Eilis O'Hanlon: Where the hell are the guards when needed?
A moral fatwa on prostitution is not only dishonest but also counter-productive, writes Eilis O'Hanlon
It's very hard to make a TV documentary about prostitution without making it look salacious.
Prime Time didn't even try. The fast cutting, the nocturnal shooting, the street lights, the women in mini skirts -- the style of last week's much-hyped expose of the vice trade might not be to anyone's taste who's never had an interest in trawling the city for sleazy encounters with anonymous women; but for those who get their jollies from such activities, the style and imagery of the show must have been like crack cocaine. It was shot like a pop video, with the content to match.
Ten minutes in, viewers had been informed that there were prostitutes in Ireland and it was possible to contact them online. Hold the front page. Fifteen minutes in, they'd learned that if you went to the location named, the prostitutes would be there, offering something which the reporter, rather bizarrely, called "hard-core sexual services" (are there any other kind?) Twenty minutes in, we'd even discovered that a woman once jailed for brothel-keeping was still involved in the trade. OK, that's mildly intriguing. Flesh out with some hair-raising stuff about people trafficking, and we're done.
The Prime Time programme was the result of six months' work by the reporters involved, and it was a solid, albeit formulaic, piece of work. It named names. It raised questions, not least: where the hell are the guards when they're needed? For many viewers, it clearly hit the spot. Twitter was abuzz with indignation and praise as the programme went on. Many thought the only problem with the show was that it blanked out the faces of the male punters. Hardened Catholics and radical feminists were united in wanting their pound of flesh. They always end up in agreement when sex is on the agenda. In the following days, the documentary was also vigorously co-opted by the highly vocal Turn Off The Red Light campaign to adopt Swedish-style laws to criminalise men who visit prostitutes, coming as the programme did so close to the publication of a Dail consultation document on the issue. So far, so predictable.
To be honest, there's not even much point rehashing all the arguments at this stage. Minds are made up. The gap remains unbridgeable between those who think that a woman's body is her own and she should be free to sell it if she likes, and those who think that adult women, like children, need to be protected from their own choices if those choices happen to be morally repugnant to others.
All I know is this. Build a time machine and set the dial to 2112, 100 years from now. Step out into a Dublin with flying cars and personalised robots and Dart trains that run on nuclear power and everyone with a microchip implanted into their skulls so that their German overlords know what they're thinking at all times. The multitude of possible futures is infinite. But in every single one of them there will be women selling sex and men paying for it.
Prostitution always has and always will exist, in every society, every culture, every historical epoch, under every known political system. Talk about wiping it out is not only fantastical, it's fantastically pointless, no matter how many Prime Time viewers demand that Something Must Be Done.
It is possible to imagine a future in which prostitution is legalised, and the women who choose to work in the trade are helped to be as safe and healthy as possible; a future in which the only women selling their bodies are those who really have freely chosen to do so, and not been forced into it by pimps or traffickers. All that can be done. But no one ever seems to want that particular debate, because they're so incensed by salacious images that they concentrate on achieving nonsensical goals like stamping out prostitution altogether.
The problem with idealism is that there seems so little wrong with it on the surface. Accuse someone of being an airy-headed idealist and they just turn instantly into John Lennon: "Well, I'm not the only one." They're almost proud of their refusal to be constrained by reality. It makes them insufferably smug, because they have Righteousness on their side. That's apparent in the Turn Off The Red Light campaign. On their website are links to evidence from countries like Sweden, which criminalise the buying of sex, but nothing about the many countries, like Germany, which have gone down the route of legalisation.
Campaigners have also leapt upon the phenomenon of sex trafficking to cloud the argument, to make it seem as if prostitution and sex trafficking are inseparable, and to deliberately deny that there are women who freely choose to engage in sex work, or that trafficking can be tackled without taking away the rights of every woman who wants to work as a prostitute.
Here's some breaking news for the campaigners: sex trafficking is already illegal. The gardai have extensive powers to stamp it out; the courts can impose harsh sentences on those caught and convicted. There is no need for any new legislation to protect vulnerable women from trafficking, merely the enforcement of existing ones. These criminals should be caught, have their profits confiscated, and, following lengthy jail sentences, be deported back to their country of origin. There is barely a person in the country who doesn't feel the same way, prostitutes included.
But exploiting the issue of trafficking to drive through a moral fatwa on prostitution in its entirety is not only dishonest, but also counterproductive. According to Prime Time, women are being brought to every part of the country. The name of Limerick even flashed up at one point. This would be the same Limerick where, a couple of months ago, 21 men who approached female gardai posing as prostitutes had their names printed in the local newspapers as a deterrent to others.
The gardai in Limerick apparently can't catch the pimps operating openly in their own city, but can catch retired school teachers and unemployed eastern Europeans looking for a bit of female company on a cold autumn night. Not exactly Hawaii Five-O, is it? That's the scandal. How can RTE reporters locate and identify criminals involved in prostitution but the guards cannot?
Originally published in
