OPINION:THE IMMIGRANT Council of Ireland recently issued a timely but harrowing report, Globalisation, Sex Trafficking and Prostitution: the experiences of migrant women in Ireland,writes BREDA O'BRIEN
The council and the Religious Sisters of Charity who funded the research were brave to tackle this topic. Most people have sympathy for those who are trafficked. Few, for example, will have forgotten the deaths of eight people in a container in Wexford in 2001. However, people are much more ambivalent about the sex industry and, once the women are earning any money at all, sympathy drops still further.
The report is brave, too, in emphasising that it is the men who buy sex who are responsible for the fact that there will always be a market for trafficked women. It is estimated that one in 15 men has bought sex. According to the report, men who buy sex tend to be highly educated, on middle incomes and in professional occupations. Some 61 per cent of them are married or in relationships.
Although the report is distressing, with its accounts of fear, gang rape and brutality, it does not go far enough. Naturally, the council concentrates on migrant women. However, although they may not have the added pain of being far from home, Irish women in prostitution are in the same miserable situation.
I visited some of the websites mentioned by the report, both the so-called escort services sites and the ones where men rate their experiences. I ended up feeling like I had been swimming in sewage. But do you know what? Some of the pictures of the women in their highly sexualised poses were little different to what you would find in the fashion supplements of allegedly respectable Sunday newspapers. Worse still, some of the milder ones were little different to the pictures posted by teenage girls on MySpace and Bebo.
Our entire culture has been sexualised, a trend summed up a decade ago by Kathleen Barry in the title of her book, The Prostitution of Sexuality. Pornography has been mainstreamed. Slippers for three- year-old girls bear the Playboy logo. Anything goes. Is it any wonder, then, that buying sex has become virtually acceptable, "so long as it is everyone's free choice"? Maybe the words of a co-ordinator of the HSE Women's Health Project might cause some of the "no harm in it if the woman has chosen it as a career" brigade to think further. "It is distressing to watch the deterioration of many women over a number of years in prostitution. I have seen the downhill spiral from a young, confident girl to a depressed, sick and broken person." Buying sex is inherently exploitative, because it treats a woman as a commodity. Some of the migrant women were paid up to €400 an hour, but then clients were entitled to do anything they liked, including having unprotected sex. One website has a "Guide to escort lingo", with pages of entries on slang for everything from sexual practices involving faeces and urine, to domination. Even when they are paying someone to dress in latex and whip them, men are buying a fantasy of dominance of another human being, someone who will do whatever they want, no matter how perverse.
The delusion indulged in by men who buy sex is phenomenal, but it is being fed by our whole culture. There is a mythology of the happy hooker. How deluded would you have to be to think that a woman who often has been coerced into prostitution in the first place, and who has sex with dozens of men a week, finds you in any way attractive? Do men have no idea of the contempt in which the women hold them?
Patently, they don’t. The report introduced me to a whole new concept, the GFE, short for “girlfriend experience”. This means that the woman feigns emotional involvement and allows French kissing. In the men’s reviews, the most vicious criticism is for women who appear “mechanical” or “going through the motions”. Such women disturb the whole male fantasy of not just buying sex, but intimacy.
Sweden introduced legislation some 10 years ago that criminalised the buying of sex, but not the women who provide it. Significantly, 45 per cent of the parliamentarians were women. Crucially, they did not stop there. They launched an awareness- raising campaign around the connections between trafficking and prostitution, and that buying sex destroys everything good about sexuality. In 2007, Jonas Trolle, an inspector with the Stockholm unit dedicated to combating prostitution, said there were only between 105 and 130 women active in prostitution in Stockholm. In Oslo, there were 5,000. The number of trafficked women has dropped dramatically. We should do the same, and make it clear that not only is buying sex a crime, it is always an exploitative, empty and sad practice.