Suppress the demand - Village Magazine

 —  October – November 2013

POLITICS PrOsTiTuTiOn

HIS summer, after ﬁfteen months of

deliberation, debate and evidence,

an Oireachtas Committee ﬁnally

recommended the criminalisation

of the demand for paid sex. It was a unani-

mous decision. The day it was delivered was

a very emotional one for women like myself,

who have lived the hugely exploitative and

abusive reality of prostitution.

I was one of the women who gave evidence

to the Committee and I had coordinated writ-

ten testimony from a group of women several

months before that. In my discussions with

those women and in reading their written evi-

dence, I learned how much prostitution had

changed in the ﬁfteen years since I escaped

it. All of these women had been out of pros-

titution less than four years. They were able

to tell me how Irish prostitution had changed

with and because of the Celtic Tiger. It was a

vile and unsupportable picture.

As Irish men acquired more money many

acquired something else: the sense that their

wants were needs. This is now the measure

of whether or not

a person lives in

an aﬄuent society.

The age proﬁle of

men using women

in prostitution

dropped signiﬁ-

cantly. Many of

the men present-

ing at brothels

were in their early

twenties and

crossed the entire

social spectrum.

This was very

diﬀerent from

when I started in

prostitution in

. Almost all

the punters then

were middle aged,

middle class and

married.

With the Celtic

Tiger came a massive inﬂux of stag parties.

Many of the men who travelled under the

guise of celebrating impending marriage

made the purchase of female ﬂesh a central

part of the festivities. In  Irish prostitu-

tion went online and the review system was

born. I was lucky  was the year I got out

of prostitution. After that women were not

just purchased for sexual use, but reviewed

on their ‘performance’, their attitude, their

willingness and their bodies.

All aspects of commercial sexual exploi-

tation were facilitated by the growth of the

internet. Porn became more accessible and

immediately more prevalent. Women in pros-

titution were, of course, in the front line. Men

started arriving in brothels demanding sex

acts they said they’d learned from porn. These

were sometimes almost physically impossi-

ble to deliver, such as ‘tea-bagging’ – an act

whereby a woman is expected to accept both a

man’s penis and testicles in her mouth. If she

couldn’t accommodate him, she could expect

a bad review.

The review system in prostitution is a

monumental cruelty. Those who defend this

system pretend that it is voluntary because

there is an ‘opt out’ clause for women who

advertise sex online. This is a fallacy. Men

who pay for sex openly and repeatedly state

online that they will never visit a woman who

doesn’t allow herself to be reviewed, because,

in their view, this must mean she ‘has some-

thing to hide’. This puts women in the sex

trade in an impossible position: allow your-

self to be reviewed like a piece of meat or go

broke. This is just one tiny part of the coer-

cion in the modern-day Irish sex trade.

The price of sex in prostitution soared

during the Celtic Tiger years. When I started

out on Benburb Street at ﬁfteen years of age,

the price of sex was ten pounds for hand relief,

ﬁfteen for oral sex and twenty for intercourse.

By  women were charging between sixty

and one hundred euros for the same acts. The

price of sex, just like housing, had soared to

unprecedented levels.

In the early nineties, the ﬁrst visible signs

of the Celtic Tiger were the new apartment

blocks that suddenly sprang up all over the

city. They oozed a luxury the Irish people had

never seen before, at least not in our own land.

Suddenly we had residential buildings that

screamed of extravagance and seemed to

promise the possibility of a future none of us

had ever been able to aﬀord. At the same time

the Sexual Oﬀences Act of  was passed

into law, and many street women, myself

included, were run indoors. The new face of

prostitution was a combination of both these

factors – beautiful luxurious apartments and

Suppress the demand

The reality behind the need for criminalisation of demand for prostitution.

By Rachel Moran

Pic

caption

here

45 people,

including

23 children,

were found

to have been

trafcked

into Ireland

last year

and 39 were

sexually

exploited

“

Continued

on page 48