06/02/2017 Inside Out West

Tonight, the unusual goings-on on a suburban street near you.

It's a really residential area, probably not the sort of place you'd

expect to find a brothel.

A former student takes on her university.

Diversity has been on the agenda in our society for a while now.

Why are these institutions moving so slowly?

And Bristol's Lost Boys remembered at last.

Do you know what's happening behind closed doors in your street?

We've heard organised gangs are renting properties and using

them as temporary brothels.

And it's happening at an alarming rate.

The rental market is changing.

Short-term lets are in demand thanks to the success of sites like Airbnb.

But they've brought a new and more sinister tenant

into our communities.

What sort of people were they?

Seedy I think is probably a fair description of them.

Brothels are opening up where you least expect them.

Looking around, it looks really like a family

area, very residential.

They're called pop-up brothels and authorities admit

they're on the rise.

We are looking at around 20 to 30 a week, usually, within Swindon.

We'll meet people involved in them.

Where did you come from?

Paris.

Not born in the EU, I stayed in Europe and then came here.

And the people who try and police them.

Police, can I come in?

So when did you first get the property here?

We bought it in 2007.

And then the planning permission was quite difficult to get.

Paul Routledge is one of Weston-Super-Mare's

biggest landlords.

He redeveloped this church, which used to be

All Saints and St Saviour's.

How many flats are inside?

13, altogether.

Paul checks the backgrounds of all his tenants, but one day

he received a complaint about some strange goings-on in one

of the flats downstairs.

He decided to investigate.

Me and my mate were sitting at these windows and one after the other

we were just watching the people walking in.

We couldn't believe it, we actually couldn't believe

that there was a tenant, this well spoken gentleman

who by all accounts was an engineer, who'd decided to run a Thai brothel

in our vestry.

And this is the advert.

Absolutely, yeah.

It said, dear fellow residents, it has come to my attention that

flat six is being used as a brothel by a young Thai girl.

These pop-up brothels are advertised on three main websites along

with other small ads for cars and washing machines.

But these aren't random personal ads, they're posted by crime gangs.

Research by the Police Foundation found that pop-up brothels are more

likely to use trafficked women than standard brothels.

In a study based in Bristol, it found organised crime gangs forced,

coerced or intimidated women into providing sex in them.

When Paul kicked his tenant out, he was threatened.

He said, well, I'm part of the Chinese Mafia and you're

going to have a lot of Chinese people coming round your house.

We know where you live and all that sort of stuff.

I just said, whatever.

You hear these threats all the time as a landlord.

His experience is common among the short-term letting

agents we've spoken to.

The reason they use short-term rentals in residential areas

is to avoid detection, making it extremely

difficult to police.

These girls are in trouble, they're not under arrest...

But officers from Wiltshire's intelligence unit are leading

the way in trying to change that.

And today they plan to visit some and we've been invited along.

We leave the police station in a convoy.

It's a chance to find out a bit more from Chris about the women involved.

No girl ever aspires to be a sex worker.

It's usually a really tragic set of circumstances

which they've fallen upon.

It is always to combat a problem.

I'm really interested to see what it's going to be like.

Looking around, it's a really residential area,

probably not the sort of place you'd expect to find a brothel.

Chris' team has been told that something suspicious is happening

in one of the flats here.

The landlord is cooperating with the police and has asked

that we don't identify where it is.

Chris, can you just tell us what's going on at the moment,

who you've found inside here?

We've got a punter who was located by the officers in bed.

The officers are just obtaining details.

We've got one chap and two girls.

I haven't had a chance to look around, but obviously we'll look

to see if it is operating as a brothel.

The English is good, which is a bonus for us,

so we'll process everything a little bit quicker.

How much money do you think you have sent home?

6,000 per month.

6,000 per month you are making, that's good money.

OK.

The police officers just said to one of the girls the reason

they are checking on their welfare is that some girls are made to see

20 or 30 different men over the course of a weekend.

It's just horrible.

The lady that's in the kitchen living room area has just told

the police that she's got two children who are back in Brazil,

which is obviously where she's from.

I can't believe that they are in Brazil and she's over

here having to do this work.

Chris calls the Home Office to check the woman's immigration status

because she doesn't have a passport.

Which begs the question how does she get in if she doesn't have it here?

We get five minutes to talk to her.

Why did you come to the UK?

Because here the money is better.

And did you know what you would be doing when you got here for work?

Yes, yes.

Tell me the places you have been working.

Cornwall, Somerset, Bristol, Reading.

So you travel around.

How often do you travel?

Every week.

Do you feel safe?

Sometimes.

Sometimes not so safe?

No.

Tell me about your situation back in Brazil, your family.

I've got two children.

They live there with my family and I make money.

They live there with my family and I make money.

I send money back to them.

Do you miss them a lot?

Oh, yes.

While we're in this flat, officers receive intelligence

that there may be another pop-up brothel operating next door.

Hello, police, can I come in?

Obviously there are you two girls, is there anyone else in the flat?

No.

How long have you lived here for?

One year and a half.

You've lived in this flat one year and a half?

Yes.

Who do you rent the flat from?

We've got two women inside here and from what I can understand

they're from Poland.

Two police officers inside at the moment

and they are obviously just trying to establish some more

information from them.

How long they've been here for, who they are working for.

Again, it looks like this is a suspected pop-up brothel.

It turned out to be a very productive day.

We managed to move two pop-up brothels, where girls had engaged

in short-term rents.

And we visited four other addresses which we subsequently found out

were a link in terms of the girls going between the addresses.

Nationally, the addresses can be linked.

All the way down the M4 corridor, London, Reading, Oxford,

through to Bristol and then down into Devon.

We are currently monitoring between 170 and 190 women

involved in sex work, predominantly located in Swindon.

We will look to intervene and see if we can offer safeguarding,

see what's behind it, see if there's organised crime

behind it, as often as we can.

Pop-up brothels are quite transient.

We're looking at around 20 to 30 a week.

Do you think any of the girls had been trafficked?

There were certainly the indicators, yes.

The Brazilian woman we met, for example, she alluded to the fact

that she didn't have access to her passport immediately.

She alluded to the fact that she paid money to a third party

to manage her profile.

The woman we interviewed has been deported back to Brazil

because she was found to be here illegally.

Landlords are liable to prosecution if their properties are found

to be used as brothels.

They can even go to jail in extreme cases.

It's led Paul to set up a data-sharing service so people

who rent their properties can check the history of their tenants.

What it does is it allows landlords, when they are referencing,

to create tenant histories.

For other landlords, I've only got one piece

of advice and that's reference, reference, reference.

Pop-up brothels are the latest face of prostitution

and they are in our neighbourhoods.

In residential streets, where children and families live.

The women involved are likely to be forced, coerced

or intimidated into providing sex by ruthless crime gangs.

But that may not be obvious.

People expect to see girls chained to a radiator

before we start to think about if they've been trafficked.

That is not the case at all.

Police forces are now waking up to this reality

but we can all do our bit.

Maybe it's time we all took more of an interest

in who's living next door.

University should be a place that inspires you,

but last summer Eno Mfon left her graduation day feeling

angry and alienated.

In this personal journey, she's going back to Bristol

University to challenge both its curriculum and culture.

I'm Eno and I write and direct plays.

I just graduated from Bristol University,

studying English and drama.

What really frustrated me about my course is that three years

and not one black theatre maker, not one black critic, is mentioned.

I studied Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton and Chaucer.

All brilliant, but all white.

I only studied more diverse writers on one module and that was optional,

not a core part of the curriculum.

So I decided to write about this lack of diversity in an Instagram

post and it became headline news.

Talking about not having diversity for diversity's sake.

But not everyone agrees.

The bottom line is that there aren't a whole heap of quality black

British contemporary plays.

That's not to say that black British writers aren't capable,

of course they are, they just haven't got there yet in that level

of artistic development.

When you look at the States, the majority of the best black plays

that are on in London, or have been on in the last two

years, they're always American.

They're always American.

I'm not saying there are no great black British plays,

there are one or two, but I think that a lot of black

British contemporary drama is mired in what I call the theatre

of the ghetto.

It is mired in a lot of black pathologies,

about the staples of guns and drugs and council estates.

Of course we do need to read more great black writers

and plays, absolutely.

But we don't just need to pour scorn on the dead white guys.

I go to Dickens not because he's a dead white guy,

but because he's a great, timeless, universal storyteller.

I would definitely agree with you saying you don't

need to get rid of it, but I feel like it's

very discouraging for me as an aspiring black writer.

When do the voices of BME writers filter into the core?

I think it's very dangerous to look at books and plays,

or knowledge in general, as white knowledge

and black knowledge.

It's human knowledge.

So talking to Lindsay has really fired me up.

I want to go back to Bristol University and ask them why

the curriculum just isn't including BME voices.

I know that there is a great quality of work by black and Asian writers

and it's just being ignored.

I also noticed the lack of diversity on campus.

Black UK nationals make up 1.5% of the student body compared to 2%

at Bath University and 5% at UWE.

I was the only black student on my course and often

felt quite isolated.

So I'm meeting a group of current students who are part

of the Why Is My Curriculum White campaign, a national movement

to increase diversity at university.

I was fascinated with what you said in your post a lot

because it is so isolating, you feel like the only one

and nobody really understands when you talk about it.

You can never mentally prepare yourself for something

until you get there.

On opening day, I was the only black person.

You look at courses and I'd be like, there's no women here,

we need to do stuff for women.

They need to talk about BME issues.

It's like there's some sort of stigma to talking

about race and gender.

To take up some of these points, I'm meeting a lecturer who was,

until recently, the only non-white member of staff in

the English department.

I remember going to the last Why Is My Curriculum White event

and you were on the panel.

What really stuck out to me was there were some similarities

in what some of the black lecturers were saying and my experience

as a black student.

There was this sense of an isolation.

I was wondering if that came into your experience at all.

Yeah, hugely.

But to me that's not a Bristol thing, that's a higher education

thing and a specifically British higher education thing.

I mean, particularly compared to America,

when you look at the statistics of lecturers and professors

from minority backgrounds.

It's shocking in this country, particularly women.

I think it's difficult because it's one of those things where to change

things we need more women of colour to be going into academia,

but to get more women of colour into academia,

we need to have women of colour in academia to serve as mentors.

It's a really long, slow, painful process.

I know it's not much of a consolation, but one thing

you can take away is having persisted through this and succeeded

and that opens the doorway to make things a bit easier for the next

intake of students.

It's been reassuring to hear from Madhu that things are changing

from her perspective.

But what does her boss think?

What we seem to be looking at is in the context of why

is our curriculum white.

We want to look at the diversity of what we teach in every single area.

Have you been to one of those meetings?

I've not been to the meetings, but I've heard reports from people

who have been to the meetings.

They're really, really good.

They're good and we are serious about this.

One way is to say we are not going to be prescriptive,

but another way is to look at what we do teach and make sure

there's a good reason for what we are teaching.

I've been talking to some of the students.

I just wanted to show you what some of these conversations looked like.

I think in Bristol we have this culture that is so isolating

and it's so exclusionary to the point where you kind of have

to learn to survive on your own.

It's also really just psychologically violent

to have your history consistently eliminated from the course,

to have everything be a peripheral or elective topic

that you have to choose.

Something like 18 black professors, black female professors,

in the whole country.

Something ridiculous like that.

If you don't see people who look like you teaching you,

you're not going to be engaged.

There are two things going on there.

One is to do with what we teach and who does the teaching.

My response to that is what we are doing is diversifying

the people doing the teaching.

Inevitably it's a gradual process.

We're taking on young lecturers with new ideas from different

backgrounds who teach in different ways.

Something else is how we support students generally.

Someone there was lamenting the fact they are isolated and feel isolated

within their whole university experience.

That's something really troubling.

I don't think it's exclusive to us at all, it's a sector problem,

it's to do with the whole way the education system

works in the UK.

It's quite a big problem given we have 22,000 students.

How do we do this?

There's no quick fix, there's no quick answer.

Diversity has been on the agenda in our society for a while now.

I'm just wondering why these institutions are moving so slowly?

I would say that we're moving quite fast.

And that we're gathering speed.

It's very difficult to change things overnight.

I would say that the possibility of doing a black studies degree

at postgraduate level here is something that would have

been unthinkable five years ago.

We're thinking about it now, it will be two more

years before it happens.

But it's happening.

Back in the real world, things seem to be moving faster.

I'm in London with my friend Juliet, who also studied English and drama.

We're off to the Alfred Fagan award, an event celebrating black

British playwrights.

This award helps to create a community of writers that reflect

the diversity of the times.

Alfred Fagan was a Jamaican playwright who began his career

in Bristol and wrote many of his best works

while living there.

Bristol has such a connection with Alfred Fagan.

We literally went to Bristol University for three years

and didn't hear a single mention of him in any of our courses.

There is a statue of Alfred Fagan in Bristol and we just didn't hear

about him in the course.

I think it's really important that students are aware

that this stuff is out there, that this stuff is going

on and conversations are being had.

It shouldn't just be had in a minority, they should filter

out into the main conversations.

The winner of the Alfred Fagan award for Best New Play of 2016 is City

is City Melodies by Lorna French.

Coming to these awards and just seeing how black voices

are celebrated has inspired me so much to continue writing.

And hopefully one day win an award.

I don't just want to be on a political theatre unit,

I don't want to be on an optional unit, I want to filter

into the mainstream, I want to break into the core,

I want to break into that somehow.

And look out for a film we've got later in the series

all about Alfred Fagan, Bristol's forgotten playwright.

You might have walked past this.

This memorial on Bristol's quayside is dedicated to members

of the Merchant Navy lost at sea.

But it turns out some names are missing.

They are known as Bristol's Lost Boys.

15 young lads who went off to see on merchant ships fetching vital

supplies during the First and Second World Wars,

never to return.

Now, for the first time in the city, the cabin, deck and galley boys

are to be publicly remembered at the Merchant Navy Memorial

on the harbour-side.

Jack Takle, at just 15, was one of the ten Bristol boys

under 16 who lost their lives in World War II.

His service log is the only possession his sister has of the boy

whose one dream was to go to sea.

Jack used to go missing and it would be, where's Jack?

Jack used to go missing and it would be, where's Jack?

I know where he is.

He would either be at Hot Wells or Avonmouth.

All he was interested in was going out to sea on the ships.

Then when he was about 14, he disappeared again,

but this time his father couldn't find him.

They said that the ship had gone out, but I can't remember the name.

Jack was found as a stowaway.

He worked his passage and the captain said

he was a very good worker.

His first official job as a cabin boy was aboard the Toronto City,

which set off from Bristol docks to America.

Then in September 1940, he left home to join the crew

of the ill-fated Matina.

When he went to join the Matina, that was the only time he ever

waved when he left home.

We were by the front door with my mother and he went down

the road with my father and just turned and waved and that was it.

The cargoes which the civilian crews of the Merchant Navy brought

back were essential and Britain's war effort depended on them.

The Matina was an Elderson Fyffe ship, sailing back from

the West Indies to Liverpool, carrying 1500 tonnes of bananas,

when it was torpedoed.

If we look at the map...

She actually sailed from Jamaica down here.

Beryl's son Winston has been researching the story

of the uncle he never met.

She was actually sunk off the coast of Rockall.

I've sailed past Rockall and it's actually pretty

miserable in a storm, I can assure you.

I think she probably met her fate about here,

about 100 miles out from Rockall.

She met the two submarines that subsequently sent her to the bottom.

All 67 crew on board were lost and it's been preying on Winston's

mind that Jack and his shipmates could have been shot

while abandoning ship.

On some of the reports I read, it said the U-28 surfaced

and started firing a deck gun.

28 rounds and 15 hits.

I think they did actually manage to get off the ship,

we understand from the research done by the Merchant Navy Organisation.

It does appear that the lifeboats did manage to get away.

Survivors were not machine-gunned in those days.

It was only later in the war when an order was given that

crew should be killed.

That was from Adolf Hitler himself.

We can only speculate that maybe the weather conditions were so bad

that the lifeboats were overwhelmed.

The only comfort you can take is they were not murdered,

let's put it that way.

Meticulous research has also uncovered a missing piece

of the jigsaw about Jack's first voyage when he was a stowaway.

The name of the ship was the Temple Pier and its records

show his father removed him, claiming he was under 14.

Which doesn't surprise me because there were a lot

of youngsters who did try to go to sea at a very young age.

But from all of our research, it looks as though he's probably

the youngest Bristol boy who managed it.

It's a very sad story because he's a very young man.

I went to sea myself when I was 16 years of age

and unfortunately at that age you think you're indestructible.

And you sail with people in stormy weather and really

ferocious conditions, which now would

probably frighten me.

But unfortunately this young lad didn't get the opportunity to grow

up like so many of the youngsters.

But you can be proud of him.

He'd have been a good seaman, from what I can see.

Keep his book, it's a very important document.

You should hang onto it.

I will do.

Be proud of him as well.

I am.

There was ten of us.

Jack was nine years older than me.

Jack was very good doing little jobs at home because we all

had little jobs to do.

And then we'd go down to the park.

There was a stream which ran through the park and we used to go

down there and get tiddlers.

And bring them home and Dad used to tell us off for taking

them out of the river.

But we done it.

My grandmother lived round the corner and he used to have

to take me down because I used to sleep at my grandmother's.

We used to sit in the sitting room and I used to have

to read the Bible to her, or sing to her.

Jack used to like to hear me sing.

In November 1940, the family received terrible news.

The Matina was reported overdue, presumed lost.

Then the following February came the official confirmation.

The ship was declared lost without trace.

It wasn't the same when Jack wasn't there.

My mother never got over it.

No.

She thought that one day he would come back, but he didn't.

She lived until she was 70, but she always thought

about Jack, all the time.

Here we are.

Hello!

Nice to see you, glad you made it.

Welcome to the Nerchant Navy Museum, and you, Winston.

Beryl and Winston have now been invited to take part

in the Lost Boys memorial ceremony and have come to have a chat

with the organiser.

This is the plaque that will be going on.

First World War and Second World War.

You can see your brother's name there at the end,

and when he was lost, 24th October, 1940.

There was 37,000 merchant seamen and women killed

during the Second World War.

And the public forgot about it.

So this is our way, the local branch of the Merchant Navy,

of keeping alive the spirit and the sacrifice our men made.

We remember the Army, the Navy and Air Force,

but they don't remember the Merchant Navy.

This plaque dedication service is all about the young boys whose

names will be remembered today.

Arthur Beames, deck boy, aged 15.

Jack Takle, aged 15, whose sister is with us, as you know.

I'm just pleased he's being remembered.

James Long, aged 16.

I'm very pleased that all of them have been remembered.

It goes down in history.

# For those in peril on the sea.

That's it for tonight.

Don't forget to check out Facebook and Twitter for more.

But for now, thank you for watching.

Good night.

On next week's programme, we reveal how one leading

supermarket's special offers aren't always what they seem.

Hello, I'm Riz Lateef with your 90-second update.

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