The organisation started initially as a very small outreach to women in street prostitution
back in 1989 when really that was where prostitution kind of happened predominantly and over the
years it's evolved to grow as an organisation, it's become a registered charity and we work
now with over 200 women every year who are in street prostitution but also in the indoor
sex trade every year women are trafficked into Ireland they are lured with the promise of work
and a better life deceived and enslaved they are forced to pleasure their respectable clients
if you solicit sexual services from a victim of trafficking it is a criminal offence carrying a
prison sentence the turn off the red light campaign advocates for Swedish style legislation
which outlaws the purchaser of sex while at the same time decriminalising the seller the aim of
this law is to reduce demand for prostitution which advocates claim will also reduce the
number of incidents of sex trafficking the Immigrant Council of Ireland and Ruhama argue
that prostitution and sex trafficking are inextricably linked and it is on this basis that
they have pushed for changes in legislation it has been described as one of the oldest professions
in history an industry that can't and some would say shouldn't be abolished everyone these days
has an opinion on prostitution the overall sex industry and its place in society for me it's
simple anything that contributes to gender inequality and allows for the purchase of one
human being for the gratification of another it's not only unacceptable it is fundamentally and
morally wrong in terms of sexual exploitation in Ireland Ruhama have since the year 2000 worked
with over 300 women who've been sexually exploited and through through human trafficking the
international figures of trafficking overall would suggest that approximately 2.5 million people
are trafficked each year with approximately half a million being within the OSC they brought
European area and between 40 to 60 percent are estimated to be children with approximately 70
percent being women women are girls and and certainly in relation to trafficking for sexual
exploitation and the vast majority would be women and girls trafficking is relatively new
definition in international law and for Ireland of course even for professionals working in the
area but trafficking is a violation of human rights it's a gross human rights violation it's a
crime against a person it's not illegal border crossing is not illegal prostitution or illegal
work engagement it is a crime committed against a person I mean we're how my mesh our first I
suppose victim of trafficking in the sense of a migrant victim of trafficking back in 2000 but
trafficking wasn't identified as a criminal offense until 2008 in this country and so we're
working for eight years with victims of trafficking who were not in law actually victims of any
recognised crime in the country I think in terms of prostitution and trafficking we would see the
two as absolutely intrinsically linked trafficking doesn't happen somewhere else you know it happens
in the context of prostitution you can't actually separate the one from the other the Irish trafficking
laws based on it's not entirely the same but it's based on the UN trafficking protocol and the UN
trafficking protocol essentially says that for trafficking to exist there has to be three elements
which is movement and movement can include recruitment transfer harboring things like that
the second element is coercion and the third element is that it's for the purpose of exploitation
and under the trafficking protocol you have to have all three of those and that can that can be
read fairly broadly and it has been read fairly broadly so that you know it would cover the you
know the sort of classic situations where somebody is kidnapped and forced into prostitution or
whatever but it could also cover things like where somebody say they you know they know that
they're going to work in another country they know that they're going to work as a sex worker they
do this willingly once they arrive they find out that the conditions are worse than they expected
they could leave if they wanted to but they decide that they're going to stay for as long as it
needs they need to pay off their debt technically they have been trafficked now in reality you know
as a matter of practice they are probably not going to be treated as trafficked by the government
because the government is going to say well you made your choice you did this deliberately you
haven't been coerced you can leave whenever you want now on the other hand the groups like the
turn out the red light campaign as far as they're concerned trafficking and prostitution are virtually
synonymous and so the fact that a woman is a migrant woman working in prostitution in their eyes
means that she's probably trafficked no matter what no matter how much agency she had and they
won't really ascribe any agency to her at all due to the clandestine nature of prostitution and
sex trafficking in Ireland obtaining accurate data has proven to be difficult the findings in
a 2009 report published by the immigrant council of Ireland was to become central to the turn off
the red light campaign this report was very interesting because it focused on this most
common form of trafficking for sexual exploitation and the experiences migrant women have in the
prostitution on the prostitution scene where trafficking occurs so they the researchers
really saw the intersection between migration prostitution and trafficking for sex and what
they uncovered is really unthinkable this is the fact that we have a quite developed sex
industry well organized where on average 800 to 1000 women primarily are advertised daily in various
countries and cities it's spread around the country the the brothels of course the establishments
where sex is being sold varies and women are rotated and they're kind of mushrooming in
different places of the city usually privately rented apartments or hotels are used there was a
research conducted and published in 2009 by the immigrant council of Ireland on globalization
and sex trafficking with in which Ruhama and the HSE service the women's health service were
both partners but the researchers did studies and surveys of the odds but they also mesh with women
and and examined the the profiles of of those in the sex trade it's I mean it's interesting
because there is certain anomalies in relation to the websites because certain nationalities
even though they are very heavily represented we know in reality in the sex trade are represented
as different nationalities but they're not represented as Irish they would be represented
as perhaps Spanish or Italian instead of for instance Romanian which would be the actual
nationality but nonetheless the fact that their migrants is is quite clear self-evident of course
the numbers of migrant women involved makes it very difficult to say with absolute certainty on
the part of the state that they are not victims of human trafficking it is very difficult to establish
contact with these people to the extent that they reveal their full his background full experience
it takes meetings and meetings and gaining trust and back and forth in obtaining facts but we would
be saying that if we know they are a very poor background if they are in such a vulnerable
situation we could be presuming that there is an exploitation going on you're talking about
consistently approximately 800 to a thousand women predominantly who will be in the indoor sex trade
and those figures are accrued from various sources and the the guardi who would be monitoring the
issue of organized prostitution and then also the mechanisms by which prostitution is advertised
so you'd have a number of different websites that would advertise what's referred to as
escorting and then you would have other ways in which prostitution is advertised such as through
the some of the massage parlors or their advertisers massage services so it's happening all over the
country and the other thing we know is that it is not the indoor sex trade as opposed to on-street
prostitution is not at all restricted to major urban areas it's in even the most tiny rural areas
because of the facility of using the internet and mobile phone technology to organize it means
it's incredibly mobile. Despite the widespread usage of these figures in the news and media some
remain critical of the research methods used to gather the data. As a social scientist I'm very
concerned about how data is collected and I teach data collection methodology its main component of
a degree in social science is figuring out how to measure things and so on and Mike one of the
major concerns I had was a figure became was widely circulating in in the media in throughout
the in the Eroctis and the houses of the Eroctis this was a figure that at least a thousand women
and sometimes a thousand sometimes at least a thousand sometimes it was a figure of a thousand
women and children and so the figure of a thousand became a fact if you like in inverted commas and
that there were thousand women for sale every day in Ireland so obviously as a social scientist I
want to know how that figure was produced and two different sources are generally cited for that
figure and in fact if you look at both those sources neither of them conclude with the figure
a thousand although they have more they have figures of you know between 600 and 800 or
approximately 800 so the figure got conflated somehow in public discourse that's one of the
problems and but by virtue of its continuous iteration it becomes a fact so then everybody
talks about a thousand and it becomes a truth then secondly if you look at how that those figures
those two pieces of research how they produce their data as a social scientist I'd have a lot
of questions about the validity of the research gathering method and for all kinds of reasons
primarily both of those pieces of research relied almost entirely for the big figures on internet
sources in other words they tracked somehow the number of women who were offering sexual services
on the internet that's certainly one way of getting some kind of measure but it's simply one
kind of measure in itself when supporters of the turn off their light campaign when they do quote
research or when they when they quote documents from Sweden they tend to quote things that are
really just policy papers by the Swedish government and the big example of this is what's called the
Scarhead report it was an evaluation that was put out in 2010 drawn by Judge Anna Scarhead and the
conclusion that Judge Scarhead got from it was that the law is working but the basis on which she
said the law is working was simply that well street prostitution has gone down we don't really see
that much indoor prostitution therefore the law works but if you actually read the report it's
actually a lot more equivocal than that because what it says is that we don't see a lot of indoor
prostitution but then the police don't really investigate indoor prostitution they don't really
pay that much attention to what goes on in the internet and they don't know anything about what
goes on in any other indoor sector so it's it's purely an example of if we don't see it it's not
there those those of us who are doing this kind of research will you know there's a good deal of
literature on this will say that what people say on the internet is not necessarily a reflection of
the reality and so we have to control for that I so there are several difficulties with that
figure then there was no apparent control for that double or triple or quadruple counting the
fact that a single woman may create four or five or more personalities for herself possibly more
we don't know so there was no control for that and there was no control for other kinds of
double counting there was no control for the possibility that the time factor in other words
somebody may and this there is evidence from all the international literature that women who
aren't engaged in transactional sex or selling sex will move in and out as do men will move in
and out of the of the activity and so they may work a week a month or one day a week and so on
so there has to be control for that as well so once those two controls are in place in the in
the data gathering process and once the data gathering process reveals how the figures have
been counted then I will say okay that looks valid to me I can see how these figures were produced
I don't think we need the figures necessarily you know and I think we'll never get full figures
throughout the world we won't get the full figures precisely because trafficking is a huge
industry and it's a very dangerous industry this criminal would stop at nothing it's like you
wouldn't really know how many people are consuming or are using heroin in in Dublin at the moment
because it's too dangerous to find out then how would you find out the obsession with numbers is
it's something that it's just it's very hard to actually do properly when you're talking about
an industry that is you know very very stigmatized that is an illegal industry basically you're
simply not going to be able to find a lot of people because they're not going to be making
themselves available so a lot of what is what is done there is basically done by guesswork
In relation to the representation I would say that I think it certainly would have been better
I think had those voices that we have heard at other platforms like the Department of Justice
seminar early in December where I remember in particular two migrant women who are sex workers
in Dublin spoke and you know made their case very clearly and I think it might have been good
for the Iraq this committee to hear those voices during those proceedings now I don't know whether
those people applied or made a submission and weren't selected I don't know what the
selection process was for the representation but I did a very crude analysis of the kind of numbers
of the kind of perspectives and it's certainly the case that the vast majority I can't tell you
the figures now but the vast majority as a hugely significant majority of those who
made representations or who participated or who made submissions or submissions that over those
days were members of the red light turn off the red light campaign well originally the only groups
that were scheduled to be heard at all were either advocacy groups NGOs and academics and the police
there wasn't invitation to sex workers themselves at all now eventually due to serious complaints
about this from sex workers themselves invitations were eventually issued but they were very limited
there was only I think three former sex workers and two current sex workers as against you know
a dozen NGOs academics and if you read the report that the office actually came out with it's very
very heavily dominated by the views of NGOs and academics and there's very little attention paid
to sex workers and the current sex workers in particular are virtually totally ignored I mean
they do report what they say but when they give their conclusions they don't actually address
what they say at all the only voices that they seem to actually have listened to are the former
sex workers who are now in favor of the turn off the red light campaign the people who are
actually going to be affected by these laws don't seem to have really got to listen certain voices
will be disqualified you will exclude no no we can't have any of those we're only going to have
people who come from and then it will be a certain kind of organization that's got papers or that you
know someone the lobbying thing you will find that someone like myself not excluded not this is not
an academic employed in a not invited no no doesn't matter excluding people only looking at particular
discourses disqualification is a really big one and that was the reason why I couldn't find for
instance in the migration literature the all the women who were selling sex they'd been disqualified
as migrants they were being dealt with by the feminists as prostitutes or sex workers and
people were fighting about them there so that even the people who were interested in migration
had excluded the women selling sex unconsciously or because they just couldn't be asked to do it
because it's really hard it's not easy to study this stuff and and people feel that it's a taboo
so they didn't do it so that another one of these techniques would be the kind of name calling
so that I've been in public forums where someone will stand up and say she is a pimp pointing
at me well I always think what do you believe I do really believe them but this is clearly it's a
rhetorical technique it's a strategy to try to undercut people you don't count so that when
it's sex workers they'll say well you are one of the rich lucky ones you're part of the elite
you couldn't possibly know about what exclusion disqualification rather than listening to everybody
and trying to process it because it's hard to process it if you really seek to process it you
will come up with not a single solution there isn't going to be a single solution for all the
different people those who are unhappy and those are happy it's not going to happen you hear the
false consciousness thing and of course if you're undocumented migrant then you shouldn't be here in
the first place so you have no right to speak you should be deported so you obviously can't be
included in the conversation in some European countries it's actually disallowed migrants
are not allowed to go to public protests I believe that's been contested in the
court of human rights however it does happen and so people are afraid and of course people
disqualify themselves oh I'm not meant to be there this is a government hearing so I don't or it's
an academic thing I I couldn't possibly I'm not they wouldn't want me or you know the police might
be there all of that kind of thing these are all ways to keep the marginalized people marginalized
migrants voices and experiences in Ireland have historically been ignored and excluded
from both public debate and the processes of legislative changes that affect them
migrants are not homogenous group in Ireland by all means I am a migrant myself even though
naturalized a long time ago and I've been here like more than 15 years by now and pretty much
consider island my home more than any other place in the world that of course the state has the right
to regulate migration and immigrant council has never opposed the right of the state to
say who has the right to come here people tend to say that migration to Ireland's a new thing
that Ireland was never an immigration destination which entirely untrue over the years waves of
migrants you had quilts and Normans and Huguenots and whatever you know however in the in the last
20 years or so has been accelerated migration which was disproportionate to other EU states because
Ireland simply became prosperous the distinction between individual and institutional racism is
slightly artificial yes people can be individually racist but by and large the issue is the state
because the state is the only factor of the only body that has the power to actually exclude and
include in racially in racial terms David Theo Goldberg on whose work I rely a lot says that all
modern nation states are racial states who exclude and include in racially in racial terms
and Ireland is no different I'm not more racist than other countries because when I say Ireland is
racist or racial people say yes both about South Africa Ireland is not more or less racist Ireland
is a nation state which constructed the Irish people as a Gaelic Catholic people and in the
process of it excluded lots of people and unfortunately many migrant groups adopt the state discourse
they talk about wanting to integrate they talk about interculturalism they talk about various
things about nature which are state discourse which ultimately discriminate between the us and the
known us one of the unfortunate things about this debate and including at an international level
at the level of the UN in the EU in the US all pretty much globally the one the unfortunate
things has been that the debate has been extremely divisive and extremely ideological
and it's very difficult for people to take a position which is not seen to be at one or other
of what is presented as polar opposites and it's so for people like myself and other scholars
and there are many of us now in Europe in fact there's a network now of scholars who are coming
together and who are concerned about the policy dimensions of this the relationship between
law and practice data gathering and you know in a way we are trying to inhabit a more grounded
research informed middle ground and which is informed by all kinds of data but unfortunately
at an international level and in Ireland the debate has been extremely divided and it has been
about the politics of discourse domination principally and the politics of discourse
domination involves delegitimizing oppositional views denying denying voices that are uncomfortable
and that you know there's again there's plenty of literature that shows that that has gone on
in the US and internationally so that for instance those who take a position like the
position I take are accused of being and I've never been accused of this although I have been
accused of not caring about women who are about violence or not caring about trafficked people
but internationally at the UN and then the US those who take the kind of position who are
saying hold on this Swedish model may not be as good as we think have been accused of being pro-pimp
you know pro-violence against women so that it becomes really difficult who wants to be even
considered to be vaguely pro-pimp they are vaguely pro-violence against them and nobody wants that
shadow around themselves so people are actually I think quite intimidated that's what this debate
is all about the exploitation of women young people young men that there be no doubt about us
that it's clear exploitation of women and young girls and boys when I hear some politicians and
senators having reservations about the legislation it really gets up my nose when I hear windbag
senators saying at meetings in the AV room that they don't know whether they can support the
legislation that really gets up my nose and can I say you are either against exploitation or you're
enough I think this has been quite a peculiar issue because I would believe that the overwhelming
majority of people in society would like to see the issue of prostitution dealt with they'd like
to see human trafficking absolutely eliminated and those responsible for us being held to account
so I think most right-thinking people would believe that inside at all and outside it so
it's what we need to do as a civilized society is to debate what's the best ways of dealing with that
but in this debate I have to say the climate has been incredible I actually don't believe that anybody
in this house is in favour of that type of activity continuing or being endorsed but the idea
that by raising issues about this bill and that by not supporting it that somehow you're in favour
of this type of exploitation as suggested by the frenzied contribution of Deputy McGraw I think is incredibly unhelpful
What Sweden did over a decade ago was they changed from a position essentially of legal
prostitution to one which took the view not that you know prostitution was a public order issue
or you know the kind of legal responses that we had had here but rather that it was incompatible
with equality between men and women and in a society that valued equality that the fact that
you know one cohort could be bought by another was just simply not acceptable and so they actually
enacted that legislation as part of their violence against women penal code. It took years for the
law to bring a change to the overall consciousness in Sweden and the law was not so popular at the
time of its adoption as it became popular much later and now repeatedly surveys among
general population show that people support it and what's really encouraging is that younger
people support it even more people without preconceptions people who are raised in this
climate already why they know it's not okay to buy access to somebody in this way. A key strategy
to actually reduce the numbers in prostitution reduce the demand or sorry is to is to hit demand
and basically hit the market to use an economic term and you'd envisage that if you criminalise
the purchase of sex it will have a knock-on effect in terms of very poor vulnerable migrant women
will no longer be brought to Ireland you know encouraged or deceived in some cases to Ireland
to be a part of the sex trade. In Sweden they say that the number of prostitutes has gone down by
something like two-thirds and the number of the extent of trafficking has gone down as well
I think that's a good model to emulate. Evidence seems to show that there are unintended consequences
which seem to render the most vulnerable women in the sex trade i.e. you know the poorest most
vulnerable migrant women who work in the most vulnerable sectors the the law seems to also
be rendering them somewhat more vulnerable. The interpretation whether the law works or it doesn't
work for us is quite beyond dispute really you have to really seek for arguments to be saying
the you know to attack the obvious truth that there is no prostitution the way there is in
other countries and the the joint committee for justice paid a visit actually in Sweden and
went to see with their own eyes and this probably had a big impact on their decision to anonymously
endorse whole party and all members endorsed recommendation that says that the law in Sweden
reduces demand. I live in Sweden it was very interesting to me I've been there for a few
years now to analyze the effects of the law they are unknown so despite claims from the
government those of us who have actually read the documents know that they have no idea there's no
way to know you can't have a big general law like that and know exactly they never knew how many
people were trafficked before so when they say they've lowered the numbers it's meaningless.
I suppose from their point of view it has been successful in the sense that attitudes towards
prostitution have certainly hardened in Norway and Sweden since the law was brought in that's
that's that's not disputed. The problem is that it's hardened against the sex workers
not just against the clients and increasing stigma against sex workers is not a good thing
from a point of view of trying to protect them. The argument that let's try it anyway this one
fix may work and it may scare off men it may drop demand and it may therefore reduce the
exploitation in the industry it may reduce the attractiveness for traffickers and I can I understand
the attractiveness of that argument it's a nice simple neat argument and people respond to it very
simply or very easily but unfortunately there is absolutely no evidence from the Swedish model
that all of those causalities are connected and that the Swedish law is actually
does what it claims to do. I think what we need to do is apply what what one of my colleagues
Catherine McGurray Minuth calls she has argued for a social justice approach. A social justice
perspective is really I suppose again drawing on the work of Nancy Frazier and has a commitment
around the politics of inclusion as a starting point so it's looking at how individuals can be
part and parcel of consideration of prostitution policy reform in a very real sense and also
looking at how the state has a responsibility to intervene where needed and also to acknowledge
individuals who don't conform to particular identities or stereotypes around prostitution.
The social justice model requires the state to have a wider social justice agenda requires a
welfare state as opposed to a kind of a liberal state where the the welfare state is pulling back
and male sexuality becomes the problem that fits in beautifully with the kind of a neoliberal
role for the state. For individuals who are highly vulnerable for individuals who are involved
in prostitution because they have no other choice for individuals who are being abused exploited
trafficked into the sex industry and so on and so forth there will be targeted interventions for
those individuals and some of those interventions and some of those responses could be through the
criminal justice system where needed but also other wider social supports will be in place
to allow for exiting as well and that's where you know organizations such as Ruhama and other
support services would you know would would be so important in that regard. It's not a question of
do I think nothing's wrong oh no I there's something really wrong but it's about migration policy
and employment policy that's what it's about and so for all these years of being invited and going
places I've tried to talk about that and it's very difficult to get that going but that's where the
problems are not about women being exploited for sex. If you are looking at it as being sex work is
being a problem because of the number of migrants in it and if you are looking at as migrants are
doing sex work because they have no other options then the problem with the turn off the red light
campaign is that they aren't actually going to give sex workers any other options if you take away
their clients that doesn't automatically enable them to find other work and we have to bear in
mind that first of all we're in a time of around 15% unemployment so a lot of jobs just aren't out
there at all. Secondly a lot of migrants aren't entitled to work in those jobs even if they existed
because they have no work permits. Now turn off the red light campaign has said that you know they
want to see these other alternatives brought in and that's all well and good but I think that the
issue around work permits is going to be a major major stumbling block even if you could get past
everything else. You know we live in a country where you know asylum seekers aren't being allowed
to work and these are people who've been tortured and they aren't being allowed to work because
the government is so afraid of creating a pool factor you know so I think does anybody seriously
think that the government is going to say well okay we're going to we want to stop people from
selling sex so we're just going to allow you all to work in other jobs I mean that's that's
it's not realistic it's fantasy land. Our society has almost half a million people unemployed so the
idea that people are going to be removed from the circumstances for which end up many people end up
in prostitution or end up back in it will still be there because the economic supports are just
simply aren't there to allow people to lead an existence freed from engagement in that activity
you know you can have an abstract debate about how voluntary is it but if somebody is a drug addict
or somebody has to feed their kids and there's no other way that's going to be a choice that
people made so you can't really talk about removing people from that net unless you really
economically transform the way in which society is wrong.
you
