Full marks for optimism to those European governments that have cooked up an imaginative, but doomed, initiative to liberate trafficked prostitutes. A number of EU states have introduced confidential phone numbers for male clients who suspect the woman they’ve just hired for sex has been working against her will.
Unless I’m interpreting this incorrectly, the man who has just paid a woman to have sex is expected to view her not as a piece of meat but as as a vulnerable human being and show some concern for her welfare. How could it possibly not work?
Perhaps the reason the measure is doomed is because it flies in the face of the central male conceit that has kept prostitution flourishing for millenniums. Men couldn’t keep using the services of prostitutes if they hadn’t managed to convince themselves that (a) they are actually pieces of meat, (b) they are making a really good living from it, and (c) they definitely love it.
It’s this same comforting sequence of joined-up delusions that has kept governments through the ages from acting on their stated abhorrence of the world’s oldest profession and introducing the one measure that would crack down hard on it, once and for all: criminalising the clients.
If you’re caught in possession of a drug such as heroin, you face prosecution. Pleading that you’re an addict and you need a supply simply to keep going won’t cut much ice. The theory is that if there wasn’t a ready market for illicit drugs, it wouldn’t be worth anybody’s while producing and importing them and killing rivals in turf wars.
If you’re caught buying bootlegged DVDs, you face prosecution. Pleading that the kids would make your life hell if they weren’t first to see the latest blockbuster film won’t get you far. Again, the reasoning is purely logical — if there were no consumers for stolen, bootlegged or cheaply copied luxury goods, there would be no criminal empires built on supplying them. So far, so reasonable.
Trading in human beings, buying and selling vulnerable young women, keeping them in sexual slavery through torture and terror and a very real threat of murder ought to be viewed at least as seriously as flogging cannabis or dodgy copies of King Kong. But it is not. Trafficking women for sex is not specifically outlawed in this country.
Kidnapping a young girl, or luring her here with the false promise of a legitimate job, then keeping her captive while she is raped by a parade of Irish men who pay her captors for the pleasure, is not a crime in this country.
What we do have are watertight regulations governing immigration, asylum and work permits. So, when a trafficked girl called Maria was freed by gardai from the clutches of her pimp and the confinement of a grimy Dublin flat, she mistakenly believed that her horrific tale would ensure compassion and protection from a caring, Christian country. But, as Prime Time revealed last week, she was arrested for having no papers, dispatched to Mountjoy jail and deported. Full marks to whoever drafted the legislation employed to expel Maria. It is obviously working.
We need to get in line with the rest of Europe when it comes to outlawing trafficking as a specific crime, but even those tough measures haven’t come close to eliminating the problem elsewhere on the Continent. Nor will they while lawmakers continue to tiptoe around the source of the problem with ineffectual, cosmetic measures designed to make it look as though they give a damn.
Asking men to phone a confidential number if they’ve had sex with a foreign prostitute who seemed troubled or reluctant is one such stunt. When has any “john” given a flying curse about the real feelings of a prostitute? If she didn’t feign enthusiasm with suitable conviction, such men would be far more likely to complain to her pimp, demand a refund and earn her a hiding.
Obscene as it is, human trafficking is the inevitable by-product of a lucrative criminal activity, just as the occasional gangland murder is a by-product of the trade in illicit drugs. Young, vulnerable women are a commodity to be traded and sold to willing purchasers, and once that central transaction can be conducted with impunity, it stands to reason that the suppliers will go to whatever lengths necessary to acquire the product.
Toeing the EU line and enforcing all those specific measures designed to hit the pimps and people-smugglers would be a very convincing and reassuring declaration of our commitment to ending human trafficking. My only quibble is that it won’t make any difference. Throwing these scumbags in prison won’t save a single girl from their clutches. Closing down their markets by targeting their customers, though, now that would make an impact.
Unlike drug addicts, who tend not to care about their public image, the customers for the prostitution trade are often upstanding family men, professional chaps, pillars of the community who are vulnerable to exposure. The prospect of being named and shamed as consumers of peddled misery would be a great deterrent. If they ran the added risk of being prosecuted as accessories in human trafficking, their enthusiasm for the services of prostitutes would wane dramatically. It’s extraordinary, really, that downloading images of child porn is a crime, but effectively raping an abducted girl is not.
Not knowing an item is stolen is no defence to the charge of handling stolen goods. Neither should it be an excuse for hiring a trafficked prostitute to say, “I didn’t realise she wasn’t working willingly.” Because here’s the truth of another cherished male myth regarding prostitution — none of them is working willingly. No girl selects prostitution as a career, not one of them would do it if she had any choice. And, sorry, they don’t enjoy it, you pay them to make it look that way.
Trafficked, coerced or just broke and in debt, every prostitute is a sad, desperate woman who once had proper dreams for her life. One of the girls featured on the Prime Time programme had been based in a flat in Portarlington. She was pregnant when she returned to Romania, and now has an infant son. So there’s a smug, probably married, maybe even highly respected, man somewhere in the midlands who has a baby son in Romania, an impoverished child dressed in hand-me-downs. Can’t you just imagine the lads sniggering “Who’s the daddy?” in the pubs around the Portarlington area the night that programme screened?
That little boy is entitled to an Irish passport, but, in truth, he’s never likely to realise his birthright because he’s just another unfortunate by-product of a trade that no government on earth is willing to tackle. And his safely anonymous Irish father doesn’t care a damn. It’s time these respected conspirators in the cruellest crime were made to care — and made to worry.
