Picture posed by model

Police might have cracked the problem of kerb crawling, but sex is still openly for sale in Medway - behind closed doors.

Now the officer who headed the major drive to tackle the worrying street worker trade says brothels could be next on the hit list.

Safe Exit was launched last year and police now claim 80 per cent of the women they knew of who were working the streets of Chatham and Rochester have left the trade.

Earlier this month, at the launch of the scheme, Insp Gary Woodward, who is spearheading the Safe Exit scheme, said he was also looking into tackling the problem of brothels.

He said: "As far as brothels are concerned, it is a completely different dynamic. The kind of girl that works in a brothel will not work on the street and vice-versa, they don’t tend to be drug-dependent and, of course, we move into other issues like exploitation and trafficking.

"I’m working on brothels as well, but not as part of Safe Exit in its truest sense, although there’s no reason why we cannot use some of the things we learn and some of the things we develop with Safe Exit with brothels."

Many of the businesses pose as massage parlours and are advertised in the Medway News published by Kent Regional News and Media Group which is mostly free through families’ letterboxes.

Our reporters contacted the numbers advertised and were openly offered a range of sexual services for sale. One of the premises is in busy Gillingham reporters where a young man was seen leaving and uttering: "I needed that."

Stephen Lowe, commercial director for KRNM, said he was unwilling to comment on the matter. The KM Group, which runs the Medway Messenger Series and the Medway Extra, refuses to carry this type of advertising.