Ms Linda Latham:

The statistic I used is research-backed.

In my experience, people who have drug addictions themselves demonstrate difficult backgrounds, proclaiming issues of abuse, drug addiction and homelessness. They themselves are giving us the history of that. Therefore, we can see their vulnerability and that they are already predisposed to any sort of exploitation.

The case of the migrant women, who make up the majority of the persons who come into the clinic, is very different. We saw 360 women last year. Almost 100 of these were on the streets and the rest were women working indoors in prostitution. Some 93% of them were migrant women. Clearly, they have poverty issues. What I thought was that their aspirations would suggest they were seeking to find a way out and to improve their standard of living in some capacity, to get a home and education for their children and an income for themselves. However, often there are layers to their situation and they are funding families and relations back home as well. Therefore, the pressure is enormous on them to stay within the sex industry, although that may not have been their original plan. They may have thought they would do it for a period and then get out of it. That is often what we hear, but then five, six or seven years later they are still there.