“I HAVE brought shame on my family and caused my poor wife a lot of unnecessary heartache,” wrote Christopher Cutler, 32, of Coulby Newham, Middlesbrough. His letter was read out in court on June 23 last year as part of a prosecution of five kerb crawlers. Each was fined over £300 and named in the press.
Middlesbrough has always had prostitutes. Graham Strange, co-ordinator of the Safer Middlesbrough Partnership, has figures running from the 1860s. Traditionally it was in the area of St Hilda’s, known as “Over the Border” — over the railway tracks in a part of town beside the docks.
Prostitutes also worked on the Newport Estate near the town centre. Edna Donnelly, 54, head of the estate’s residents’ association, said: “I lived side by side with these women. If I was up late with the curtains drawn they would say, ‘You’re ruining our business’, and I would say, ‘I’ll close my curtains if you make sure there aren’t any used condoms in my garden’. I wasn’t happy about it but they were adults and we rubbed along.”
The change came in the mid-1990s when heroin use exploded. “Suddenly there were lots of really young girls on the streets,” Mrs Donnelly said. “It started happening whenever they needed a fix. In the morning as you took your kids to school, they would be having sex in the car park. People had sex right up against my door.”
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Wendy Shepherd, children’s service manager for the charity Barnado’s, began investigating in 1998. “We found 70 prostitutes who were under 21. Thirty-five were under 17. The youngest was 11,” she said. Her report transformed the policy of Cleveland Police. Mr Strange, who led the first multi-agency partnership addressing prostitution, said: “We started treating these girls as victims rather than offenders.”
Prosecuting prostitutes had led to a vicious cycle: many went back to prostitution to pay off the fines. Now charities, agencies and the police attempted to provide women with the support to change direction. Instead of arresting them, the police concentrated on the kerb crawlers. In 2001 they gained the power to arrest them, using regular patrols and CCTV cameras. The courts arranged for their prosecution in tranches and Middlesbrough’s Evening Gazette publicised the convictions, passing on reports to neighbouring regional papers if the men were from out of town.
Interviews with offenders quickly confirmed that the policy was the best deterrent.
By 2003, 84 per cent of those arrested had come from outside Middlesbrough, unaware of the tougher policy. In recent years Cleveland Police had been making 200-250 arrests, about a quarter of the national total. Last year the number had fallen to 108.