THE GARDA Commissioner is considering rolling out a nationwide operation targeting men who buy sexual favours from prostitutes. This follows the success of a trial operation in Dublin in which more than 60 men were prosecuted.
The pilot project has involved undercover female gardaí loitering in areas well-known for street prostitution and then arresting and charging men, known as “kerb crawlers”, who try to solicit them for sex.
The tactic represents a departure from the Garda’s traditional approach to prostitution, which has usually been to target women selling sex rather than men buying it.
Sixty-four men have been arrested and charged since last October by a team of gardaí based in the Bridewell Garda station in Dublin’s north inner city.
The area covered by the station includes a network of streets where on-street prostitutes are known to work.
Any women working as prostitutes who were encountered by the undercover gardaí were not prosecuted. Instead, they were diverted to the north Dublin-based Ruhama agency, which helps women involved in prostitution.
The arrested men have already been before the courts. A range of penalties were imposed including fines and the Probation Act.
Operation Kerb has proven so successful that two follow-up undercover operations detected no kerb crawlers in the areas targeted.
A report on the success of the programme has now been compiled by senior officers who headed the Bridewell initiative and has been presented to Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan for his consideration.
Garda sources said the report would be considered to assess if an extension of the scheme to other parts of the Republic with an on-street prostitution problem would be possible.
These areas include major urban centres such as Limerick and Cork.
Ruhama chief executive Sarah Benson said the new zero-tolerance initiative had the potential to greatly decrease on-street prostitution.
She hoped that the approach adopted by the Bridewell station would be rolled out nationwide.
“Most of the women involved in street prostitution are Irish and come from positions of vulnerability, such as poverty, drug misuse, homelessness and abuse,” she said.
Ruhama had already witnessed an increase in the number of women coming to it for help since the zero tolerance approach began.
“This may be due to a decreased fear of being arrested by the women or a decline in the number of buyers, with fear of arrest acting as an effective deterrent,” Ms Benson said.
It is a criminal offence in the Republic to solicit on the street for the purposes of prostitution. This means that any approach to a prostitute to buy a sexual favour or any offer by a prostitute to sell sexual favours is a criminal offence.
However, Ruhama is currently lobbying the Government to introduce Swedish-style laws that explicitly criminalise the purchase of sex – both on-street and in other locations such as apartments run as brothels.
Such laws were introduced in Sweden in 1999 and since then there has been greatly reduced demand for prostitutes, with half the number of women now working on the streets.
Trafficking into Sweden for the purposes of sexual exploitation has also declined. This has happened because, it is believed, demand for prostitutes has declined as fear of being caught has increased among their male “clients”.