What a shame that all the prostitutes murdered in Ipswich were not the product of broken homes. It would have made a solution so much simpler, at least to propose if not to enforce: marriage for all, home by nine, in bed by ten. Unfortunately one of the girls at least appears to come from precisely the kind of nice middle class two-parent happy family background that is supposed by many jumping on the Conservative Party’s new-old bandwagon to preclude drug taking, poverty and misery.

Iain Duncan Smith’s social justice report is not in fact as simplistic as that; it is David Cameron who has leapt up to prescribe tax breaks for married couples as a cure-all, not Mr Duncan Smith. The former Conservative leader, as opposed to the current one, has a real understanding of the problems faced by people in multiple deprivation; let us wait and see the solutions he proposes before condemning him as a homophobic single-mum basher.

One thing I can predict with utter certainty: neither the Conservative nor Labour parties will propose the sort of steps that would have protected Gemma and Tania and Anneli and, as looks grimly inevitable, Paula and Annette. The solutions are too unpalatable for polite politics, which relies on middle-class votes in “nice” areas like Suffolk for election.

First, brothels: proper, clean, large-as-you-like, licensed knocking shops, with medical checks and protection for the girls. And tax credits too. Not all prostitutes would want to join one, but at least they would have a choice. At the beginning of this year Labour launched a “prostitution strategy”, after the most thorough review of the law in half a century. It abandoned ideas for managed zones in non-residential areas and instead prescribed a crackdown on kerb crawling, early intervention, efforts to tackle demand and new attempts to help women to escape from the lifestyle. It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious and so sad: a pathetic range of tried and failed “policies”. The only promising proposal was to allow up to three women to operate from the same premises in sort of mini-brothels without facing prosecution; but there has been no sign since of the legislation needed to implement it.

What there has been in a concerted focus on kerb crawling, with zero-tolerance zones and the increased use of ASBOs — recently introduced against women working as prostitutes in Ipswich — which have forced the women into ever darker corners and more quickly into strange men’s cars in order to evade arrest. And that, according to prostitutes in Ipswich and elsewhere, has left them more vulnerable than ever. Funny how silent Home Office ministers have been this week; it normally takes but a headline or two for John Reid to pop up flashing a stiffer sentence or a fundamental review.

Wait until the Suffolk police begin to struggle under the weight of media and public interest — all those calls from people who think they may have seen a dodgy-looking bloke in the car park — and watch as the debate about whether our police forces are too small begins all over again. This Home Secretary has ducked that one, abandoning a reorganisation that would have seen East Anglian forces merged, and without instituting any sort of national force to tackle serious crime such as this.

And that would be easy compared with addressing the drug issue: Gemma Adams, like many of the prostitutes on the streets of Ipswich, was a heroin addict. How much evidence does the Government need before it concludes that heroin should be prescribed on the NHS for addicts to short circuit the personal and public chaos an addicted life generates? It doesn’t mean that society condones heroin use, any more than it condones or condemns the use of Prozac or benzodiazepams; but it does mean recognising addiction as a physical condition and not just a moral failure.

Start to sort that out and you could begin to determine the part that poverty really plays in this way of life. Mr Duncan Smith is right when he says that raising drug addicts above the “poverty line” doesn’t stop them being poor; he would be wrong if he concluded that there was therefore no point in helping them financially.

We can only hope, too, that Mr Cameron heard the London prostitute interviewed on the Today programme yesterday morning (with a sort of “we don’t do this very often” apology from the presenter by way of introduction for listeners of a moralistic bent). She explained eloquently how she turned to prostitution because she needed money to raise her children, and didn’t want to work long hours in a supermarket never seeing them. Money, Mr Cameron: it is the basis of general wellbeing if you haven’t got enough of it, and any family in a low-income bracket needs it, married or not.

It didn’t require the deaths of five women to tell us any of this. Nor is there a society on earth that can prevent the violence of the occasional serial killer. What we have done is offered up the street girls as easy prey while turning up our noses at them and their way of life and turning our backs. Despite the rest of the country talking about the murders in Ipswich, the Prime Minister had nothing to say about them at his press conference yesterday.

If these deaths have helped to shine a light on the desperate world that exists outside our front doors and under our eyes, well at least that is something. Not much of a consolation to their families and friends, is it?

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