GOVERNMENT SCHEME HELPS PROSTITUTES SWAP THE STREET FOR THE SALON

In Doncaster's burgeoning red-light district, the "prostitutes" with the
manicured and painted fingernails are the women whose bodies are no longer
for sale.

They have turned away from the world's oldest profession to take up careers
as beauticians. Glowing healthily from free visits to the gym and swimming
pool in the Yorkshire town, they are products of the first
government-backed programme designed to help prostitutes leave the streets
and find other forms of work.

In a scheme supported by the Department for Work and Pensions and run by
Streetreach, a prostitute support organisation, together with the
employment group Reed, women across South Yorkshire are being trained as
manicurists, hairdressers and holiday camp reps.

"Louise", 22, the mother of a young son, is hoping to open her own nail
salon, after spending four years working on the streets.

She was one of four former prostitutes to graduate from a four-month course
that qualifies them to work as "nail technicians", meeting the growing
demand for brightly-coloured and heavily decorated false nails.

"At the moment I am doing friends to get my confidence," Louise said. "I
have never had any qualifications before and now I've got something for my
future."

She is one of more than 30 women who have been found jobs and training.

But outside on the streets, the girls who continue to work "on the game"
remain distinctly unglamorous.

Many raise a hand to their mouths while addressing punters " an attempt to
conceal their blackened teeth and inflamed gums. Their facial scabs and
greasy, nit-infested hair are usually untouched by cosmetics.

Dressed in cheap denim mini-skirts and dirty trainers, the hunger in their
eyes betrays their determination to earn the money they need to buy
drugs " up to AUKP200 a day.

Heroin has taken hold in the Yorkshire pit villages and driven scores of
young women into selling their bodies.

Steve Butler, the head of South Yorkshire police's Doncaster vice unit,
says the number of women working the market town's red light area has
doubled in a decade. Streetreach said it was working with 240 prostitutes,
mostly in their teens and early 20s.

Sergeant Butler, who has photographs of the girls lining his office walls,
said: "We are a town, not a city " 240 is a massive problem."

Police admit that they are powerless to keep the women from the streets,
because the courts are unable to impose custodial sentences and typically
hand down fines of only about AUKP50.

Later that evening, as he drove around the residential streets of the
town's red light area, Sgt Butler asked the working girls if they have
"been into Streetreach lately".

Set up 11 years ago by Trudy Hannington, Streetreach is nationally known
for its work in providing a lifeline to people who have lost almost all
contact with mainstream society.

Ms Hannington said the growing availability of first heroin and then crack
cocaine had transformed the nature of the prostitution problem in Doncaster.

It is now almost unheard of for a Doncaster prostitute not to be dependent
on Class A drugs. Many are HIV-positive and some carry the Hepatitis C virus.

Streetreach, which is funded by the local council and health authority,
puts the women through a drug treatment programme and refers those who are
successful to Maria Wilcox, a community consultant for the employment firm
Reed in Partnership.

As part of the Government's Welfare to Work programme, Ms Wilcox helps to
give the women stability and prepare them for potential employers.

She said: "Prostitutes are at the very bottom of social deprivation. They
are one of the hardest to reach groups and they do not have a work history
that they can declare."

The project has a budget of about AUKP200 per woman, to allow them to buy
presentable clothes, improve personal hygiene and attend local gyms. If it
meant keeping a woman off the streets, the scheme's organisers would be
prepared to invest AUKP1,000 in them.

Women are also given computer training and help with their CVs. They are
told to draw something positive from their life on the streets by
emphasising that they have "inter-personal skills".

It can be a long haul. Katherine, 28, went from being a healthy young woman
who enjoyed windsurfing to a heroin-dependent prostitute spending up to 16
hours a day on the street.

Sitting in the Streetreach office, she said: "All I want is to be normal
and happy and meet someone who accepts my past."

Three hours later, she was back out on Boxholme Lane, her fleeting optimism
replaced by the craving to earn money for drugs.

But South Yorkshire Police are so pleased with the project to take women
off the streets that Streetreach were asked to address an Association of
Chief Police Officers national conference last July for all police vice
units across England and Wales.

The project's organisers now hope that the idea can be taken to other towns
and cities with a prostitution problem. Kevin Browne, operations director
of Reed in Partnership, said: "Everybody deserves a chance to change."