By Alex Bourn
A tell-all book is to be released tomorrow in a bid to push prostitution away from the streets of South Auckland.
It includes personal accounts from residents, councillors and business owners, who are fed up with street prostitution in their suburbs.
At night, sex workers and their customers roam the streets of “Hunters’ Corner”.
Come morning, it's the residents and businesses that are left to clean up the mess.
Murari Aggrawal has worked in Papatoetoe for almost a decade. He has seen what street prostitution has done for the town.
“Decent people tend to not come into the area with their families now, with so many street prostitutes around,” says Mr Agrawal of the Auckland Indian Retailers Association.
It has led local board chairman John McCracken to publish a tell-all book, which lifts the lid on street soliciting in residential areas of Papatoetoe, Otahuhu and Manurewa.
“Who wants to move into an area where you have got street workers operating on the footpath and on your driveway?” asks Mr McCracken.
The book features personal accounts from business owners and residents, highlighting the challenges they face from prostitution.
“Mornings when I come over here, on the streetscape, you can see everything, like condoms on the roads and used plastic bags where they do a lot of sniffing,” says Mr Aggrawal. “All sorts of dirty things.”
“When the clients can't find the prostitutes working on the streets, they then approach women who are walking to and from work or at the bus stop, asking them if they are prostitutes,” says Mr McCracken.
The book takes aim at the Prostitution Reform Act and supports the Auckland Council Bill for regulation of prostitution in certain places.
The proposed bill will ban street workers from residential, school and sports areas.
“Our goal is actually to move it into a commercial area, because this is a legal business and they should be operating in a commercial environment,” says the local board chairman. “At the moment they're totally unrestricted at all.”
The bill would introduce fines for street workers and their clients as well as powers of arrest and the power to stop suspected vehicles.
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