Kevin Myers: Rampantte Rabbitte has to learn that moralising prohibitions upon human appetites never work
According to its justice spokesman, the Labour Party will introduce the "Swedish" laws on prostitution -- by which it is illegal to buy sexual favours, and the male client commits the crime, while the woman remains innocent. And so, thanks to Rampantte Rabbitte, we are back to sex again.
What is it about this subject that causes such widespread irrationality? Why is it laudable for me to pay a woman to massage my scalp or my feet, but if I pay her to massage the parts half-way between, it's disgusting and wicked and someone should dial 999? Yet if no money is involved, this middle-massage is regarded as healthy and normal, and when done by a man on a woman is now regarded as a mandatory part of sex.
However, this almost universal activity becomes uniquely taboo the moment that money is introduced into it. But I can pay for similar services to any other part of my body, and no one says a word. Odd, isn't it?
And once middle-massage becomes unlawful, it is usually controlled by criminals, and professional middle masseuses are usually beyond the protection of the law. Indeed, the whole business is so corrupted by prohibition that many middle masseuses are allegedly "trafficked" in the way that hairdressers and pedicurists seldom seem to be. Though I could be wrong: possibly containers with manipulators of tonsure and toe are smuggled in through Dublin docks at night, and their human cargoes secretly distributed to underground hairdressing and foot-rubbing parlours across the country.
At which point, enter the chorus of disapproving shrieks: I am making light of the trafficking of women as slave-prostitutes! I am trivialising the exploitation of the victims of organised rape! I am being flippant about a crime against humanity!
No I'm not. What I'm actually saying is that there is little or no involuntary trafficking of sex-workers, notwithstanding the allegations by John Cunningham of the Immigration Council of Ireland. He speaks of women and girls "being collected at Dublin Airport and taken to apartments where they were gang-raped for days". After being given "a few days to pull themselves together", they are put into brothels operating across Ireland.
Well, since every single aspect of this -- the kidnapping, the mass-rape, the forcible prostitution -- is already both against the law and comprehensively evil, why is another law needed? And anyway, most of his allegations are fable. A police survey in Britain was unable to find one single authentic case in which a foreign girl had been forcibly trafficked into the country for prostitution against her will. Allegations of kidnap and rape there have usually been made by illegal-immigrants in order to substantiate asylum-seeking claims.
Three years ago, the Swedish government appointed a judge, Anna Skarhed, to examine its anti-prostitution laws. Its directive stated that the inquiry could not suggest, or point in any direction other than that buying of sex should be criminalised. They chose the right person, for she ruled: "Based on a gender equality and human rights perspective . . . the distinction between voluntary and non-voluntary prostitution is not relevant."
This is classically Orwellian double-speak, in which the ideologically-defined abstracts of "equality" and "human rights" entirely invalidate the only absolute human concept, that of personal freedom. So, by Skarhedian standards, a working girl who genuinely chooses to provide middle massages for a living is no "freer" than a sexual galley-slave. Yes, she might think she is, and the galley slave will certainly think she is, but old Skarhed doesn't, and she's the thought-police and so her opinion counts.
Some women are "forced" into prostitution for economic reasons, goes the complaint. Possibly, says Pye Jakobsson, of the Rose Alliance of Swedish sex workers -- but is that any worse than having to clean up faeces in an old people's home?
Supporters of the Swedish whore-law declare that it has reduced the amount of prostitution there. But this is not a "fact", so much as a statement of faith. The Socialstyrelsen -- the Swedish Department of Health -- doesn't know how many sex workers in Sweden there are, and accepts that internet-driven prostitution is almost impossible to calculate or control.
Because this is usually a "crime" without a complainant, the claim that fewer clients are visiting middle masseuses is based on questionnaire-surveys of Swedish men. This surely is a criminological first: that a government tries to measure the levels of "crime" by asking the criminals to own up. Therefore -- no admission, no crime: QED. What a surprise.
The real intention of the Swedish law is certainly not to make life better for the middle masseuses. Anna Skarhed again: "We don't work with harm reduction in Sweden. Because that's not the way Sweden looks upon this. We see it as a ban on prostitution: there should be no prostitution."
Quite so. But history shows that moralising prohibitions upon human appetites never work. The likely consequences of the Swedish prohibition of prostitution will be that: a) prohibitionists feel very pleased with themselves, which of course is most important, and b) prostitution is driven deeper underground, so that yet even more middle masseuses will be controlled by violent pimps. How wonderful.
- Kevin Myers
Irish Independent
