No debate on the evils of gangland crime is ever complete without reference to the “recreational drug user”. If it wasn’t for these otherwise upstanding citizens buying a few spliffs for the weekend or a bag of coke for a dinner party, gangsters wouldn’t kill each other in turf wars and innocent people wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire.

So if we could only appeal to the conscience of the recreational drug users, and force them to see the link between their discreet supplier and the murderous gangsters, we’d have won a strategic victory in the war on drugs.

The most lucrative criminal commerce of all is in illegal arms, though there’s little point in appealing to the better nature of clients of that trade. When it comes to drugs, though, the ultimate consumers are often ordinary people who would never consider themselves as criminal accessories. So it makes sense to try to shame these regular folk into the relatively minor changes of lifestyle and attitude that would cripple the criminal empires.

Such people probably pay their taxes, hold down decent jobs, teach their kids right from wrong and wouldn’t dream of parking in a disabled bay. It’s just that the link between the psychopathic drug lords and a bag of white powder bought off an amiable contact in the pub seems so tenuous as to be negligible.

After arms and drugs, the third biggest criminal business is the sex trade. Again, the ultimate consumers are not other gangsters but often ordinary, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens who would baulk at the notion that they were criminal cohorts. But for some reason, nobody ever talks about recreational sex-trade users, which allows these men much more wriggle room to distance their participation from the ugly, cruel and often murderous criminality they help to fund.

But men who buy sex are recreational users. So why is it that their consciences are unassailable? The link between supplier and consumer could hardly be any more intimate.

Sex-trade clients deal directly with women whom they know have been coerced, by poverty or addiction, into selling their bodies. The mythical happy hooker who stocks her designer wardrobe and puts her children through private school with the proceeds of her high-class clientele is a million miles removed from the quotidian reality of prostitution. You don’t find Julia Roberts types pacing the freezing canal bank in Dublin, or working in cramped basements in Carlow. If these were savvy career girls, their pimps wouldn’t be so rich, and sex trafficking wouldn’t be such a lucrative trade for organised criminals.

Working girls are on the game because they don’t have many options. None of them had prostitution on top of their wish-list in career-guidance classes. Clearly their respectable clients can square that thought with their conscience before they go home to their families. But they can’t be allowed to go on turning a blind eye to the fact that it isn’t just money or drugs that has some girls on the game. Following last week’s concerted operation to break an international prostitution ring in Carlow, the extent of human trafficking in the Irish sex trade is now undeniable.

For years, agencies such as Ruhama and Amnesty International, and academics from NUI Galway, have been reporting on the growth of sex trafficking in this country, but nobody has been paying much heed.

Last summer, the government introduced a bill to outlaw human trafficking, but it is patently inadequate. While it makes trafficking a crime, the attendant symptoms such as debt bonding, restriction of movement, removal of a passport, are not individually criminalised.

And, astonishingly, it absolves the clients from any role in the crime if they can argue that they didn’t know the girl was a victim of trafficking. In other words, “I’m sorry, Judge, I didn’t know she was lured here with the promise of a job as a nanny, I didn’t know she was beaten every night and her child was being held at gunpoint by gangsters in Estonia, I thought she was an impoverished junkie,” is a perfectly acceptable defence.

Gardai estimate that one trafficked girl earned €80,000 last year for the Mr Big of the brothel trade. Last week a 47-year-old Carlow man was arrested in Wales in connection with alleged brothel-keeping. He’d allegedly run his operation as a family business. Also arrested last week were his son and daughter, his wife and his girlfriend. The conversation in that holding cell may have been a little stilted. If there was family involvement the scale of the rewards might have made it expedient for these women to shelve conventional proprieties in the interests of keeping the business ticking over.

It’s hard to imagine anybody lower in the hierarchy of human pond life than one who’d abduct, terrorise and repeatedly violate another person for their own financial ends. Anybody who assists in this deserves to be handled with extreme prejudice. There’s something deeply skewed about the fact that it is a civil wrong to falsely impute unchastity in a woman, but you can walk out of a criminal court by pleading that you believed a victim of human trafficking was just a common slapper.

It’s just not good enough that clients can get away with saying they had no “reasonable grounds” to believe that a trafficked girl was working against her will. Sex is a fundamental means of communication between human beings. It’s ludicrous to suggest that a half-way sentient man could have sex with a woman without realising she was repulsed or reluctant, beyond what must be normal in commercial transactions.

Jacqui Smith, Britain’s home secretary, recently proposed fines and criminal records for users of prostitutes who have been trafficked or controlled by a pimp. She’s perfectly correct. If a man knew he was going to be convicted should the girl turn out to be trafficked, he’d certainly think twice. There should not be a get out of jail clause for men who pay for sex with trafficked girls, because their personal morality or powers of observation should not have any relevance. Men who have sex with trafficked girls are more than just recreational users, they’re rapists. It really is that simple.

It’s not just their conscience we need to appeal to, it’s their concern for their own skins. If a girl’s been abducted, imprisoned, blackmailed and assaulted then she’s got the strongest possible proof that she did not consent to sex. If these men knew they’d be prosecuted as rapists, however respectable and law-abiding they might otherwise be, the Mr Bigs might have a tougher time of it keeping their brothels and their mistresses in business.

brenda.power@sunday-times.ie

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