through a moral panic about predatory men of (most likely) muslim & Pakistani origin who prey on young white girls, posing a problem for those who would like to keep race, religion & culture out of such discussions.
The most alarming & dispiriting element of the background to this modern version of these ancient stories – why those men, those girls, in those towns – came in an edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Report last week.
Towns such as Rochdale in the north west of England have disproportionate numbers of private childrens ‘homes’ which ‘look after’ vulnerable girls on behalf of local social service authorities in the south of England, & on whom there is no obligation to register with the local authority where they are actually based. The reason is the same as that which is currently being trotted out for putting a cap on the amount of Housing Benefit payable to claimants in London – property prices are much lower outside the capital, & particularly in the North West.
Goodness knows what it would have cost the local authority which was paying a private sector company £¼m a year to look after just one troubled girl who, apart from her carers, had a whole house to herself, if that house had been in the South East.
Yes, of course there are elements of race, but men like these would never themselves have the confidence to approach confident girls, even those ‘up for it’, not least because of the role played by the public consumption of alcohol in getting to meet & socialise with such women, & all the problems associated with cross-cultural marriage – topics which have also had interesting coverage recently on Radio 4. Put all this together with an unusual concentration of vulnerable girls, statistically more likely to be white, a certain amount of nervousness by the authorities about appearing to be racist, plus our own ambivalent feelings about girls who are ‘bad’ & you have tragedies just waiting to happen.
One other disturbing piece of intelligence which has emerged concerns the role of ‘reality’ television; one girl whose sexual exploitation led to her murder, & a father now charged with the murder of six of his children who died in a fire, had both featured in television programmes about their problematic life styles.
*My landlady was not alone in her alarm: research in The Times archive turned up a letter from Edwyn Young, Rector & Rural Dean (!) of Stepney & a group of concerned Christians who wrote Wednesday, June 5, 1957, in advance of the publication of the Wolfenden report:
“The solicitation of passers-by occurs principally in a short stretch of Commercial Road, an important main highway. Organised vice is rapidly increasing, & is rampant in an ever increasing area where houses are being acquired by those who desire to exploit vice”:
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