Well loved puppets Sooty and Sweep have been busy texting Happy Birthday to Nelson Mandela. Make sure you get your message to Tata before his birthday on 18 July by email , or by texting a message on 84707 and in the process raise money for his HIV charity 46664.

Those of you working in healthcare may be interested in this forthcoming workshop ‘Opening the door’. The event promises to be a ‘hands-on weekend for artists and healthcare professionals interested in developing the relationships between arts, health and wellbeing - and the opening of doors between artistic practice and both mainstream and alternative healthcare’.

Dancers Gill Clarke and Miranda Tufnell will be joined by visual artist Chris Crickmay and musician Sylvia Hallett for the weekend.

The weekend runs on 16-17th August 2008 and costs £180 (£120 concs). The event is being organised by the International Workshop Festival in collaboration with movingartsbase. You can book tickets via mail@workshopfestival.co.uk.

News out today has drawn attention to reported high levels of women and children trafficked into prostitution in the UK.

Trafficking is always an emotive issue, as to question any aspect of it means you are automatically branded as someone who denies any abuse within the sex industry, or who does not care about anyone harmed within prostitution. Tragic stories from ex-sex workers, along with celebrity endorsement of well publicised anti-trafficking campaigns can often hide the fact that the data supporting the prevalence of trafficking is not always clear, and the agendas driving the anti trafficking campaigns may not always be agreed upon as beneficial to sex workers.

Unfortunately it is rare that the media ever questions stories about trafficking. Why would the press do so? It allows for salacious reporting, public revulsion, blaming of foreigners and shady gangland activity. No point in questioning anything that gives you such dramatic story angles.

Which is why it’s depressing but not surprising that with today’s excited headlines about thousands of trafficked children and women, no journalist appeared to ask questions that might have shown a different story.

It isn’t difficult; all you need to do is look at the data presented in the story and ask yourself if it makes any sense.

Media reports state between 6000-18000 trafficked girls and women are forced to work as prostitutes in the UK. Operation Pentameter Two – a six month nationwide police campaign against trafficking gangs resulted in 528 arrests of suspected traffickers and 167 victims of trafficking identified (154 women and 13 children - some as young as 13). Data suggests 822 premises were visited during the operationwhich led to 24 convictions.

Now it’s not clear whether it’s 6000, 18000 or an average of the two. It is not clear whether this is a six month figure (meaning that annually 12000-36000 women and girls are trafficked), or whether it spans some other time period. We have no idea whether it means there are anywhere between 6000-18000 victims of trafficking in the UK at any one time, or whether this is a figure that has increased or decreased.

It’s also confusing because at the close of 2007 politicians claimed there were 25000 sex slaves in the UK. So does this mean there has been a reduction of (a minimum of 7000) victims of trafficking?

The data is also sketchy around the total number of sex workers identified within this operation. Did all 167 victims identified come from the 822 brothels and homes visited or were there some homes/brothels where there was more than one victim, or did victims work in more than one location? Who else was working in the other 822 premises? What were their stories/experiences – were they charged or questioned?

How does the headline of 6000 to 18000 women and children trafficked into the UK for the sex trade translate into only 167 victims identified? It either means there are fewer women and children trafficked, or that around 5833 to 17833 victims remain unaccounted for.

The records indicated that 528 suspected traffickers were identified and 167 victims. Which means there is a huge disparity between victims and traffickers – roughly three traffickers per victim. This figure surely does no justice to those women and children, who are genuine victims as it must make us wonder if trafficking is such a lucrative trade with so many active traffickers, based on this data why aren’t there more victims? Did the operation simply not uncover them?

Of the traffickers arrested it seems only 4% were convicted – which means either there weren’t that many people involved in trafficking as first seems, or the prosecution of this operation was way off beam.

Perhaps the answer is simple. In any legal case there will always be more arrests made than prosecutions. Sometimes this is because people are innocent and will be let go, sometimes it’s because there’s not enough evidence to convict them. We have no idea with this data whether the low conviction rate is down to most people arrested being innocent, or a lack of evidence to prosecute all 528 suspects. It would also be helpful to have some comparison with an average legal case, since it’s not obvious whether the 24 convictions following 528 arrests equals a better than average prosecution rate or not.

Most of the headlines have focused on two key pieces of data. That 6000-18000 women and children are working in UK brothels, and that many are as young as 13 years old. This gives the impression that many of the victims of trafficking are children, whereas this data indicates that it’s around 8% of victims identified who were children. Now that’s clearly 8% too many children being abused, but press coverage has suggested that child trafficking is the norm, not the exception.

We are told that 24 of the 528 traffickers were charged, but we are told nothing about the fate of the women and children concerned in this case, apart from them being ‘freed’. But set free how? 85% of the women and children identified within this case were from outside the UK. So were they allowed to remain in the UK? Were they given leave to remain along with psychological support and access to healthcare services? Were they imprisoned here before being repatriated? Or were they deported?

What happened to the 167 women and children? Are they okay? Why did nobody check?

Critics of the current focus on trafficking argue that it is really a means of immigration control. Although the focus appears to be on the wellbeing of victims, their fate may well be being deported or imprisoned.

There are also concerns this approach is part of the current government’s problematic approach to prostitution, which is often to accept misleading or unintelligible data while ignoring the evidence base on this area and favouring passionate rhetorical campaigns that allows them to push for legal changes around sex laws that may end up harming, not helping, prostitutes.

So what was the story here? Was it really that thousands of women and children are being abused? Looking at the data it seems that while it’s suspected many women are trafficked, the numbers identified are very small in reality. Suspected traffickers outweigh suspected victims, and less than 5% of arrested traffickers are convicted. Nobody has been told what happened to the women and children identified through Operation Pentameter Two.

The data simply doesn’t match the headlines. It’s all very well the media making out they are concerned about victims of trafficking, but you can tell nobody really cares about the wellbeing of prostitutes because nobody asked questions about this data. If they had done they may have realised the scourge of trafficking we’re constantly being warned against is not as dramatic as we may think – but tragically there are still missing victims here.

It’s no secret that I have concerns over the ethics of the TV show Big Brother. From the way the programme is set up, to the involvement of psychologists in the series there are major issues about the show.

Concerns include the problem of experts in the programme not always being the psychologists they claim to be. That psychologists who appear on the show are simultaneously advocating a programme that acts in ways that are unethical, and that the production company behind the programme will not allow dissenting voices from psychologists to be heard on their shows. There are also worries about the conditions participants in the show are kept in - from restricting food, to setting up stressful situations that lead to conflict and hostility.

While there’s the argument that people consent to be on the show therefore they know what they’re letting themselves in for, even the series producers claim that they can’t be sure how people will react once in the Big Brother house. Ergo you can’t truly consent to something even if it seems familiar to you. Particularly if, year on year, the show aims to set up increasingly stressful and difficult scenarios so contestants can seem more interesting for the viewing public.

In previous years there have been scandals over the show allowing bullying and racism to go unchallenged. This year, there seems to be both a nod to understanding this, but also using this as a means of upping ratings.

Although the series has been on for only a few weeks, already we’ve seen contestants deprived of food, subjected to stressful situations and two contestants evicted for bullying behaviour - including threatening the wellbeing of fellow housemates and their families and spitting in a housemate’s face.

Putting people into cramped conditions, stressful situations and introducing alcohol into the mix is always going to cause flashpoints. So is including people who are picked for being deliberately different in their views and backgrounds. Engineering difficult situations to make people more hostile to each other, particularly as a means of making things more ‘entertainment’ is unethical broadcast journalism.

Every year I caution about the programme, I disclose how psychologists are involved within the shows, and I question about the ethics of the series. But this years series seems to be worse than before. Despite of warnings over showing bullying and racism in the past, it seems Big Brother are more than happy to allow this to happen this year - just so long as they remove offending housemates after an aggressive act has happened.

Year on year I ask for the British Psychological Society to speak out against the programme, for psychologists to boycott it, and for greater awareness for the public over how the programme manipulates both contestants and the viewing public.

I suspect I waste my time whenever I speak out against the programme, but this year it has completely got out of control. It is not acceptable to set up stressful situations that lead to violence or threats, and cause distress to contestants all in the name of ‘entertainment’.

Letting people get stressed to the point of aggressive behaviour, only to then evict them is psychologically damaging, as is the effects on the remaining housemates.

Clearly this year people have been selected for their volatile behaviour, and said behaviour has not been monitored or managed appropriately. This is not entertainment, it is exploitation.

It’s not just a case of psychologists refusing to endorse this show anymore. Anyone linked with it - celebrities, presenters and TV workers ought to be ashamed of themselves.

The big news today is that ‘TV psychiatrist’ Dr Raj Persaud is being investigated by the General Medical Council for passing off other people’s academic work as his own in media features and academic journals. Dr Persaud has admitted to plagiarism, but the GMC has to decide what action to take as a result.

This poses a dilemma, since plagiarism is a major academic no-no. Due to an increase in people selling essays and the ability to copy information from the internet, cheating is a widespread problem affecting universities worldwide. That’s why most academic institutions take a very firm stance on the issue – automatically failing students who are caught passing off people’s work as their own.

Academic journals are slightly different. While they equally disapprove of plagiarism, it is down to individual authors to declare what they are submitting as their own work. That means they haven’t copied from another source – or from their colleagues or students. Unfortunately plagiarism by supervisors isn’t unheard of, nor is copying from colleagues. But in the case of journals it’s also the responsibility of peer reviewers and journal editors to check the accuracy of any work submitted.

Where complaints are made, journals and academic institutions are obliged to investigate. This could lead to an academic losing their job, but not always since those in positions of power who take advantage of students or researchers may get away with what is plagiarism by calling it ‘supervision’ or ‘management’. It takes a brave student or staff member to show (and prove) unethical practice of a senior staff member.

Within media it’s different again. The media thrives on cannibalising itself for ideas and angles, although again its poor form to copy someone’s work directly. So you could take an idea (e.g. the plot of a recent episode from a TV show) and use that to inform an article, but you couldn’t pass off the script of said show as your own work.

Dr Persaud was caught between two places, the media (where plagiarism is perhaps subject to interpretation) and academia, where plagiarism is (rightly) a big issue. This may explain why these unfortunate events arose. Moreover, while Persaud is a practitioner who works in the media and someone who does publish academic papers, it may be without formal training on how to publish that a clear understanding of what plagiarism means could have been missed. Admittedly I’m giving a very generous benefit of the doubt here, but having taught practitioners how to publish I’m frequently surprised how little they know about the logistics and ethics of this area.

I’ve followed Dr Persaud’s career with interest. I would do, as I’m also a psychologist who’s keen to work within mainstream media. As a successful media personality I’ve watched how Persaud works and made decisions about my own practice. Like Persaud I believe that we can share many ideas from psychology with the public – and we should do this as a part of our daily work. Unlike Persaud I have made decisions not to talk about celebrities and case studies. This is probably one of the reasons he’s a successful media pundit and I am not.

All day colleagues have been emailing me about this case. ‘Hey have you seen how Per-pseud (sic) has been caught out!’ was the subject heading from one. In general the tone has not been sympathetic for Dr Persaud (from my colleagues and also wider media coverage). Perhaps that’s partly because academics are a funny bunch that tend to look down on working with the media – but are still always jealous of anyone who gets a bit of publicity.

Strangely, as someone who has been critical of Dr Persaud’s approach in the past, I have taken no satisfaction in this case. Bad practice has been admitted to here, that’s undeniable. But the pressure from both academia and media will certainly have played a role. And when any practitioner is shown up as suspect it makes all of our jobs that much harder. There are still a great many academics who would rather we have nothing to do with the media, and cases like this automatically serve to bolster their arguments that nothing good can come from being part of the press.

Interestingly the media have been quick to cover the TV-doc-in-cheating-scandal angle, but very few have acknowledged the role the media may have played within this case. For practitioners who worry about working with the media this case has become a cautionary tale since the press were very happy to woo Dr Persaud back in the day, only to label him ‘rent a quote’ when he became well known, and now we see the media happy to pillory him. It’s a sad payback for someone who, whether you like his views or approach, has done a lot to bring psychiatry to society.

Critics within academia of course can argue that it’s no good bringing psychiatry (and psychology) to the public domain if what you’re sharing involves stealing someone else’s work. In an era where academics are fearful of any accusation of malpractice it is perhaps unsurprising that nobody is apparently speaking out in Dr Persaud’s defence.

There are lessons to be learned in this case. Academic journals need to take an even stronger line on plagiarism, and check more thoroughly for cases of malpractice. Healthcare practitioners who intend to publish academic books or papers require greater training in how to publish – and what constitutes plagiarism. And the media need to be careful that experts they are employing are playing fair.

The key question here is really about fitness to practice. Dr Persaud is a psychiatrist. His dealings with the media give us no real clue about how he is as a doctor. He could be an excellent practitioner. We don’t know. The question is whether passing off someone’s work as your own interferes with being a competent healthcare practitioner. And whether cheating over your writing means you can’t deliver patient care.

There’s no doubt that someone who has admitted to a fair amount of plagiarism from different sources (and seemingly denied accusations of plagiarism when first accused) will lose their credibility as an academic. It may be a case where academic journals could refuse to publish future research of someone like this – unless they could verify the originality of their work. It may also be the case that an academic institution would not have a practitioner lecturing students if they had been under such a cloud, since how can we penalise students if academics are allowed to get away with cheating?

Yet this is a separate argument about fitness to practise on a clinical level. I suspect it will be a difficult dilemma for the GMC and general opinion seems to be Persaud will not escape without a major stain on his character, but may be allowed to continue to practice clinically. Whether he has much of an academic career left is debatable, but so long as he’s happy to say what the media wants, no doubt the journalists who’re labelling him a fraud today will be happy to have a quote from him about a celebrity du jour tomorrow.

It’s one of the key differences between media and academia. Academics rarely forget, and journalists rarely remember.