City centre apartments are being used as pop-up brothels - and are increasingly used by Chinese sex workers, a modern slavery detective says.
With ‘very few’ massage parlours left Manchester, many sex workers are instead operating from short-term lets, according to Detective Constable Colin Ward. He works in Greater Manchester Police’s specialist modern slavery unit and has been helping victims of sex trafficking for many years.
But the experienced detective says the landscape of Manchester’s sex trade is ever-changing. Eastern European women - mostly Albanian and Hungarian nationals - driven into street prostitution still work around the industrial estates of Back Piccadilly and Great Ancoats Street.
But over the last four years there has been a rise in the number of Chinese sex workers operating in the city. The reasons for this are not fully understood, DC Ward says.
“There seems to have been a growth in the last few years in Chinese sex workers," he says.
“Trying to find out if they’re exploited or not is not easy, but there’s definitely a massive growth in the number of Chinese sex workers. Probably the biggest growth of any ethnicity I’ve seen over the last four years.
“It started just before Covid. And when Covid started, they started saying they were Japanese online because they thought people wouldn’t see them if they said they were Chinese.
“Pop-up brothels are the biggest thing. There are very few massage parlours now.”
The rise of so-called pop-up brothels was first reported by the M.E.N back in 2017 . They are short-term ventures set up and advertised online and operated from accommodation owned by dodgy landlords and organised crime gangs.
Lasting just a matter of weeks these fleeting set-ups make it particularly difficult for the police to keep track of any vulnerable women working inside.
“They will be a normal house on a normal street," says DC Ward.
"Or an Airbnb, or a city centre apartment. That’s harder for us to identify.
"The massage parlours we can go and visit and make sure people are being treated well. When you don’t know where it is and it’s so transient, that’s harder."
Back in 2017, Romanian couple Alexe Popa and Gabriela Diac admitted operating pop-up brothels around south Manchester and employing Eastern European women as prostitutes, in houses in Levenshulme, Longsight and Rusholme.
They were tracked down through adverts on adult websites Viva Street and Adultwork though police found no evidence that the women working for them had been coerced.
The case shone a light on the significant increase in the number of pop-up brothels across Greater Manchester.
Last year the former director of Rochdale Children's Services, Gail Hopper, told the M.E.N some parents are at greater risk of being exploited in pop-up brothels.
Speaking about children who are exploited to carry our criminal activity, she said their parents can also fall victim to exploitation.
“We’ve seen examples of children who’ve been exploited whose parents have been victim to the exploitation as well,” she said.
“If you have a single parent for instance who has limited resources. That’s where things like pop up brothels have been identified in different places."
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