Held captive with drugs, degradation and abuse
An increasing number of young women (and boys) in Ireland are being coerced into prostitution. Carol Hunt reports
Sunday November 16 2008
MY neighbour finds my surprise highly amusing. Noting that a previous apartment I had lived in had been "outed" as a Chinese massage/sex parlour (after I had left, I hasten to add), he wonders why I should be surprised that a neighbouring house is currently being used as a brothel.
"Which one is it?" I ask, walking outside with the phone glued to my ear.
"The one with the red door, just near the end," he says.
Seemingly there are two Spanish girls working from there, but thankfully, as far as he knows, no pimps or managers.
"And there's another one just around the corner," he adds, insisting his information comes purely from gossip at the local and not through any personal experience of these dens of ill repute.
He rings off singing, "Oh, the hooker is a person in your neighbourhood ... "
Interesting, maybe, but certainly not news.
Last week I picked up a book called Prostitution and Irish Society 1800-1940 by historian Maria Luddy, a fascinating read which details the tragic and often farcical manner in which anything to do with women and sex was/is treated in Ireland.
She recounts how, in the late Eighties, shops in Galway refused to put up posters advertising her lecture because they contained the
words "prostitution" and "Ireland" in the same sentence.
In the first years of the 20th Century, some Irish suffragists (today we'd call them feminists) tried to focus attention on the double standard of sexual morality, which ignored the men involved in the purchase of sexual favours while simultaneously condemning women.
Nationalist (and Catholic) Ireland responded by asserting that "the only way in which Irish men could be brought to immoral sexual behaviour was to join the British Army".
Don't laugh, but it was assumed that prostitution, like tobacco and potatoes, was a purely British import. The girls in the Monto (Dublin's notorious and semi-legal red-light district on the east side of O'Connell Street) serviced only immoral, Protestant, English boys -- and their King, if rumour is to be believed.
So you can imagine the shock the new bosses of Eire Inc got in the Twenties when they realised that the number of prostitutes on the streets had actually increased after Independence.
Mind you, a few of them may have had something to do with those figures, as it was noted, "When the Senate is open, the Monto is full."
Who to blame now?
Certainly not the men themselves, and, as the British were no longer here, that just left the women. Purity became a primary characteristic of the ideal Irish woman, and women were forced to return to the home as wives and mothers so that they would not corrupt the good young men of Ireland with their seductive wiles.
One idiot -- Commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, General William Murphy -- even went so far as to suggest that every woman who lived in a single room should have her dwelling described as a brothel.
Obviously the suffragists failed miserably in their attempt to get the men to take some responsibility for the fact that prostitution exists, and it has taken a century for their point to be officially accepted.
Last Monday, Mary O'Rourke, TD and patron of Ruhama -- a voluntary body that works with women involved in prostitution -- launched a TV advertising campaign aimed at men who solicit sex from victims of trafficking in Ireland.
Some of you may be surprised to hear this, but it is now a criminal offence to pay to have sex with a woman (or a boy, I assume). You can be fined or jailed if you're caught.
Those of us who believe that what two people do in private behind closed doors is their own business, and certainly not that of our Government, may be a tad affronted by this -- but there's a very good reason for it.
Just last week in Peterborough in England, six brothel bosses and sex traffickers were locked up for a total of 52 years after forcing a 16-year-old girl from Slovakia into a life of prostitution. It's the beginning of a growing recognition in Europe of the need to address the horrific problem of sex trafficking.
Earlier last week Deputy O'Rourke told me that her relationship with Ruhama dates back to that brief period when she was Minister for Health -- before Albert got his hatchet out. At that time Ruhama's aim was purely to get women off the streets, but since then their emphasis has shifted to try to cope with the terrible problem of women who are trafficked into the country and made to work as prostitutes against their will.
"Have you seen the ad?" Deputy O'Rourke asks.
"It shows a lovely girl who is persuaded to come to Ireland because of all the opportunities here -- better pay and conditions and all that -- but then she's met by this guy and that's the end of her life. It's not just the sex, it's the terrible abuse that these women are faced with and the fact that they have to keep earning or they will suffer even more."
The life to which these immigrant women are subjected echoes that of a previous century, when so many Irish women emigrated to London, Boston and New York in search of a better life and ended up living -- and dying -- as sex workers.
Deputy O'Rourke explains that the gardai have been given special in-house training to deal with this new type of crime. "They've been fantastic," she says. This view is verified by a woman I know who works with the Rape Crisis Centre in Dublin.
The gardai are thrilled that there is now legislation in place to help them tackle this problem.
And, by God, is it needed!
Last week, a friend who works with at-risk women related to me some of the stories he had heard from the people he worked with.
"The details of the physical and sexual degradation these women experience are unbelievable," he said.
"The women are not viewed as being real people with feelings and lives. They are drugged and dehumanised, which makes it possible for men -- and, increasingly, Irish men -- to abuse them without conscience."
There will always be people who will want to, or need to, pay for sex. And there will always be men and women willing to sell their bodies as commodities. That's their choice. C'est la vie.
But what the TV ad released by Ruhama last week is trying to get across is that, in an increasing number of cases, women (and young boys) are not choosing to become prostitutes, they are being forced to have sex with strangers against their will.
No matter how pliant and willing they may appear to the man buying their bodies, it is not their choice. Ergo; it is rape.
How many men would want that on their conscience?
