Women are victims, not perpetrators - Prostitution laws

NOT before time, a campaign has been launched to criminalise the men who use prostitutes for sex in Ireland.

Up to now, in a typically Irish solution for an international problem, this country has prosecuted the women who provide sex. Turning logic on its head, it is as if the men who prey on them, often violently and always abusively, for their own gratification are somehow the innocent victims of the women who engage in the oldest profession of all.

Having worked for over two decades with women affected by prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation, the Dublin-based organisation, Ruhama, deserves to be applauded for organising this campaign aimed at bringing Ireland into line with how prostitutes are protected in most other civilised countries. There can be little doubt that where matters of sexual mores are concerned, so-called sex workers continue to be viewed in this country as the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of what is now a highly organised Irish arm of what has grown into a sordid global business run by criminals. Organised gangs and pimps live off the money earned by an estimated 1,500 prostitutes here, most of them trafficked from eastern Europe and Africa.