UK Nutter News

The moralist campaign group Child's Eye Line UK is crowing after shopping centres in the UK have agreed to remove Ann Summers window displays featuring bondage imagery.

The St Nicholas shopping centre in Sutton and the Golden Square shopping centre in Warrington removed the bondage-halloween themed posters after campaigners whinged they were not appropriate to be displayed in children's eye line.

Leszek Banasiak, Operations Manager at the St Nicholas Shopping Centre in Sutton, told Child's Eye Line UK:

Thank you to local parents for drawing our attention to this matter. We understand your concerns and have instructed Ann Summers to remove the poster.

Child's Eye Line UK founder Kathy McGuinness spouted:

Sexualised imagery should not be displayed on the high street. It's great to see retailers acting responsibly and listening to parents' concerns. We hope that other shopping centres and high streets will follow their lead to protect children from sexualised imagery in family-friendly places.

Eaves has announced that it ceased operations on 30th October 2015.

Eaves was primarily a feminist group commendably supporting women who were victims of violence. However the group also got into political campaiging and became famous for its Big Brothel 'research' with the Poppy Project that attempted to hype trafficking in UK brothels. The reports were widely derided by both academics and sex workers groups but the rubbished research was cited for years to come. A massive operation of police raids on hundreds of brothels simply didn't find the claimed trafficked sex workers.

Eaves has been operational since 1977. With reference to the decline and closure of Eaves, Chair, Louisa Cox explained:

Eaves has had to contend with high rents, project funding that does not cover the core costs so an increasing deficit and most recently the tragic illness, and subsequent loss, of our inspirational CEO Denise Marshall. We have taken a range of measures to diversify our funding base, increase donations, cut costs, move offices, but ultimately none of these steps was enough to save us.

Eaves has done its best to ensure service users have other services to go to and we have been able to transfer some of our projects to other organisations.

The future of the Poppy Project is uncertain.

A feminist morality campaign group, White Ribbon Scotland, is slightly unusual in that it is run by men. The group is generating a little publicity by with a White Ribbon 'award' to the feminist extremists of Glasgow City Council forming Glasgow's Violence Against Women Partnership (GVAWP).

GVAWP will also reveall the results of what it claims is Scotland's biggest ever attitudinal survey on the subject. The online questionnaire was completed by 1237 people who considered questions around issues such as rape, domestic abuse, pornography, lap and pole dancing and gender inequality.

Councillor Jim Coleman has chaired the Glasgow Violence Against Women Partnership (GVAWP) since it was established in 2000. He accepted the award on behalf of the city and inevitably took the opportunity to blame porn and sex work. Coleman said:

Today's presentation coincides with the roll out of Clare's Law across Scotland and stage three of the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Bill. We very much welcome both these major steps forward and the protection they afford women but we are disappointed that the Human Trafficking bill seeks to protect those who have been trafficked and not all exploited in prostitution. The root cause of human trafficking is the sex industry's demand for women and girls. This demand is created by men.

To eradicate human trafficking we need to eradicate prostitution and to do this we need to tackle the demand by men. GVAWP will continue to campaign for a challenging demand approach on prostitution with legislation to decriminalise those selling sex and criminalise those who buy it. We believe it is the only way to end prostitution.

The results of the attitudinal survey highlight the ongoing need to continue to change attitudes and challenge misconceptions. For example, one in five of respondents thought prostitution was a choice women make. This we know is a myth and worryingly one in five also thought that pornography was not harmful, when in fact it contributes to violence against women.