End of the line for prostitutes
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Your support makes all the difference.Telecom companies yesterday signed up for a plan to stop prostitutes' calling cards littering phone boxes in Britain's inner cities.
From mid-September British Telecom and all telephone operators will ensure that prostitutes who advertise their numbers in payphones will have incoming calls blocked.
The plan was the idea of Westminster City Council in central London. The numbers will be obtained daily from cards collected nationwide, but especially in problem areas such as the capital. The cards will be processed centrally and the advertised numbers investigated.
Customers who advertise in payphones will be warned, and can forestall action by promising not to advertise again.
Robert Moreland, chairman of planning and environment for Westminster, said that the council had become increasingly concerned about the problem. Previous attempts to ban thecards have slipped through legislative loopholes.
"Prostitutes' cards are increasingly explicit and graphic and are causing concern to our residents, business people and visitors," he said.
"We have made various prosecutions under various bits of legislation but they have not really been effective, partly because of the limited fines that can be charged."
Bob Warner, BT's director of payphones, said that the company had tried various methods to eradicate the cards.
"But within minutes, and sometimes within seconds, they just got replaced," he said. "There's now a lot more competition so simply stopping people advertising BT numbers in kiosks wouldn't work. We had to get other telephone operators, including mobile operators, to join in."
Around 150,000 cards are now removed every week from telephone kiosks in central London alone. An eight-week campaign to remove cards from payphones in Westminster in 1994 harvested more than one million cards.
"The going rate for installing cards is pounds 10 per 100 cards," said a police spokesman. "Most 'vice carders' work for a number of prostitutes, so they're earning in excess of pounds 100 per day."
As competition increased, the vice carders have become aggressive, threatening anyone attempting to remove them. Investigations by the Metropolitan Police suggest that most cards removed from London's telephone boxes relate to just 200 numbers. "Carding" is a relatively new phenomenon, which seems to be peculiar to London, Brighton and Manchester.
Leading article, page 11
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