Susan O'Keeffe (Labour)

I thank the Minister for his robust response. I pay tribute to the Turn off the Red Light campaign for their perseverance. They have spread the message in a way that people can understand and as Senator Healy Eames said, they remind us that every day the exploitation of women and children continues, that day should not come to pass without some action to deal with it.

When the Swedish Detective Inspector Jonas Trolle was here last year he said that it is now widely seen as shameful and unacceptable to purchase a woman for sex in Sweden. He was speaking in support of the Swedish model and I know there is much confusion and discussion around the success or otherwise of the Swedish model, but he was right about that aspect. It is shameful and unacceptable to purchase a woman for sex. I think no person in this room would disagree with that. It is important for us to remember that is at the core of what we are trying to achieve. Our support for the Minister's work is because we believe this is shameful and unacceptable.

It is shameful that the culture in Ireland is such that as Senator O'Brien has said, we believe it is kind of acceptable that sex is bought and sold and that equality is not sufficiently embedded. We need to arrive at a point where it is shameful and unacceptable for men to demean women through the purchase of sex. Women are demeaned in more ways than just sexual exploitation because of the trafficking, bullying, the physical and mental violence, not to mention drugs and control and all the other things related to sexual exploitation. We have a job of work to do on the culture and the campaigners in Turn Off the Red Light have started that work. As Senator Bacik said, while there may be debate about whether the legislation in Sweden succeeded in all its intents, it is certainly helped. It was also supported by the role of education. We need to bring education on the issue into this debate and not leave the problem entirely to the Minister for Justice and Equality to try to address a problem that cannot be dealt with by legislation alone. The legislation will always have a flaw, the backdoor.

We need to start to encourage young people to understand that this behaviour is not correct and to encourage those who may be engaged in buying sex to think again. Some classes were run in the UK at the end of the 1990s and the first man who turned up at one of them said he was present for the prostitution school. It had to be pointed out that he was there for the "kerb crawling school", so to speak, because he had forgotten that he was responsible as a kerb crawler, as a purchaser of sex, and that the day was set aside to discuss with him and other men what had happened and why they had ended up buying sex. We need to start to look at the issue in that light and educate not just those who may end up buying sex but those who are already in the system.

Some years ago, when I worked at the BBC, I had the privilege of working with Ms Irene Iveson, a physiotherapist who worked in Nottingham, whose 14 year old daughter was murdered in a car park. Irene did not know that her daughter was a prostitute. She had been working for three weeks when she was killed. Irene Iveson, very bravely decided to turn what could only have been described as an appalling experience into something positive and she started to work on educating people and helping them to understand this behaviour and also to encourage the outlawing of kerb crawling. Unfortunately, Irene Iveson is no longer with us, but when I worked with her, we went to Glasgow to visit a number of prostitutes. It is fair to say that even though we spoke to a small number of women, only eight or nine, every one of them would have wished their lives to be different. None was there voluntarily. They felt demeaned and they all spoke about the fear of violence. When Irene spoke of her daughter having been murdered, they too were able to come forward and tell their stories much more freely because they knew that Irene understood them.

We also met Ms Fiona Broadfoot, who still works with an organisation called EXIT and advises the British Government. Fiona was a prostitute who came out of prostitution and set up an organisation to encourage other women to find ways out of it. Implementation of the legislation must be supported by work in other areas. I do not think the Independent Senators believe we can rely solely on legislation. The more times we raise the matter and discuss the wider and broader aspects of this, the more we realise that Irish society has not faced up to the cold realities of what prostitution means to women and children and to the men who purchase sex. We have a collective responsibility to act in the interests of society. We look to the legislation only in the first instance but we realise that much work remains to be done. I commend the Independent Senators on tabling this motion and urging the matter on. I thank the Minister for his continued and clear dedication to the matter.