Young women - wearing mini dresses and stilettos - openly tout for business in front of primary schoolkids as dawn breaks over Hessle Road in Hull, East Yorkshire. Loitering near bus stops and outside shops, they offer passers-by cheaper rates for "sex outdoors". Locals warn the grim situation is now intolerable, with the number of women patrolling the street rocketing. On Friday morning, one sex worker approached our reporter as kids walked to one of the seven nearby primary schools today.
Have you got a car? Do you want it indoors or outdoors? There's an alley just around the corner. Where are you parked? She then whispered that she offered punters the chance to "touch her all over for twenty quid". Meanwhile, other horrified locals said they are regularly approached as early as 5am as they make their way to work. Funeral director Steve Smith, 30, claims he was solicited while standing at a cash machine before starting work. She was a bit young to end up in a box.
Just four years ago, Hull became the first UK city to create a "prostitute-free zone", meaning people caught loitering, soliciting or having sex in the area could be arrested and charged. However, the ban has done little to deter the problem, and residents now claim as many as 15 to 20 prostitutes tout the streets every day. Many of the girls take their customers to an open car park behind the shops which is littered with condoms, cigarette butts, empty beer cans and smashed spirits bottles.
Some are even said to be using a disused phone box for sex, often leaving their business cards behind along with condoms, syringes and other drugs paraphernalia. A local shop owner, who did not wish to be named, said: "There have been prostitutes down here for decades. But they always come back. Coppers caught 26 kerb crawlers approaching prostitutes over a three-month period, 16 of them were then slapped with section orders, banning them from the area.
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