I was driving my 13 year old daughter to the school bus stop when the dulcet tones of Radio 4′s newsreader announced that the police had found body parts belonging to Suzanne Blamires. Without thinking, I glanced at my daughter sitting in the passenger seat and burst into tears.  I imagined the mothers of Suzanne Blamires, Susan Rushworth, and Shelley Armitage looking at their teenaged daughters and planning their futures: careers, marriage, family – who knows what those girls with the 1980s big hair and brightly coloured leg warmers might have gone on to achieve.

But Suzanne, Susan and Shelley were all someone’s daughter, as is every other female prostitute. Most of them are someone’s sister and friend and many are someone’s mother too. And most of them don’t want to be in their ‘job’.Suzanne’s mother described her daughter as ‘bright and articulate’, saying ‘“Unfortunately my daughter went down the wrong path and she didn’t have the life she was meant to have’. I wept for another mother and the untimely loss of her daughter. And whilst the media argue over whether the murdered women of Bradford should be described as ‘prostitutes’, ‘sex workers’  or ‘women who work as prostitutes’, it’s easy to dehumanise and devalue them.

It’s all too easy to believe that women working in the sex industry could just walk away if they wanted to. But many have little choice, trapped by a combination of addiction, childcare responsibilities, poor mental health, bullying pimps and crushing poverty and debt. Their personal issues ensure that they are socially isolated as well as financially excluded. Most of the women are only too aware of their vulnerability and want to get out of the trade. Yet the one thing that keeps pulling them back is their drug addiction, Hearing the stories of the women on the streets of Bradford, scared after the disappearance of their friends and colleagues, I felt distraught that they sold their bodies for just enough for a wrap of drugs, then went back out on the streets and did it all over again. I don’t support that was the future Nicky Blamires saw for her daughter as she brushed her hair, waved her off to school or even when the young Suzanne won a place to study nursing.

So whilst the Daily Mail and its like continue to condemn these women and scream at even the mention of decriminalisation of drugs, the women are further isolated and left vulnerable by Labour’s new anti-sex trade laws, brought in allegedly to help the women they are now trapping further. I was incensed by these new laws, which have made it much more difficult for women to work safely, whilst giving absolutely no support at all to those who might want to stop selling their bodies. The authoritarian and puritanical wing of the Labour party, cheer-led by Harriet Harman. If society cannot find a way to support the most vulberable women so that they do not find themselves drawn into the sex trade, we could at least ensure that they work in a safe environment.

 But unless we find a way to deal with drugs and drug addicts in a  more effective and less judgemental way, we will never see an end to a desperate and dangerous activity that destroys lives, even when the woman remains physically alive. Whilst society sees prostitutes and somehow a sub-species and labels them in a judgemental way, men will continue to feel that they can do what they like with the women – even as far as murdering them. And more and more of us will lose our daughters, sisters, friends and mothers …

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