Imagine coming to Ireland under the impression that you are starting a new life with a man you love. You know your situation is not quite legal, but you trust him. Slowly, perhaps over a period of months, trust and hope ebb away, as he systematically breaks down your self-esteem. Finally, you realise that the man you thought loved you plans to be your pimp, not your partner, writes Breda O'Brien
Browbeaten and ashamed, and with limited English, you are at his mercy and he does not seem to know the meaning of that word.
Trafficking is an ugly word, redolent of fear, exploitation and abuse of power. The situation described above is but one of its forms.
According to one definition, it involves the recruitment or transportation of a person where "use is made of coercion, force or threat, including abduction, or deceit, or fraud, or abuse of authority or of a position of vulnerability, which is such that the person has no real and acceptable alternative but to submit to the abuse involved."
Trafficking of women and prostitution are inextricably linked. According to Europol, 40 million women were involved in prostitution internationally in 2001. More than 60 per cent of these women were migrant women. The UN reports estimate that two million women and children are trafficked each year, including 500,000 who are trafficked into western Europe.
There are no reliable figures for women trafficked into Ireland, but Ruhama, a non-governmental organisation that works with women in prostitution, says it had contact with some 91 women in 2003-2004 who had been trafficked.
It is safe to guess that these 91 women are but a tiny percentage of women who have been trafficked but who are invisible in our society.
Thus far, most people would be shocked and horrified, and completely supportive of anything that would prevent this exploitation, not only of women, but of some very young people who are scarcely more than children.
Why, then, are we so accepting of lapdancing clubs in our cities and towns, when internationally there is evidence that such clubs are often gateways to prostitution? It is not a coincidence that the nationalities most often found working in these clubs, such as Albanians and Romanians, also feature prominently in the list of countries in the developed world from where women are trafficked for prostitution.
We know from Operation Quest two years ago, a joint operation of the Garda and the Criminal Assets Bureau, that although work permits are no longer issued for non-national lapdancers, this is of little concern to club management. Clubs just forge ahead with their lucrative business. Women were vulnerable when dependent on an employer for a work permit; they are even more vulnerable now.
The fantasy is that women who work in lapdancing clubs are strong and empowered, cynically using their beauty and seductiveness to earn good money. The reality is somewhat more sordid. Certainly, there is good money to be earned, but often there is intense pressure to provide services that are not officially for sale.
Even the money can eventually become a trap, because if a woman wishes to leave lapdancing, she not only has a troubling gap on her CV, but she will find it very hard to earn the same amount of money. As a woman gets older, and less attractive to customers, the pressure to earn money through prostitution becomes stronger and stronger because often she is not qualified to do anything else.
It might be less easy to stagger, full of beer, into a lapdancing club if it were seen, not as a harmless bit of diversion but instead a place where women are exploited and often end up in prostitution. It has been reported in recent times that at least one club management was willing to process a credit card for prostitution. Be that as it may, there is a very fine line dividing lapdancing from other so-called sexual services, and it is impossible to believe that line is not crossed regularly.
Some people believe that legalising prostitution would prevent exploitation of women. This, they reason, would mean greater protection and less stigma. Trafficking would not be necessary if women could choose to work as prostitutes.
Sadly, the evidence does not bear this out. The Netherlands provides perhaps the clearest evidence that legalising prostitution does not end either trafficking or exploitation. In 1999 one report found that 80 per cent of women in Dutch brothels had been trafficked, up from a 70 per cent estimate in 1994 by the International Organisation for Migration.
According to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International, far from limiting the amount of prostitution, in 2001 it accounted for 5 per cent of the Netherlands economy, and the sex industry has increased by 25 per cent. Most worrying of all, there has been a 300 per cent increase in child prostitution, many of them girls trafficked from Nigeria.
Sweden took exactly the opposite course. Far from legalising prostitution, it decided to target the customers by prohibiting and penalising the purchase of "sexual services". It also launched a national campaign against prostitution and trafficking, making the connections between them clear. The Swedish national rapporteur on trafficking noted in 2002 that the enforcement of the new laws had made Sweden less attractive to traffickers.
Swedish NGOs working with women in prostitution report that they are less fearful of contacting them for assistance. The number involved in prostitution has declined and, according to police representatives in 2001, there is no evidence that prostitution has gone underground.
A debate on the Swedish style of legislation would be very valuable. The culture and mores of Sweden may be too different from ours to justify simply importing its laws, but an Irish legal model should be developed which respects women as human beings and actively works to prevent them being seen as sexual commodities.
We might begin our debate by asking what insecurity exists in the Irish psyche that we are almost petulantly unwilling to look at the evidence that is staring us in the face about lapdancing clubs. Far from being a harmless phenomenon that shows we are finally as cosmopolitan and sophisticated as we always desperately wished to be, they are the "soft side" of a sordid and demeaning industry that feeds on human misery.