'I will end you': The dangers of selling sex in Ireland
Barbara Babeurre says she felt safest working in Germany, where both selling and buying sex are legal, regulated and taxed.
“You don’t know who I am in Limerick. I will end you,” the man spat down angrily into Barbara Babeurre’s face as she attempted to push him out the door, trying not to inhale the stench of his armpits.
Seconds earlier her friend, a fellow sex worker, had run from her room and pleaded for help after the client went berserk, shouting and throwing anything he could grab at her after she asked him to shower properly before sex.
“I thought he was going to beat the shit out of me,” Ms Babeurre said.
“I told him I’d call the guards when he refused to leave and he said, ‘what about you? You’re working together, what you do is illegal. It's a brothel.’
“I was shocked. That’s the first time anyone ever said that to me.”
Ms Babeurre eventually forced the man to leave the flat the two women were renting in Limerick but they were very shaken by the incident.
But danger is currently an occupational hazard of selling sex in Ireland.
The day before the attack, eight men arrived with one client who had booked to see Ms Babeurre, but luckily, her screening system allowed her to see the gang before she gave them access to the flat.
“They would have raped me,” she said.
“In December, my friend was raped at knifepoint by two men in her hotel room and beaten up when she couldn’t open the safe, which was empty anyway. That was in a four-star hotel in Ballsbridge.
“In Cork, a few years ago, a provider was raped, tied up with cables from the TV, beaten up and left for dead in the bathtub where they had almost drowned her.
"There was a gang targeting sex workers like that, raping them and robbing them. One person would book an appointment and they’d then let more men into the room.”
The Sex Workers Alliance Ireland (SWAI), a peer-led service for anyone who sells sex, estimates that violence against sex workers has increased by 92% since the End Demand model was introduced in 2017.
The Sexual Offences Act 2017 prohibited the purchase of sex and increased penalties for workers sharing a premises.
The maximum fine on summary conviction for ‘brothel keeping’ increased from €1,000 to €5,000 and the maximum jail term doubled from six months to one year.
A conviction on indictment (which requires a Jury trial), remained unchanged by the act with a maximum fine of €10,000 remaining and/or a maximum five-year jail term.
SWAI has been calling for the legalisation and regulation of sex work which they say will better protect workers.
Ms Babeurre agrees. She has worked in Germany, France, the UK, her native Czech Republic and Ireland.
She said that she felt safest working in Germany, where both selling and buying sex are legal, regulated and taxed.
Criminalising women for working together — labeled as brothel-keeping — is endangering the lives of sex workers, she believes.
But she also believes that criminalising the buyer endangers sex workers by pushing the trade further into the shadows.
“What would have happened to my friend if she was alone that day? He could have seriously hurt her, or worse,” Ms Babeurre said.
“Everyone is selling their body or their brain in some way anyway. Why is it legal to make porn in most countries but illegal to do this?”
Business was good on Ms Babeurre’s last trip to Cork before the Level 5 lockdown. She made €1,650 in one very good day but on another day she earned nothing when all six clients cancelled.
But since returning to Ireland in January after spending Christmas at home with her family in Prague, business has plummeted by 70%-80%.
“I think this time people are more worried [about Covid-19]. And a lot of my regulars are home with their kids because the schools are closed,” she said.
“What I used to make in one day takes me four days now.”
Over lockdown, she has mostly stayed in AirB&Bs or apartments rented directly from landlords where she faces less scrutiny about her reasons for travelling than in hotels.
Recent trips to Cork and Dublin have been “absolutely dead” and business was not great either in Galway, Belfast or Newry.
She was waiting for the government announcement on whether the lockdown would be extended and plans to return to Prague in early February until public health restrictions ease here again.
Despite the current difficulties, she said that she loves her job and the freedom it ordinarily gives her — financially and to travel.
But every day she gets horribly abusive messages or phone calls from men she refuses to see.
She said that the misogyny and prejudice against sex workers is horribly visible in any online forum — whenever a sex worker speaks out, so do ugly voices, saying that women who sell sex and were attacked “deserved” it.
‘I hope you get coronavirus and the doctor gives your ventilator to someone else because you’re a bitch. You should be shot,’ is just one of the messages Ms Babeurre received this week.
And last week, she was sent threatening messages telling her that she would die alone. The sender also said that she would never have children ‘because no man wanted children with a whore and no child wanted a whore for a mother’.
“That really hurt because I have two children at home,” she said. “But I’ve been working for nine years so I have built up a wall."
“Some people think that they can treat you any way because they’re paying you.
“I screen every number on the website Ugly Mugs [where sex workers share details of dangerous or abusive clients] to check if that number has been complained by other providers before.”
Her children are with family at her apartment in her beloved hometown Prague, which is like a mixture of Paris, Budapest and Rome, she said, but friendlier, greener, with an East London vibe and better beer.
Ms Babeurre’s route into sex work was meandering. When the former fashion model escaped an abusive relationship in Prague, she was desperate for money and agreed to do some semi-naked ‘glamour’ shots.
Her naked photos led to pornography producers offering her work. She declined until her landlord suddenly announced that his son was moving in so she and her children must move out, and she once again needed money fast to secure a new home.
After working for almost two years in porn, she agreed to sex work.
She has worked in Ireland for more than one year now, splitting her time mostly between Ireland, Prague, London, and Edinburgh.
“A lot of people don’t understand but I really like what I do,” she said. “I don’t see someone if I don’t respect them or click with them."
“Everything is so easy to get online it feels like humans have become disposable. If you want to meet someone for sex you can find them online in five to 10 minutes. We don’t have the same connections with people outside our friend groups anymore.
“I dated three clients in the past seven years but for the past two years I’ve been single.
“With online dating, men often treat you like an escort anyway, expecting sex without even going for coffee first. Why would I do that when I could charge €400 for that instead?”
