y friend works the graveyard shift in an internet café. During the day students and tourists make up the majority of the customers, but in the wee hours of the morning the clientele is rather different – taxi drivers taking a break to play online poker, obsessive gamers settling for the night and a large contingent of lonely old men, drunks, assorted freaks and johns.

Some are businessmen or farmers away from home for a night or two, but by far the majority of them – at least at this internet café – are young and drunk. Having failed to score in the nightclub next door, these men have decided to exchange cash for sex instead of calling it a night.
Conspiracy nuts, dipsomaniacs and the mentally unstable bother my friend not a jot, it’s the young johns that do. They call escorts on their mobile phones in the middle of the shop, loudly questioning the services on offer and treat the women on the end of the phone as dirt.
“Hey, hey you! Do you speak English? English! Are you fucking stupid? Do you do hard sports? How about fisting? What? What do you mean you’re finished for the night? Well, fuck you too, you fucking cunt!”
For safety reasons escorts don’t see drunk clients and most of them sense that that such a potential customer is an aggressive bully and turn him down, and so our hero continues to phone escort after escort until he finds one who agrees to see him. It is easy to imagine that a prostitute who is prepared to say yes must either be strung out, desperate for money or that she has no control over her clients.
If there was ever a subject I have mixed feelings about, it’s prostitution. I absolutely believe that every adult has the right to do whatever they want with their own body, be it multiple tattoos, multiple drugs or multiple lovers, but with sex work the issue of consent is incredibly murky.
I would have very little problem with sex work were all its practitioners something like Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle de Jour. Perhaps a little less glamorous, perhaps not earning big money servicing captains of industry, millionaires and minor royals, but exchanging sex for cash, in a safe environment, because he or she had freely chosen to do so.
This is rarely the case. By far the majority of people who sell sex do so because of poverty, addiction, coercion or abuse. Research has shown that many prostitutes were raped as children and over the course of their careers most will be physically assaulted or raped by clients. If a woman or man ends up as a sex worker because they have been emotionally, physically or sexually abused, then can they really be said to have consented to selling sex? I’m not so sure.
Then there are women who have been trafficked for sex. We have all read of women lured to the developed world with promises of jobs as nannies, cleaners, models or dancers only to be forced into prostitution by criminal gangs. These cannot even be called sex workers as there is no consent – they are victims of rape.
In the boom years, Ireland was a prime location for sex workers as Irish men were prepared to pay around twice as much for sexual services as men on the continent. Unfortunately this meant that Ireland was also attractive to the criminal gangs trafficking women from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. We may be deep in recession now the latest reports from those who work with victims of the sex trade has shown that neither trafficking nor the demand for prostitutes has gone away.
It is difficult to put a figure on the how many women have been trafficked into Ireland. In August, Ruhama, a charity that works with women in the sex industry, reported that almost half of their caseload was made up of trafficked women. Furthermore the 2009 report by the Immigrant Council of Ireland (ICI) found that around nine out of ten women working indoors as prostitutes are migrants. Some, of course, are here of their own volition, others are not, and some may have been coerced into the sex industry but they still do not fulfil the legal definition of ‘trafficked’.
While there are laws in place to deal with victims of trafficking and with traffickers this has proven ineffective, says Denise Charlton, chief executive of the ICI. Sex trafficking is a very hard crime to prosecute. The traffickers are organised and mobile and thus can generally stay a step or two ahead of the police. What’s more the victims have been brutalised, are terrified, may come from countries with corrupt legal systems or fear that if they co-operate with the authorities the gangs will take revenge on their families at home.
Because of this, the ICI has called on the government to criminalise the purchase, but not the sale of sex. A number of countries have already done so, most notably Sweden, who introduced such a law in 1999.
The UK introduced similar legislation this April although it doesn’t go as far as the Swedish law. If a pimp or trafficker does not control a sex worker then the judge hearing the case may decide the punter has not committed a crime whereas in Sweden buying sex is illegal and the circumstances around the purchase are irrelevant.
“What the Swedes would say about their legislation is that it’s been a declarative law. In one way it’s about decreasing sex trafficking but it’s also about saying it’s not okay for women and girls to be bought,” says Charlton.
In September a delegation including officials from the ICI, the department of justice, the health board and the police will be visiting Sweden to see how the law was implemented and how or if a similar law could be introduced here.
“Some of the Swedish findings are very positive, such as it does decrease the level of sex trafficking and there is huge public support for it,” notes Charlton.
What’s more, the legislation has proved to be an effective deterrent for johns – in 2008 only 8 percent of Swedish men had paid for sex compared to 13.6 percent criminalisation.
But who actually buys sex? Most reports have found that men who use prostitutes tend to be Mr Normal – average age, average looks, average income and probably in a relationship – although anecdotal reports from sex workers suggest that Irish punters are getting younger and more aggressive.
“There are very ordinary men buying women for all sorts of reasons,” says Charlton. “Some are buying the Pretty Woman fantasy and not really aware of the criminal world they are supporting. There are other men who are not buying sex, they are buying the right to do what they want and that’s very clear from the testimony of women who have exited [prostitution] or women who come to our service.”
A cursory glance of the reviews on a site like Escorts Ireland makes clear that many men who use escorts are lonely and what they are after is a “girlfriend experience” – sex with a woman who seems to like them and who wants to spend time with them. Some regard these appointments as dates and even believe the escorts are genuinely horny and selling sex for the sheer love of it.
These men do not intend to cause anyone any harm and as Charlton notes, education is enough to make many of them stop using prostitutes. However, there are those who don’t care. It is already illegal to have sex with a trafficked sex worker and chances are a man who is unconcerned about whether or not a woman is exploited is unlikely to change without a significant deterrent.
As the law currently stands a man who visits a sex worker he believes is trafficked can report this to the police without fear of reprisal, as long as he hasn’t availed of her services. If the law changes this will no longer be the case.
Laws that change social behaviour do work if they are visibly enforced. Witness the smoking ban for one. It seems likely that a law criminalising purchasing sex would discourage potential punters, but only if the police actually tried to catch them. If not, all it will mean is that cases of exploited or trafficked women are less likely to be reported to authorities.
Anything that discourages sex trafficking is a good thing. Sex shouldn’t be about exploitation and profit; it should be about pleasure, intimacy or even just mutual physical need. Most of all it should be consensual.
Consent can be obtained through charm, flattery, over the course of dinner, with a glass or two of wine or even by the slight manipulation of the truth – that’s called dating. Can it really can be bought and sold? Maybe, but it’s rare.
I’d like to believe in the happy hooker, but then I’d also like to believe that there is a monster in Loch Ness. Both are much discussed, but proof of the existence of either remains elusive. You have to ask why.