Ban buying sex says Irish review
Ireland should criminalise purchasers of sexual services and decriminalise those selling them.
The Oireachtas Justice Committee, which opened for submissions on reforming Ireland’s prostitution laws almost a year ago, reported its findings to the government last week.
The current laws in Ireland have been criticised for failing to adequately protect victims of human trafficking.
While it is not illegal to buy or sell sexual services in Ireland, it is illegal to buy sex from a person who has been trafficked.
However, an absence of strict liability enables defendants to deny culpability based on ignorance about a person having been trafficked – eg by saying they didn’t know.
And there is also ambiguity in the current legislation about how to define a “trafficked person”.
The ‘Swedish model’, from which the committee’s recommendations deride, makes provision in law for a summary offence which penalises the purchase, or any attempt to do so, of sexual services from another person through prostitution.
The aim is to reduce the stigma and help those involved in sex work to seek help from support services and the Gardaí, hte Irish police service, also decriminalise those who sell sexual services.
Committee chairman, David Stanton TD, said: “The committee finds persuasive the evidence it has heard on the reduction of demand for prostitution in Sweden since the introduction of the ban on buying sex 1999.
“It concludes that such a reduction in demand will lessen the incidence of harms associated with prostitution and – particularly in view of the predominance of migrant women in prostitution in Ireland – the economic basis for human trafficking into the State for the purpose of sexual exploitation.”
The committee received over 800 submissions from 24 organisations and individuals which iterated the link between prostitution and organised crime.
It also revealed some other worrying statistics.
Of 134 people sex-trafficked in Ireland in the three previous years, one in four of them was a child.
Under the current legislation, it is also incredibly hard to secure a conviction against those charged with soliciting, and in 2012 only three out of 46 prosecutions were successful.
Conviction rates are similarly low for brothel keeping, with only 8 prosecutions from 47 arrests last year.
The committee has also recommended other legal reforms, including tougher penalties for traffickers and pimps, granting anonymity to witnesses in cases of sexual exploitation, and making grooming of a child or vulnerable person a criminal offence.
Premises advertised as massage parlours should, the committee found, be subject to regulation and inspection.
Accessing websites advertising prostitution should be subject to the same penalties as those that advertise or distribute child pornography.
Sarah Benson, chief executive of Ruhama, a charity which works with victims of trafficking and women in the sex trade, welcomed the committee’s proposals.
“The recommendations of this report are a validation of the need to shift the focus of the law from those who are vulnerable and exploited in prostitution, who need support and not convictions – towards the sex buyers.”
The committee’s proposals, however, have been viewed with caution by the Sex Workers Alliance in Ireland (SWAI), which claims that by homogenising the needs of trafficked and non-trafficked persons in an attempt to curb prostitution, the authorities will fail to protect adequately those involved and push sex work back underground.
SWAI said it was against human trafficking of any kind but supports a harm reduction approach in relation to sex work but “we know this change in the law will put sex workers civil, human, safety and health rights at risk.”
But either way, at the present time, and with the current legal framework, lives are at risk.
As a result, Justice Minister Alan Shatter, who will now consider the report’s findings, has been urged by members of all the political parties in the committee to implement changes to the current system as soon as possible.
Banning the purchase of sex is a populist but futile,disingenuous means of dealing with prostitution.Hasn’t worked in the United States despite decades long criminalisation of both puchaser and seller. Hasn’t worked in Sweden , Norway or Iceland.For example, the Sweden HumanRights Forum of November 2012 confirmed 166 trafficked children (half for sexual exploitation) between the years 2008 and 2011 which is a worse sex trafficking per capita stat than Ireland(Google Gotenberg 166 children the local) . even the Swedes don’t believe that the Swedish legislation has any effect – TORL correctly quote the Jari Kuosmanen 2008 survey of 1,134 people that over 70% of respondents support the criminalisation of clients ; However, TORL don’t publicise that nearly 60% of the same respondents want the legislation replaced n
b y the US prohobition model of criminalisation of both seller and purchaser. However, the most glaring stat from the survey which both the Committee and TORL specifically omit is that ,after a decade of enforcement ,only 20% of respondents felt that demand had , IN ANY WAY , been reduced and a whopping 13% felt that prostitution had , IN ANY WAY , had been rreduced. So even the Swedes don’t believe that their legislation is a success but that hasn’t stopped TORL or the kneejerk (ban it and it will just go away!) ,self serving reaction from politicians. WHO ,Human Rights Watch ,UNAIDS , Special Rapporteur of Human Rights, Global Commission on AIDS and many other global health bodies reject the Swedish model as does the Swedish Sex Worker Campaigners like Pye Jakobsson .There’s a plethora of evidence showing that the legislation is a fraud incl annual reports from the Pro Centre in Oslo where prostitutes have suffered from driving the ‘trade’ underground. Unfortunately, the Committe specificaly refused to examine the New Zealand model which is uniformly lauded as the model of best practice .Indeed after a decade of claiming ‘success’ of the model,the Swedes still cannot provide a single statistical report toback their findings – Not one . A committee led by the nose by TORL instead of fulfilling their responsibilites of thoroughly examining all social models to arrive at the optimum environment but their report came as no surprise to anyone following the committe hearings whitewash where the commitee steadfastly refused to speak to Swedish sex workers like Jakobsson about the real consequences of the law. The author here appears to have bought the marketing camnpaign w/out any research.
I´m from Sweden. Actually the prostitution problem has almost disappered and a lot of other criminality asociated with prostitution has also decreased. It´s one of the best laws that our government has introduced for the last 100 years. A real success story i would say. Saved many lives and a lot of suffering. The police has not put much work in it either, just minimal.