Dr. Kathryn McGarry:

I thank the Deputy for the questions. I stated that arising from my study, viewing all women as "at-risk" in prostitution blurs the line, limiting the opportunity to make a distinction between acts to which a person has consented - however mistakenly we believe that is - and acts to which a person has not consented and which may leave him or her physically harmed or at risk from an individual. It reduces the opportunity to intervene and target violence against women and men in prostitution. If prostitution is regarded as inherently violent, we do not make any qualitative distinction between violence perpetrated against sex workers and the violence of society that forces somebody into the sex trade.

It is a complex issue and there are a number of different ideological standpoints in this regard. Such a stance can be unhelpful as it blurs the lines somewhat. For example, it makes operational definitions difficult to establish from the outset, and coupled with this is the lack of substantial evidence on experiences in the sex industry in Ireland as a base line. I make this point given the criticisms of the official Swedish evaluation, with the idea that sketchy evidence was presented that was very inconclusive with regard to what works, women's safety and so on. With evaluation, we need pre-intervention or pre-policy data collection as well as post-policy data collection for comparison. That was not available in Sweden and we do not have anything substantial in Ireland, regardless of some of the really good attempts at this work from Ms Monica O'Connor, Dr. Jane Pillinger and others involved in data collection on the sex industry in Ireland.

Much of the conversation about the sex industry is Dublin-based and we must think about what is going on elsewhere. One of the women in my study toured Ireland and it seems she did so quite independently and working by herself. She did not advertise her services as much as other touring escorts because she had "regulars", which touches on the argument made earlier about the underground being a redundant notion as a consequence of the Swedish model. People who have "regulars" do not require as much advertising as others.