Walk down Swansea's High Street after dark and even occasionally during the day and you're likely to come face to face with the stark problem of the city's street sex trade.
Women standing outside offering their services to men walking past, and drivers who crawl along the pavements flashing their lights, is a sad reality of the prostitution problem in this part of the city.
It was highlighted in a special Wales Online report at the end of 2017, which revealed women were charging £10 for sex, £5 more if it was without a condom.
The issue reached a point where parents claimed some sex workers had touted for business outside a school , while a woman living in the area said she was 'sick' of cars slowing by her and asking for 'business' .
South Wales Police introduced a multi-agency approach to help and protect sex workers, called the Sex Worker Organisational Team referral process.
But despite the efforts of police and other agencies, the problems persist.
Prostitution in Swansea...
The issue of sex work in the city is nothing new, however.
Elizabeth F. Belcham observes in her book, Swansea's Bad Girls - Crime and Prostitution, that sex work was rife in Swansea in 1858, in particular in The Strand, High Street and Wind Street.
The port of Swansea once provided a haven for ships and their crews, and The Strand and High Street had pubs on nearly every street corner.
The number of ships in port was reflected by the number of prostitutes plying their trade.
It got to such an extent that in 1866, there were 199 known prostitutes and 85 houses of 'ill repute' in the city, otherwise known as brothels.
Ms Belcham's book observes how Swansea police statistics published for 1876 stated there were once as many as 286 known prostitutes on the streets of Swansea, some of them as young as 13, until 1885 when the Criminal Law Amendment Act raised the minimum age to 16.
Drugs, violence and prostitution force landlord to shut High Street pub just months after it opened
Many had been cast out by their families aged 14 with no skills and without much education, and prostitution was often the easiest route for young women who had to stand on their own two feet.
The Cambrian newspaper, dated June 3, 1881, observed: "Not only abandoned women, but young girls who have scarcely emerged from childhood parade our streets by day and night in the most unblushing manner.
"In the evenings, Wind Street is sometimes impassably crowded with brazen-faced solicitants and half-drunken victims, and brutal 'bullies'. It does no good to drive them from the pavement or to pull down the hovels in which they live, they swarm again, as boldly as ever."
In 1879, to contain the problem, a three-mile limit restricted their movements to the inner city rather than allow "contamination" of other environs.
"Most women met their customers on the street, or in public houses from which they were increasingly to be excluded by the liquor laws. Many 'traded their favours' in the back alleys," Mrs Belcham wrote.
It often led to unwanted pregnancies, which would lead to them having to find someone who could 'help' them with 'remedies' or medical 'instruments', often insanitary, which would put their own lives at risk.
Venereal disease cases were also common, in particular at the ports, and Ms Belcham's book observes that the Swansea Hospital was inundated, with Swansea Workhouse Infirmary in 1871 recording the female venereal ward was overcrowded.
Woman featured in BBC documentary banned from Liverpool's red light district
It wasn't just the prostitutes and their customers suffering from sexually transmitted infections, however.
It seemed the problem was widespread, even in the more affluent parts of Swansea.
Mrs Belcham wrote: "The 'working girls' were not the only ones to have caught the disease. How many private doctors favoured a more respectable cause of death on the death certificate in upper or middle class homes is uncertain.
"Promiscuous men may have brought the disease home to the innocent wife."
Brothels were outlawed in the UK by the Sexual Offences Act 1956. In 1959, it was made illegal for a 'common prostitute to loiter or solicit in a street or public place for the purpose of prostitution'.
That hasn't stopped it happening though, not by a long shot.
