Boris Johnson seeks to cut 'Olympic prostitution'

Boris Johnson is seeking a deal to block an expected surge in prostitution and human trafficking in the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games. The mayor of London wants mobile phone operators to work with his office, the police and voluntary groups to help target numbers advertised on thousands of sex calling cards that litter phone boxes throughout the capital. City Hall wants the companies to cut off numbers used by pimps who control prostitution as soon as they are identified.

Major sporting events are often linked to an upsurge in demand for prostitution, which in turn fuels human trafficking, according to Johnson's deputy, Kit Malthouse. At the Athens Olympics the number of known human trafficking victims almost doubled.

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Malthouse, who has campaigned to ban sex service calling cards since 2000, when he worked as a councillor in Westminster, said: "If you are an American tourist and if you walk into a telephone box you would think it was a sex shop. We want a streamlined, agreed process for barring these numbers because they become very valuable for a number of reasons. Firstly, they become a source of repeat business. Plus the numbers operate as a kind of switchboard; there will be several poor girls operating behind the number. Hopefully, it will become dangerous to advertise your number in these boxes because you may lose your business."