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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
December-January 2014 43
W
ITH the relentless practicalities of running
a country it is perhaps unsurprising that our
politicians don’t often propose legislation
which has, at its heart, the goal of human harmony.
November 27th of this year was a welcome exception.
With Minister Frances Fitzgerald’s proposal of ‘The
Sexual Offences Bill 2014’ we have it within our grasp
to prohibit, for the first time in Ireland’s history, by
law, the purchase of sexual access to another person.
I speak about human harmony here because
it is an absolute impossibility in the absence of
equality, and equality itself is impossible where one
group has not been liberated from the dominance
of another. As an abolitionist campaigner, I am
often reminded that there are men and trans-
persons bought in the sex-trade. My answer is
always the same: look who’s buying them.
This proposed legislation would make those who
buy sexual access to people legally accountable
for their actions, irrespective of biological sex.
Nobody, however, is ever going to be able to tell me
that almost all those abused in the sex-trade are not
women and children. They are. After seven years in
prostitution I know they are, and it is that simple.
The announcement of these proposed laws has
been a major milestone in the Turn Off the Red Light
campaign. It has been almost four years since I first
spoke at the launch of a campaign that turned out
to be a long, drawn-out and arduous fight for social
justice. Fifteen months of relentless media debates
and over 800 written submissions were involved.
There were private hearings and public hearings in
which the Garda Síochána made it perfectly clear in
their evidence to Government that Irish prostitution
is directed and controlled by organised crime. Irish
politicians visited Sweden to investigate how the Sex
Purchase Law was operating there. This lengthy and
thorough debate was eventually concluded on June
27th as the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice,
Defence and Equality unanimously agreed that the
Nordic Model should be imported into Irish law.
Now, thankfully, Minister Fitzgerald has backed
the main points of the campaign. While we of course
look forward to examining the Bill in detail, we
are overwhelmingly well-disposed to the headings
of its contents so far, and glad to see also that a
whole new raft of measures to protect children
from sexual exploitation is contained in the bill.
There are few enough days in all our lives when
we can truly say we are proud of our country, or that
we are living through a historically significant time.
When these things come together, as they do for me
at this time, I find myself looking both forward and
back. I find myself imagining myself living into my
seventies and eighties and looking back on this as a
truly significant turning point for my country. And I
find myself looking back to my teens and connecting
with the absolute sense of injustice I was so immersed
in and infused with then. I was not so inured to
injustice, though, that I was
unaware of it. I always knew
the purchase of sexual access
to women and girls was a
human rights abuse. I knew it
because I lived it every day.
It is easy for me to imagine
my older self looking back on
the historical relevance of the
enactment of this legislation,
but it is harder, much harder,
to imagine my teenage self
looking forward to it. Justice
did not exist in the brothels
and the red-light zones and it would have been so very
difficult for my fifteen-year-old self to imagine it there.
If I could go back and tell myself one thing,
it would be this: “On November 27th 2014 a
law will be proposed that will bring justice to
this red-light street, and all the other streets
in the zone, and every brothel in Ireland.” •
Rachel Moran is the author of ‘Paid For – My Journey
Through Prostitution’ @RachelRMoran
The Sexual
Offences Bill
criminalises
buying sex
Nov 27th – justice in red lights
RACHEL MORAN
Irish
prostitution
is directed
and controlled
by organised
crime
“
