Flourishing industry hidden in plain sight

PROSTITUTION is alive and flourishing in a town near you.

Brazen internet advertising and discussion boards are strewn with opportunities for men to pay for sex without travelling too far from their homes.

Often these brothels are set up by Irish and European madams.

In others, they are quasi-prisons for sex trafficking victims, tricked into coming from Africa, South America and eastern Europe.

According to crime figures compiled by the Central Statistics Office, Dublin still leads the way in incidents of street-side prostitution, but across Ireland pimps are increasingly taking shelter in rented houses and apartments.

Five years ago, there was one brothel-keeping offence for every million people outside Dublin. Last year there were 20.

This is underlined by activity on the notorious Escorts Ireland website. In one hour last week, 50 individual women had their online profiles modified in order to entice men to pay for sex.

Of those, 19 were based in Dublin, eight were in Galway, and the remaining 23 were spread in twos and threes in counties from Donegal to Waterford.

These are from estimated total of 1,000 prostitutes working in Ireland today.

The isolated location of many new brothels has also provided cover a sinister feature of the trade — human trafficking.

Not all brothels are run by traffickers. Court records show many women set up in business without the coercion of criminals hanging over them.

However, trafficking has allowed pimps and brothel-keepers to meet customer’s demands in remote locations and maximising profit through coercion and violence.

Of 60 female trafficking victims, examined as part of a detailed study by the Government’s anti-trafficking unit in prostitution, 47 were held in off-street venues. Sixteen of the women were denied the right to have those they were forced to have sex with wear a condom.

Justice Minister Alan Shatter has said the issue of advertising on the internet can be difficult to police given it is international in nature, despite such notices being against the public order laws.

He told the Dáil that gardaí, through Operation Quest, do monitor and act on the open online advertising of prostitution.

This has not stopped or even handicapped the trade. Fines on conviction for brothel keeping range from €1,270 to €12,700.

However, in recent times the volume of cash seized as part of brothel raids dwarves the potential and suggests the benefits of acting outside the law entice criminals to stick with the trade.

Ruhama, the support and advocacy service for women working the sex industry, said the majority of referrals to its service involve women who are working indoors.

And its latest figures support the evidence of a shift from a traditionally urban trade to a cross-country crime.

Of 24 new referrals to its service in 2010, just four involved women based in Dublin.

“The reality today is that organisers of prostitution, including of course traffickers, rely increasingly on mobile phone and internet technology to advertise prostitution in Ireland.

“This means that prostitution is no longer restricted to large urban areas but is a presence now in even the smallest rural communities. It is happening in small communities in apartments, over shops and pubs — hidden in plain sight,” its annual report said.

Official crime figures present an even starker picture.

In 2005, a raid in Westmeath was the only move on a brothel outside Dublin.

The same year there were seven busts in Dublin, four in the north city centre and three in the south city centre.

In the intervening period, the incidents of brothel keeping in the capital has remained static. It rose to eight in 2008 and 2009, but dropped to five last year.

Meanwhile, across Ireland the amount of brothels shut down by gardaí jumped from one in 2005 to 62 in 2010. And this year it is again keeping pace, there were 20 incidents of brothel keeping in the first half of 2011.

Gardaí in Limerick have set a standard for cracking down on the sex industry. They closed down 17 brothels last year and recorded 49 incidents of prostitution.

It now rivals Dublin’s north inner city in terms of reports of this crime because in the first half of this year, there were 43 incidents of prostitution in Limerick, compared with 45 in the Dublin North Central division.

And this came at a time when a dedicated Garda operation was rolled out from Dublin’s Bridewell Station, with the support of Ruhama, to target men kerb-crawling for sex.

The figures tell a story but so too does the trail of women, and to a lesser extent men, arriving into district courts to face charges for managing sex dens.

A selection of cases from the past five months reveals the geographic spread of these operations but also the premises involved and the circumstances in which the women came to work here.

A 28-year-old Nigerian woman was fined €500 for running a small brothel out of a rented house in Midleton, Co Cork. She claimed to have been trafficked into Europe but has since set up a brothel of her own and a younger alleged trafficking victim was found on the premises.

A fellow country woman of hers was brought to court in relation to the running of four brothels in Dublin, Sligo, and Longford and trafficking women to work in them.

She again claimed to be victim of the human sex trade from Africa to Europe. The accused has said she got involved herself to pay back debts.

Two 20-year-old Slovakian women pleaded guilty to running a brothel out of a self-catering cottage on the grounds of a hotel in Killarney. They had just arrived and believed the activity was legal here.

A brothel was shut down on Washington Street in Cork, which had been run by two Hungarian women, one from Nicaragua, and one from Brazil. The youngest of the four was 21, the oldest was 33.

In 2010, three brothels were broken up by gardaí in one Sligo apartment block. Two more were found in nearby units.

Last December, a number of Eastern European women were set free after being trafficked to sell their bodies in openly advertised businesses in Meath, Dublin and Wexford.

In Romania, a gang was moved on after making more than €550,000 in profits from the sale of women in Ireland.

But coercion and trafficking is not the only explanation.

Elsewhere, four young women from Romania pleaded guilty to running a brothel at Merchants Road in Galway last month. They came into the city in an attempt to capitalise on the visitors, and cash windfalls, at the Galway Races.

The same month, another five Romanian women were fined for setting up in Letterkenny, Co Donegal, three had come at the beginning of the summer as an advance party to set up the operation.

All of these cases involved the brothel owners and pimps openly advertising on the internet.

In some cases the investigating gardaí were able to call the number, make an appointment and follow through with the arrest.

The amount of convictions is relatively high for this crime, compared with others. Figures just released from the CSO show that in the first half of 2010, there were 69 detected prostitution offences and 18 convictions.

But the success rate is much lower in cases of trafficking.

Gerardine Rowley of Ruhama said there are problems with the anti-trafficking legislation both here and in other countries.

It requires victim participation in the prosecution in order to gain full protection and this scares the victims of trafficking off.

Ms Rowley said investigators have been preferring to charge criminals with organising prostitution because it is easier to prove with technical evidence such as bookkeeping records, mobile phone accounts and punters’ statements.

Last year 71.8% of reported victims of trafficking in Ireland were said to be the victims of sexual exploitation. Nine out of 10 of these were women.

Ruhama referred 23 trafficking victims brought here for sexual exploitation to the gardaí last year, which was two-thirds of all cases which NGOs brought to the police.

Fifteen of these were from western Africa and four from other European countries.