Prostitution: it’s time for honesty

It takes persistence to get to the truth about what’s going on in official Ireland. You have to dig through the files, look at the facts, analyse the detail. And too often either there isn’t time. Too many distractions make it difficult for us to paint the full picture. But in failing to do so, we leave ourselves all the more vulnerable to disinformation.

I always had an instinct that we were being fed a load of misleading propaganda on the issue of prostitution – and in particular in relation to the allegations of human trafficking in the sex industry in Ireland, which have surfaced in recent years. But there was no straightforward way of substantiating that gut feeling. Until now...
It is self-evident that immigrants – in Ireland as elsewhere – are vulnerable. I am all for people who want to protect the physical wellbeing of those outsiders, who land on these shores in the hope of making their homes here or creating a new life for themselves and their families. In addition, I fully support the efforts of anyone who genuinely sees cases of forced prostitution and intervenes on behalf of those who are being exploited.

Coercion of any kind in relation to sexual acts is utterly wrong – and that includes coercion to provide sex-for-sale services. To force or bully anyone to engage in prostitution is indefensible. Anyone who is guilty of this deserves to face the full rigours of the law. The most important word in relation to sex between adults is consent.
But of course that is not how the issue is viewed by people with a Roman Catholic religious agenda. They believe that ‘impersonal’ sex is sinful, shameful and wrong. In truth they generally believe that sex outside marriage is sinful and shameful and wrong, but they are generally too afraid of being dismissed as cranks and prudes to say that nowadays. Similarly, they are too crafty to say bluntly that they disapprove of prostitution because of its sexual element. Instead they have found a convenient smokescreen behind which they can mount a campaign against prostitution in general. Sex trafficking is that smokescreen.

Instead of expressing moral disapproval of what a woman who works as a prostitute does, the spectre of sex trafficking allows those who disapprove of prostitution on moral grounds to express their disapproval of something else entirely: that is, of the men who allegedly shunt women from one place to another forcing them to sell their bodies to (other) men who are prepared to pay for sex.
If you can create the impression that women are being trafficked into Ireland to engage in sex-for-sale activities the moral high ground is yours. The coup-de-grace which follows, is to blur the lines sufficiently, so that every non-Irish person who is engaged in prostitution here can be defined as having been ‘trafficked’. And this is what has happened. Non-nationals are indeed engaged in prostitution in Ireland. And they are now widely considered to have been traficked.

The agenda of religious groups in relation to prostitution dovetails with that of a certain strand of feminism, which sees sex-for-sale activities as a male conspiracy. Prostitution is just another form of exploitation of women by men. The people who buy sex are the guilty ones. The women who sell it are essentially innocent. If there is anyone on the ‘sale’ side who is guilty it is the unscrupulous, shadowy men who it is presumed profit from the sex-for-sale activities of the women they control.
There is of course an element of truth in this. Especially in situations where prostitution is illegal, it is often the case that pimps organise women to sell sexual services. And it is also true that men have a history of using their economic advantage to procure sexual services from women (sometimes within marriage, but that’s a different argument). 
But, as we will see, to use those truisms to argue that no one should be able to sell sexual services is to turn logic on its head. 

Turn Off The Blue Light is a new group, set up to lobby on behalf of sex workers in Ireland. TOTBL have taken the time to analyse recent cases in the Irish courts relating to prostitution. The figures they have produced completely refute any suggestion that there is sex trafficking on any scale in this country.
In all, over the past three years, 55 people have been convicted for brothel-keeping. According to TOTBL, all but two of these individuals admitted that they themselves were working as prostitutes.
Under the law at present, a woman operating on her own cannot be charged with running a brothel. Three women operating together can. Far from being pimps exploiting vulnerable women, those convicted of brothel-keeping were themselves women who had decided to operate together as prostitutes, in twos and threes, for safety.

Of the two charged who did not work as prostitutes, one was a woman. In three years, again according to Turn Out The Blue Light, only one male ‘pimp’ has been charged – a young man from the Czech Republic, who had been working here as a carpenter before the banking crisis and the collapse of the construction industry. Out of work, he tried his hand at running a brothel. The women who worked for – or perhaps it was with – him described him in court as ‘nice’. He may, of course, have been a swine and they may have been afraid to say so, but there is no evidence to that effect and we have therefore no reason to assume it.

This is not necessarily a complete picture. Historically, unscrupulous men have run sex-for-sale operations here. For example, a Dublin man, Martin Morgan, who fits the profile of an old-style pimp, recently lost his appeal against his conviction for running a city-centre brothel. His original conviction, in May 2008, falls just outside the three year period covered by the TOTBL survey.
That said, Turn Off The Blue Light express the argument against clamping down on prostitution in very convincing terms.
“There is currently a Turn Off The Red Light (TORL) campaign being run by an alliance of organisations,” they explain. “They say they want to end prostitution and sex trafficking and ‘the solution’ is to criminalise the purchasers of sex. We believe the real agenda is to have their own ideology on sex work enacted as law.

“Further criminalisation would drive the sex industry deeper underground and make it more dangerous for everyone. Our priority is the well-being of persons in sex work, not any moral agenda, thus we strongly oppose the TORL campaign.”
Agreed. But why?
“Criminalising the buying of sex would only serve to drive sex work further underground and make it more dangerous for sex workers and their clients. Policies of suppression, whether focused on sex workers or their clients, have negative consequences for those who trade sex.”  

And now we get to the heart of the matter.
“There is nothing wrong with someone paying for sexual services,” Turn Off The Blue Light continues. “Sex worker clients are being demonised by anti-prostitution campaigners, who want society to view them as men intent on harming and abusing women, but this is untrue. Sex worker clients are all sorts of people, but most would only want to pay a consenting adult for sexual services and equally most treat sex workers with respect.

“It would be a gross infringement of civil liberties to prosecute adults for privately paying other consenting adults for sex. Same-sex sexual activity was only decriminalised in this country in 1993 and we don’t want to take a step backwards now. The government have no right to impose a moral agenda on the private sex lives of consenting adults.”
This, then, is the meat of the argument. If your real agenda is protecting people who are exploited, then the key conclusion advanced by Turn Off The Blue Light is that outlawing those who pay for sex will make the situation worse, not better.
“Sex worker clients will often report their concerns to the Gardaí if they encounter a sex worker who they are not sure is working of his/her own free will,” they insist. “A law criminalising the clients of sex workers would clearly discourage them from doing this and make it harder for the authorities to identify exploited or trafficked sex workers.
“Real crimes, like violent attacks on sex workers, would be less likely to be reported to the Gardaí, and health initiatives would find it harder to reach out to sex workers.” 

TOTBL also challenge the impression that people who pay for sex are uniformly degenerate. Many men, for example, care for wives or lovers after they have been victims of brain damage or dementia and don’t want to get involved in a romantic relationship – but feel entitled to sex. Equally there are people who are themselves victims of one ailment or another and whose likelihood of attracting anyone into a loving sexual relationship is greatly diminished as a result.
“There is the issue,” Turn Out The Blue Light says, “that for certain groups of people, such as disabled people, having access to a sex worker is sometimes the only way they can enjoy sex. To deny a person this, or make them out to be a criminal for wanting it, is an abuse of their human rights.”

And on the subject of trafficking?
“The situation regards trafficking has been greatly exaggerated in recent years by anti-prostitution organisations for their own motives,” they state. “This is not to say that trafficking does not exist, but there is no justification for a complete ban on buying sexual services because of it. Domestic violence occurs in marriage but there is no law to ban marriage.

“Problems within the sex work industry, like trafficking, can be effectively dealt with by the relevant laws for dealing with these specific problems.”
In other words, kidnapping is against the law. So is slavery. So is violence against a person. Sex trafficking is adequately covered by those laws. 
As for prostitution, there is no earthly possibility of eliminating it.
Rather that putting sex workers at any greater risk, we should be legislating properly to create a framework in which people who want to – or need to – sell or buy sex can do so in Ireland legally and safely.

It is time to end the hypocrisy and cant.