Sir – Your article covering the raid on a brothel in Marston (February 12) missed an opportunity to give your readers some vital context to the story.

I make no claim to know the women or their circumstances, but while you are quick to point out that they were arrested on suspicion of being illegally in the UK (effectively criminalising them in your readers’ eyes), there is a more sinister and unhappy side to these stories. Forced labour is a growing problem in the UK and trafficking women for sex work is on the increase. Women are duped into spending a lifetime's sum of money to be brought to the UK only to find they must pay back their ‘debt’ in whatever way their traffickers see fit. Setting up a brothel with Asian women and an older receptionist is sadly all too common; a clue to their desperate lives lies in your own article: ‘we found two sparsely furnished rooms with airbeds on the floor’ — hardly the lap of luxury.

I applaud the police’s advice to landlords to carry out regular checks on their properties, as a reduced pool of housing will help to make the jobs of pimps more difficult; however, I believe you have a duty as a responsible newspaper to give a more balanced account of the circumstances. Not once did you state that the three women may be victims, working in terrifying conditions, with no protection, no support and constantly at the whim of the men who control them and those who sleep with them.

I urge you to ensure future stories of this nature are handled with more care and given more context, since this type of reporting belongs more in the Daily Mail than in the pages of an enlightened Oxford paper.

Olivia Robinson, Temple Cowley