Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I wish to share time with Deputy Coppinger.

People Before Profit opposes the Bill on a number of grounds and I will outline our concerns. I have concerns about access to children's psychotherapy notes and believe this should be restricted to exceptional circumstances where more general information from the therapist is not available.

However, my chief concern relates to the criminalisation of the purchase of sex. Approximately three years ago, the union I worked for at the time, Unite, was lobbied by the Turn Off the Red Light, TORL, campaign and we had a debate in the equality and women's sections of the union. I was the only person to advocate that TORL had it wrong but I lost the vote when it came to the union adopting a position. Like the Union of Students in Ireland and Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, Unite is reconsidering its position on this. It is healthy that organisations that advocate on behalf of women and that represent women and others should examine where the criminalisation of the purchasers of sex may lead us.

I object to the conflation in the legislation of a number of different and complex issues. The issue of consensual adult sex work should not be conflated with the issue of women and, indeed, children being trafficked and coerced into sex work or the issue of child abuse or pornography. They are different issues and the Bill attempts to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, which is not an appropriate response. The conflation allows for many Members to express outrage and moral revulsion but the previous speaker made an eloquent case for looking after prostitutes and trying to get them out of the business of providing sex. I do not at all disagree with that but, at the end of the day, what the Bill sets out to do will end up doing the opposite. Much of the justification revolves around references to the Nordic and Swedish model, which has been instanced by the TORL campaign, Ruhama etc. as a good model, with research showing it addressed the issue. However, the model does not consider the complexity of the issue or the social and economic realities that lie at the heart of the criminalisation of the purchase of sex.

It appears the legislation would decriminalise prostitution, although I am a little confused because section 25 refers to reinforcing the offences of loitering, working indoors or running a brothel and making them subject to harsher sanctions. However, the Bill provides that those who purchase sex will be liable to criminal charges and, therefore, they can be arrested and brought before the courts. It is regrettable that the Bill does not acknowledge or address how the law interacts with sex workers. Although it does not discriminate against sex workers, it makes their lives more dangerous and precarious. This is based on research conducted by Amnesty International and people who look after female prostitutes in the Scandinavian countries who have operated under this model. By targeting the purchase of sex, the industry at large will be driven underground.

There were cases in Scandinavia where clients of sex workers were brought to court and the clients were required to give evidence against them. There were also cases of clients having their personal possessions searched and if they carried condoms, for example, they were used as exhibit A in the case against the purchaser of sex. HIV Ireland wrote to us recently about this. Aids Action Alliance has also conducted research in this regard which has found that if women, in particular, and children are driven into a position of having to hide the fact they may be selling sex because the purchasers are liable to end up in court, they may end up not protecting themselves. There is evidence that HIV is on the increase among sex workers in Sweden and Norway. Criminalising the purchase of sex creates a buyer's market but it determines from the buyer's point of view where the act should take place and in what surroundings it should take place rather than the sex workers having control of where and how the act takes place. It drives the industry into a dangerous and dark place, particularly for the women concerned.

According to the Amnesty International report, sex workers who befall this kind of criminalisation are subject to surveillance because if the police want to catch the purchase, they surveil the sex workers. They leads to a situation where the sex workers and the treatment they receive at the hands of the police is often dangerous. In this country, many sex workers have complained openly, and it has been reported in the media over recent years, that they can be persecuted, harassed and often put into troubled areas by the gardaí who are pursuing them. There is no attempt to separate the dangers of sex work from the reasons people are engaged in it. They can be driven into it or they could choose this work rather than choosing a different life. This legislation will not help women and children in this position.

The conflation of that and trafficking is even more worrying because we should be going after traffickers. Trafficking human beings for the purposes of the purchase of sex and forcing people to engage in the sale of sex is a serious crime. A court case was reported in the news over recent days in which 20 Romanian women were fined for running a brothel in the west having been trafficked into the country but there was no sign of those responsible for trafficking them.

I would much rather see the State produce a strong Bill with financial and resource supports for the Garda, which already has a budget and a dedicated unit for trafficking but which seems to get very few results, and put efforts into that rather than the criminalising of the purchaser. As I have argued, the latter will drive the situation for women into more dangerous territory, drive the whole thing underground and make them even more vulnerable in terms of the protection of their own health.

I will finish by reading a little from a piece by two Swedish researchers who looked at the decriminalisation of prostitution and beyond. The research concerned the experiences of women in Sweden since the introduction of the Swedish model, which is marketed around the world as the way to go when in fact it is not the way to go and has had very serious effects on prostitution and prostitutes in the countries that have adopted it: "It is said to have ... had a deterrent effect on clients, and to have changed societal attitudes ... without ... any negative consequences." That was the intent of it. However, these claims have been evaluated since and are, according to the report, inconsistent, full of contradictions and haphazard, with "irrelevant or flawed comparisons and conclusions [that] were made without factual backup and were at times of a speculative character". Therefore, organisations which work with prostitutes, all for very good reasons, and which say that we must criminalise the purchase of sex are actually getting the opposite result and a much more negative response from those who work in the sex industry.

The reality is that we are not dealing with these issues solely by legislation but that we need to recognise, as previous speakers have said, that there are economic and social complexities that surround sex workers and that unless we offer alternatives to women and tackle the root causes of the oppression of women in general, we will simply end up worsening the position of the most vulnerable women in society. What this Bill does not do, and what those who drafted it did not do, was talk to the very people whom they claim to protect, namely, the sex workers themselves, who are very recognisable, very easy to contact and in some ways much better organised than they used to be. Before we vote on this Bill, we have a moral responsibility to talk to these groups that represent sex workers, to read the reports by Amnesty International and HIV Ireland and to represent the issues for sex workers rather than thinking we are doing the morally correct thing by going after the purchasers of sex and ending up making women even more vulnerable.

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