Susan McKay, New Campaign Against Prostitution
Published: Sunday, November 22, 2009
The newly formed Sex Workers Alliance urges us to accept that prostitution is a freely chosen occupation, as viable a way of paying your bills as any other. The Alliance claims it can promote the health, safety and empowerment of those it calls sex workers in what it calls the sex industry. These are not victims, it insists. This view sees the man who uses prostitutes as a person buying a service from a person selling it.
Choosing to do something means weighing it up against other possibilities and deciding it is the best option. As in: will I be a doctor, or a civil servant, or a shop assistant, or will I be a prostitute? But of course that isn't how women enter prostitution. For the most part, they do it because they feel they have no choice. They feel they are forced into it.
Surveys carried out in the UK, which is culturally similar to Ireland, find that three out of 4 prostitutes become involved when they are under the age of 18. Seven out of ten of them will have spent time in care as children. Some 85% of them experienced physical abuse in childhood and almost half experienced sexual abuse. Three quarters indentified poverty as the reason they got involved.
The vast majority - nine out of ten - of women working as prostitutes want to stop. And it is no wonder. Their mortality rate is 12 times higher than the national average. More than half of them have been raped and/or sexually assaulted and at least three quarters have been beaten up by pimps or punters.
Pimps, by the way, are men who hire out prostitutes and control their earnings. Punters are men who use prostitutes. These are the people who benefit from the sex industry, along with the traffickers and the brothel owners.
Almost 70% of prostitutes have symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the same range as victims of torture and veterans of war.
Most women working in prostitution in Ireland are migrants. Some have been trafficked here. Many have drink and drug addictions. These are vulnerable women, isolated women, poor women, women whose life experience has prepared them for exploitation. Many of them are very young. It is not an offence in Ireland to pay a child for sex.
Health? Safety? Empowerment?
No. Overwhelmingly, prostitution is violence. It comes from harm and it leads to harm. The reason that it isn't a choice any one of us would encourage our daughters or our friends to make, is because we know this. What we need is not a campaign for better conditions, but one to destroy this industry and create exit routes for those trapped in it.
In Sweden, this is happening. There is a law, introduced ten years ago, which states that it is illegal to pay for sex. This targets and criminalises demand - men using prostitutes - rather than prostitutes. It is a popular law, supported by 80% of the population, and it is working. Prostitution is declining and so is trafficking.
The UK has just taken first steps towards introducing a similar model, and here, in mid November, a private members bill calling for new legislation along the same lines, was narrowly defeated.
The Sex Workers Alliance includes many who have the best interests of women working as prostitutes at heart, and some women, indeed, who have been in prostitution. With respect, we disagree that there is any way this can be turned into a good and freely chosen way to make a living.
The National Women's Council congratulates the British women whose campaign, Demand Change!, is bringing about reform of the UK laws, and we will be part of alliance of groups campaigning for similar change here. [www.demandchange.org.uk; www.eaves4women.co.uk; www.dublinpact.ie/dignity]
Prostitution is incompatible with equality for women.