Sir, – The Minister for Justice accuses those who pay for sex of "bearing responsibility for the lives stolen by [human] trafficking" ("Prostitute-users responsible for 'lives stolen by trafficking'", October 18th). This argument, of course, forms the rationale for her proposals to criminalise the purchase of sex.
As noted in your report, human trafficking is undertaken for the purpose of supplying forced labour not only in the sex trade but also in the domestic, homecare, farm and fisheries sectors, among others. Will the Minister be seeking to prohibit these other areas of commerce on the basis that they, too, contribute to trafficking?
As with any commodity, the vast majority of persons who purchase sex do so on the understanding – and, very often, with the irrefutable knowledge – that the person providing the service is doing so of their own volition. It is deeply unfair and disingenuous for the Minister to blame these “customers” for the fact that human trafficking has infiltrated the sex trade in recent years. The real culprit in this regard is, of course, the anachronistic ragbag of laws that force the sex trade to operate in the sort of murky and clandestine space in which organised crime thrives. Yet, instead of reforming these deeply outdated criminal laws, the Minister intends to add to them.
Why does the Minister think it necessary to deprive consenting adults of a lawful means of fulfilling one of their most basic needs? If she is serious about stamping out human trafficking in the sex industry, why doesn’t the Minister instead give the Garda extra resources to enforce our already robust anti-trafficking laws? Better yet, why doesn’t she fully legalise, regulate and tax the sex industry? This would deliver a hammer blow to the traffickers’ business model while also generating much-needed revenue for the State.
Instead, the Minister is proposing a measure that will only drive prostitution further underground – thus making sex workers less safe, criminalising purchasers who have no criminal intent or inclination, and allowing traffickers and other criminals to further tighten their grip on this market.
Prostitution is, as the cliche puts it, the oldest profession – because sex is the most primal of human desires. The idea that criminalising its purchase will kill demand and thus “defeat” the traffickers betrays a lamentable lack of human understanding.
Indeed, criminalising the purchase of sex will so obviously be counterproductive to the anti-trafficking objective that one must suspect that those pushing for this ludicrous law are driven less by the plight of trafficking victims than by a peculiar mix of misplaced feminism and good old-fashioned moral censoriousness. – Yours, etc,
PAULA McALLEN,
Templeogue,
Dublin 16.