Crime without punishment?
AFTER this article hits the newsstands this morning, a cohort of prostitutes, website operators, and punters will take to “escort” message boards to complain about “bleeding hearts” who say all prostitutes are the victims of trafficking or are forced by circumstance into the sex trade.
Accusations of “sensationalism” and driving the “anti-prostitution agenda” as well as responses such as “It’s my body, I’ll do what I want with it” and “I am an intelligent, educated woman who chooses to do this” will be churned out.
But of the 1,000-odd women regularly offering sex for sale in this country, how many would say they have chosen to do it? How many would say they had other options but decided “no, I’d be happier having sex with up to 10 strangers every day for as little as €50 per half hour”. I would venture very few.
According to Ruhama, the organisation which works with women in prostitution, the reasons women get involved in the sex industry vary.
It has attributed the reasons to “background” issues such as debt, a lack of alternative opportunities of making money, lack of education, mental health issues, abusive background, addiction issues, and low self-esteem. It has also said the women could be involved in current abusive relationships that coerce them into prostitution.
Many governments have begun to decriminalise the women and crack down on the men who use them for sex. That is because the authorities are realising that while many women may not be trafficked in the strictest sense of the word, circumstances have forced them into a world where they have little other choice.
As well as the stigma of having to sell their body to whoever is willing to pay the price, there is also the inherent danger the women are putting themselves in.
With literally every appointment in the isolation of a short-let apartment or a hotel room, the prostitute is opening the door to a man they don’t know and putting themselves in a position from which they can never guarantee they will walk away unscathed.
The Croatian prostitute who met Billy Keogh in a Waterford hotel room might have thought it was just another appointment, the second of up to 10 she could expect to have that day. But when, during sex, he began choking her and demanding she take off the condom she put on him, she rapidly realised she was in trouble and there was nobody there to help her.
When she refused to take it off he ripped it off himself telling her: “That’s a better fuck. You’re fucked up now.” When she struggled he threatened to throw her out the hotel bedroom window.
The scant regard he had for her emerged during his trial. “If the girl was good looking I’d have no problem with having sex without a condom but this girl wasn’t great looking,” he said at the time.
That comment encapsulates the view many men take of prostitutes. They don’t want to know their history, why they are making themselves available for demeaning sex with multiple partners, or whether they are doing so against their will. All they care about is getting high-quality sex for their cash.
It is true that prostitution is never likely to be eradicated. Men’s demand for sex means there will always be a market. But that is not to say that authorities should neglect to do all they can to make it harder for the industry to thrive.
The 120 garda raids on brothels across the country last month marked a significant escalation by authorities to tackle prostitution.
The raids were specifically targeted at gathering information on the relatively small number of individuals organising the brothels and thereby earning most from the sex trade. They came just weeks after RTÉ’s Prime Time programme had shown the extent to which those individuals transported women around the country.
Gardaí did not just target the cities but also large towns in counties such as Tipperary, Kilkenny, Carlow, Waterford, and Wexford. At each property, they checked on the women’s welfare and tried to establish if any were the victims of trafficking. As and when the kingpins of the operations are collared, the women are likely to become witnesses in their prosecution.
Hopefully, what also may emerge are the number of suspected victims of human trafficking gardaí encountered during the investigation.
After just 20 raids carried out in the North at the same time as the Garda operation, the PSNI was able to confirm it had identified three suspected trafficking victims and taken them to safety.
In the immediate aftermath of the Garda operation a spokesman did say they were targeting groups “making profits from vulnerable members of society across the island of Ireland” and that their policy was to treat the women as victims as well as witnesses. However, there was no mention of whether they had identified any trafficking victims.
There is little doubt that victims of human trafficking are being brought into this jurisdiction and forced to provide sex.
The latest report from the Department of Justice’s Anti-Human Trafficking Unit said there were 57 alleged victims of human trafficking — including 13 children — reported to gardaí in 2011 and that of those, 37 were victims of sexual exploitation, two were victims of both labour and sexual exploitation, and five were victims of “uncategorised exploitation”.
However, in spite of that large number, last year — like every other year — there were little or no prosecutions for the explicit crime of bringing women and children into the country against their will to provide sexual services. At present there is one woman awaiting trial for allegedly trafficking one person into the State as well as six counts of controlling prostitution.
The low conviction rate beggars belief when one considers that, in its last annual report, Ruhama said it engaged with a total of 80 women in 2010 who had been trafficked into Ireland or sought refuge here after being smuggled to another country in Europe. Of those 26 were new cases in that year.
The 80 trafficking victims originated from 18 different countries. The majority came from Nigeria (61%), with Romania, Cameroon, Albania, Moldova, and Ghana the next significant cohort. Other women came from countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia.
But one should not be fooled into thinking it is only the movement of foreign women from one jurisdiction against their will.
“Trafficking is not necessarily across borders,” according to Ruhama.
“Smuggling is across borders. Therefore Irish women can be trafficked too and there needs to be a greater understanding of that. We need to start looking at the Irish women who have been duped into prostitution, coerced and deceived.
“Trafficking is movement of people by means or force even within borders for the purposes of labour or sexual exploitation. We would believe the majority of women in Ireland fall under the victims of trafficking to some degree. There are the extreme cases where a woman is kidnapped and forced into sex and receives no money. However, there is also a level of trafficking involving a woman’s position of vulnerability, as talked about in the UN protocol that defines trafficking and in the Convention of Europe.
“They talk about a woman being vulnerable through a lack of education, a lack of opportunities or an abusive background, who have been coerced and brought to Ireland and sold a wonderful story.”
One does not imagine that sex trade victims are working in city centre operations where they are, in addition to legitimate services, expected to provide sexual services to streams of punters.
Yet according to Ruhama, the majority of the Chinese women it has supported have been involved in prostitution “in what are referred to as massage parlours”.
Those Chinese women, in particular, are brought into the country through people smugglers often using bogus student visas.
With limited English to make them employable and in order to repay a significant debt — up to €50,000 — to those who brought them in, they have no alternative but to work in the massage parlours.
Read more here about Ireland's growing sex industry.
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