Alleged trafficker arrested on Park Lane

Woman attacked in Lambeth

Police are appealing for information after a woman was sexually assaulted on a residential street outside a health club. She was walking along Ockley Road, Lambeth when she was attacked from behind, pinned down and assaulted outside Holmes Place Health Club.

She suffered bruising to her head, hand and wrist and received cuts to her lip and nose in the attack on Saturday, December 11 at 4am. The suspect is described as 5ft 8in tall, in his mid-20s and of Mediterranean appearance. Anyone with information should call Detective Constable Andrew Munro on 020 8721 3549 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111
Online resource: ic South London

'Valentines Day rapist' jailed

A man who carried out a vicious sex assault on a woman less than two weeks after being released from prison has been jailed for 11 years.

Richard Mitchell had been imprisoned for an indecent assault, but 11 days after his release in February 2004, he attacked a young woman in Finsbury Park in the early hours of 14th February.

udge Greenwood told Mitchell he was a "high risk to the public" who was likely to "reoffend in the future". "I have had to consider imposing a life sentence but I am just persuaded to take an alternative course. "But you came as close as anyone can to a life sentence," the judge added.
Online resource: ic South London

Councils debate G strings

Venues in Leeds are facing a new era of thongs after concern that the niche market of strip clubs may be sliding towards virtual deregulation. Despite the clubs' venerable tradition in Leeds, concern has grown over the spread of nudity from strip shows to pole dancing and the city's licensing panel is now to decide "what is acceptable". Councillors have drawn up suggested regulations, although a panel fact-finding outing to a club called Wildcats was cancelled because too few members wanted to go.

The Conservative panel chair, Ronnie Feldman, said that people had differing opinions about the propriety of nude dancing, but Leeds could not continue without regulation. Clubs have been able to open with only a public entertainment licence and no detailed supervision of what form the entertainment takes.

Officers in Leeds have been advised by their counterparts in Birmingham, which last year agreed 14 regulations. "Nude" dancers in the Midlands must wear G-strings, which they can only remove at the end of their show, and contact is limited to a hand-in-hand greeting.

In a submission to the Leeds council on behalf of the club Tappas, solicitors Wells & Co said: "Performances involving full nudity in a lap dancing establishment would be fundamentally undermined by any condition requiring performers to be 'appropriately clothed'.
Online resource: The Guardian

Man arrested at Heathrow after woman's death

A man has been arrested at Heathrow Airport after the body of a woman was found in Dorset. The discovery was made at a property in the Poole Quay area and police say they are treating the death as murder.

A post-mortem examination to establish how the woman died is due to take place on Thursday. The area around the building remains cordoned off. The man, a 27-year-old from London, was arrested in connection with the death at Heathrow Airport on Wednesday night.
Online resource: BBC

Police hunt 'paint' muggers

Lancashire are hunting two girls and a boy who sprayed paint in a woman's face before mugging her.

The three youths attacked the woman and stole her mobile phone, cash and cards in an alley off Pinder Street in Nelson on Tuesday evening. Police believe that the youths would have had green paint splashes from the attack on their clothes. Karen Nuttall of Pennine Police described the incident as "a particularly nasty attack".
Online resource: BBC

Oil millionaire had prostituted woman on contract

An oil firm executive awarded an American prostitute a £1,300 a month contract so he could pay for her services out of company coffers, it emerged yesterday.

In all, Philip Garrod, 52, described by his old firm as its "incredibly respectable" former representative in Houston, Texas, paid $43,000 (£23,000) to LB Evaluation Inc - the corporate name he had given to 39-year-old Lina Burger.

Garrod, who is married with two sons, aged 20 and 17, signed a deal by which his Norwich-based company agreed to pay Miss Burger $2,500 (£1,300) a month in return for the provision of "love" and for visitation rights to her dog, Mercedes. The contract was witnessed by a public notary in Houston.

The Manchester-born executive also reportedly enjoyed visits to other prostitutes, massage parlours and strip bars. He gave ratings to vice girls' performances in reviews for a website and is believed to have paid off Miss Burger's credit cards and met the bill for her laser eye surgery.

Yesterday his former company, Hydro Projects Group, expressed its fury that Garrod, who was convicted of stealing thousands from the business, had started up two companies in direct opposition.
Source: Telegraph

Rapes continue in Congo

Two years after its war was declared officially over, a wave of sexual violence continues to sweep through the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here the war has ebbed but not disappeared: fighters from Congo's myriad militias and rebel groups, as well as fighters from Rwanda, are still loose in the forests and cities, pillaging, murdering and raping.

lthough the violence is not on the same scale as it once was, it remains a messy, unfinished conflict which has a huge impact on civilians - particularly girls and women. At least 40,000 have been raped over the past six years, according to a recent report by Amnesty International.

Congo's recent history is a dark, under-reported horror story which started a decade ago when Hutus responsible for murdering 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda's 1994 genocide fled across the border to escape the avenging Tutsi army.

All sides used proxy forces: the Congolese army was aided by tribal Mayi-Mayi militias and Hutus. The Tutsi-led Rwandan army sponsored a rebel movement, as did Uganda. They turned eastern Congo into fiefdoms of plunder in which rape was a form of booty as well as a weapon against ethnic groups deemed hostile. Spending months at a time in remote forests eroded the fighters' discipline and humanity. "These forces very rarely met each other but they all punished the civilian population," says Gwendolyn Lusi, a programme manager in eastern Congo for the aid agency Doctors on Call forService (DOCS).
Source: Guardian

Pregnant women face discrimination

Tens of thousands of women are sacked, made redundant or forced to leave their jobs every year because they are pregnant, according to research today by the Equal Opportunities Commission. It found that 30,000 expectant mothers - seven per cent of the 441,000 pregnant women in the workplace - lose their jobs each year because of unfair discrimination.

A further 45 per cent said they had experienced some form of discrimination because of their pregnancy, with five per cent claiming that they were put under pressure to quit when they announced they were expecting a child. Another 21 per cent complained they had suffered financially because of discrimination against pregnant women, with many losing their jobs, having their salary cut or being given a lower pay rise than their colleagues.

The findings come from a survey of 1,000 women in Britain who had recently given birth and worked while pregnant. One woman said: "It was completely different from the minute I found out I was pregnant. The attitudes of people? I just felt like an outsider. I felt pushed out."
Source: Telegraph

Female prison population falling

The number of women in prison has dropped around 3% after spiralling for a decade, the Home Office said this week. Minister Hazel Blears told MPs: 'As of last Friday, the women's prison population stood at 4,261; that's down about 3% from last year. 'In the last ten years the number actually tripled and in the last year, for the first time, it has started to go down.' She was replying to Tory MP Sir Teddy Taylor (Rochford and Southend East) who asked if enough was being done to tackle the problems faced by females in jail.

'Are you satisfied with the level of care given to women prisoners observing that many of them appear from the most terrible backgrounds and actually deserve a great deal of sympathy?' he asked at question time. Ms Blears said it was particularly important to target support at those women.
Online resource: The Scotsman

MA in sexual violence

The Child and Women Abuse Studies Unit is currently looking at designing new courses on violence against women and children. They have designed a short questionnaire outlining some of the proposals. The feedback from the questionnaire would be really helpful to ascertain a potential market for such courses, and what would be the preferred, and most beneficial structure and subject matter. All completed questionnaires to be returned to Lorna Kennedy at CWASU.