A game of two halves?

Laiza is one of the most popular girls on the Escort Ireland website, but even she gets some bad reviews from punters. “Overall had a good time but not my cup of tea or type,” writes a user calling himself ‘deafboy’.

“Like us all, Laiza still has a bit to learn – OWO would be nice!” writes another client, referring to unprotected oral sex. ‘Armanidublin’ is more positive in his review of the prostitute’s performance: “The truth is Laiza genuinely enjoys what she does and really gets into the whole experience.”
Escort Ireland is a slick, regularly-updated website that can get you time with a hooker within just a few clicks. Truth be told, it’s probably at the classier end of the seedy business of prostitution. But that’s not saying much – elsewhere it advertises the Irish ‘tour’ of a 40-year-old English prostitute.
The site has listings for around 350 female escorts, as well as 10 male and one transsexual. It makes no pretence at being anything but a sex contact site. But because it’s run from outside Ireland, the Gardaí are powerless to act against it, and other sites like it.
The internet is just one aspect of a massively changed sex industry in this country – and Ruhama, an organisation established to help prostiitutes get off the game, is trying to work out how to deal with the difference onthe ground.
MASSIVE INVESTIGATION
Ruhama volunteers have been working with prostitutes on Dublin’s streets since the late 1980s, and have witnessed the shift from traditional street-walking to a more sophisticated, and less conspicuous, indoor trade. Their van still travels the street to bring volunteers face to face with prostitutes, but the fact is that more women have moved indoors.
“We’re meeting a large number of non-national women working as prostitutes,” says Gerardine Rowley of Ruhama, “and it’s estimated that 90% of the women working in indoor prostitution are non-nationals. It’s a challenge for people like us because it’s moved off the streets. Indoor prostitution has expanded massively in Ireland over the past few years. This is a very lucrative area – street prostitution still exists, but the women are not quite as visible.”
There’s little doubt that technology has made it easier for sex workers to operate indoors. In general, it is a safer way for women to operate. But it can also make it easier for pimps, where they’re involved, to keep their girls under even greater control. One senior Garda source who’s been involved with major investigations into prostitution outlined the scale of the problem. “I’d say 75% of contact with prostitutes in Ireland now is through the Internet,” he told hotpress. “There’s a very lucrative business there.”
“Every business and every area of criminality has benefited from the Internet,” says Gerardine. “Prostitution is one area where it’s a challenge to get legislation to address the extent of crime. We need a review of the reality of prostitution: what are we dealing with and what’s the extent of it in 2007?”
There is another dimension to the issue. Leaving moral arguments out of it, should the State legislate at all for what happens between consenting adults, as long as it is free of the kind of violent or exploitative actions which are in any event covered by other, existing legislation? Ireland’s attitude to sex has changed enormously. So has the attitude of women, who are far less likely now than fifteen years ago to be judgemental about the sex that previously would have been considered beyond the pale. Certainly, the pervasive spread of ‘raunch culture’ through society in recent years is changing attitudes to prostitution and the sex industry.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the popularity of lapdancing clubs across the country, which are often attended by women as well as men.
In 2004, the Gardaí launched a massive investigation into suspected links between some of these clubs and prostitution. Special attention was paid to the numbers of foreign nationals working in these clubs.
CULTURAL BARRIERS
Despite the resources and time put into the investigation, a Garda source admitted that the lack of resulting prosecutions has been disappointing. But he said it had helped to highlight the issue. “What we established, that we hadn’t been aware of, was that girls were being brought in here by the clubs, so that effectively they couldn’t move without the clubs say so.
“We discovered one particular club where the customer would approach the owner and pay €600. He’d leave an address or go to a hotel room that was either pre-booked, or was booked by the club. The girl would be sent out by taxi to meet him, and picked up later.”
Many of the clubs work on a money-per-dance basis. “If the girl’s not asked to perform any private dances, she doesn’t get paid. The problem with this is it leads to competition between the girls,” says the officer. “They’re all selling the same thing – so it’s down to a girl and what she’s prepared to do, how far she’s prepared to go.”
There are those who insist that lapdancing is a respectable activity. Angels is one of the country’s most famous strip clubs. It emerged from the Operation Quest investigations with a clean record. Joe Moore, the manager there, insists that the negative perception of strip clubs is, in many cases, down to prejudice.
“There’s an underground here [Ireland] of sex, of prostitution, of people potentially being forced to get involved in sex for sale. That’s a hard thing for us, because we’re constantly defending ourselves. All I can do, and all I have done, is try and make it clear to everyone who comes into Angels, that no matter what you might think when you’re getting in here, you’re not getting sex.”
Joe believes that Operation Quest has helped to ensure better standards in the industry. “What kills me is that if somebody does something wrong with one club, everybody gets it. The fact is that nobody wants to protect the girls from exploitation more than I do.”
The cultural barriers faced by recent immigrants have made matters more difficult for both the Garda and groups like Ruhama.
“What we were dealing with in 2004 was Latvian and Lithuanian girls,” revealed our Garda source. “But as the EU has expanded to take in those countries, we find the girls are being sourced from further and further afield, because they’re cheaper. So we had girls from as far away as Mongolia and Brazil – they come here with no English, and just one asset.”
Garda investigations in the area have been re-focused to look at what they can do about escort sites and other online means of contact with the sex industry. Meanwhile Ruhama will continue to work to get prostitutes out of the business, and Joe Moore will still be trying to separate his club from negative public opinions of his trade. But he seems resigned to failure.
“Lapdancing is obviously part of the sex industry... we can’t get away from that. We’ll always be put in that bracket.”