Online prostitution soars amid lack of resources and will

IRISH prostitution, once confined to women selling their bodies on the streets to feed an addiction or stave off poverty is now a multi-million-euro industry involving up to 1,000 women selling sex over the internet on a regular basis.

Gardaí cannot police prostitution properly — firstly due to inadequate resources, secondly due to insubstantial legislation and thirdly due to a lack of political will. Therefore the women, claiming to be ‘escorts’ not prostitutes, operate with impunity and are able to charge upwards of e300 for an hour of sex with dozens of willing clients.

Those men find the women because the internet gives them mobile phone details, vital statistics of the women, scantily clad pictures of their ‘wares’, rates and graphic lists of services offered all at the touch of a button.