ABSTRACT
Gail Whitehouse was the ‘silly girl’. She was 23 and the mother of two children. She worked the street beat in Wolverhampton until September 1990, when she was strangled. She was the first sex worker to be murdered about whom I knew something personally: she sometimes worked in Birmingham and was known to my outreach team, but she had also made the papers some months before her death for having all her fines written off at a court appearance before Wolverhampton magistrates. Her comments to reporters remain a succinct indictment of the criminalisation of sex work:
I think the decision of the court was brilliant. It makes a mockery of the whole system. I was originally paying £4 a week in fines but because I have been arrested so often, they put up the payment to £30 a week. There was no way I could afford to pay over £4,600 in any case. It was pointless them fining me that amount in the first place. I have been a prostitute for two-and-a-half years and I suppose I have been arrested between 80 and 90 times. It is ridiculous to have fines like that brought against you. Nobody could possibly afford to pay them. 1
