Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am quite disappointed with Senator McDowell. I agree with him that section 4 should have been dealt with in another Bill.

In my previous career, I supported many people who were exploited through prostitution because they were addicts, homeless or lived in poverty. In the past few years I have become a very strong advocate for them. I want sex work to be criminalised in terms of the purchaser because the people I supported were vulnerable adults. If one provides a service for money because of being impoverished then one is automatically in a more vulnerable position and there is no balance of power. I have also spent a lot of time with women who have said that they provide services consensually. They do not see themselves as vulnerable. Such people must be legislated for. A differentiation should have been made between both cohorts. On one hand, there are vulnerable adults who are exploited due to poverty, abuse and addiction. Most of the sex workers that I supported would have had addictions. I would have preferred separate legislation that defined different areas.

I am concerned by the fact that part of the Bill encourages women to work alone. I have tried to consider this Bill not so much morally but more in terms of a harm reduction model or one that will cause the least amount of harm to the people involved in prostitution. The part of the Bill that removes the option for single operators to work alongside others out of fear of being viewed as a brothel is counter-productive to our aim of keeping women safe.

Advocates for sex workers have mentioned that the power balance shifts more to the man when his actions are criminalised. I would like to hear more on this aspect. This legislation means that it is the man who takes the risk and, thus, he will be in a greater position to influence the terms of reference. The power will now lie more with the man because he has been made the risk taker in this situation. We need to discuss these points and I look forward to hearing the views of the Minister of State on them.

I have divided my queries into sections. Section 27 refers to a review, which I welcome.However, there was much advocacy for a review of the legislation after either 12 months or two years. As there is much evidence, as was suggested, that this model is likely to have a poor impact on the human rights of workers and interfere with their ability to protect themselves, there is concern as to what the law will review. It must not be an assessment of fluctuations in the numbers of sex workers alone but rather an assessment of the impact of the law on the human rights of sex workers. Considering no prior baseline research into the population was carried out and that the law will affect current sex workers, how does the Government propose to make comparisons with the review? What are the Government's plans to conduct meaningful and thorough consultation into the sex work population in Ireland and engage with it directly about the laws that affect sex workers' experiences and needs?

The second section to which I wish to refer is section 26. An amendment concerning the provision of legal clarification on the brothel-keeping law was attempted in the Dáil and seemed to have wide support; 42 Deputies voted in favour of it. This law is purported to arrest exploiters, but we know from CSO reports over the past five-year period that 92% of people arrested were the workers themselves. We very frequently see reports in the news of sex workers working in groups as small as two people being arrested, their money taken, fined and told to go to their country of origin. I believe last week a married couple working as escorts together out of their house, with no one else working alongside them, were arrested under such legislation and essentially charged for pimping each other. Their full names and addresses were printed in the newspaper. Last month, there was a case of four Romanian women in Galway who were arrested, their moneys taken, fined and sent home. They said they were working to send money home to their families. The judge referred to them as little girls and said he thought they were trafficking victims but he sent them home without investigation regardless of that comment. Why was the Criminal Law (Human Trafficking) Act 2008 not assessed in this regard for its failure to adequately address the problem of trafficking for sexual exploitation? Why was there no focus on implementing the existing law more effectively?

The next point I wish to make concerns sex workers and their distrust of the Garda. Many come from countries where the police are quite abusive. According to a report that came out last week, the Ombudsman is looking into 70 accounts of sexual assault by gardaí over six years. It was reported last year in the news that when gardaí raided a work apartment, one garda returned after the operation and allegedly raped one of the workers. When someone mentioned last week on "Today with Sean O'Rourke" that gardaí were receiving training to deal with sex workers more sensitively, a garda texted in to say they were receiving no such training. When Galina Sandeva - I might have the pronunciation of her name wrong - a Bulgarian sex worker in Norway, where a similar model exists, died, her friends did not contact the police until they found her body themselves. Amnesty International's report on the effect of this law in Norway quoted a worker as saying:

You only call the police if you think you are going to die. If you call the police, you lose everything.

When workers hear these accounts, they become even less likely to reach out to the police and they have a greater fear of being mistreated. If the Garda and judges continue not to interpret the law in a way that protects the workers, will there be scope for legally clarifying this brothel-keeping law so that stronger measures to protect workers from exploitation are introduced?

The Minister rejected a proposed amendment in the Dáil to include provisions in the Bill for viable alternatives to working in the sex industry and for supports that may serve as preventive measures against entering the industry in the first place. This was a hugely flawed decision. How are we to look to move women out of prostitution or reduce the level of prostitution if we do not increase the supports available to people to make that transition? What measures does the Government intend to introduce to address the survival situations that are leading people to engage in the sex industry? Senator McDowell referred to students. Their involvement in sex work is not isolated to the UK; this happens in Ireland as well. He is right that it is happening but he made it seem as if it were a choice, which it is not. Again, it goes hand in hand with the need to be able to pay for an education and how inaccessible that is. When we consider different laws, we need to consider the contributing factors to people entering the industry in the first place. Why was there not a thorough examination of the legislative model of full decriminalisation, as obtains in New Zealand, considering it is the single model for which sex-worker-led organisations worldwide?

We all know that so many parts of the Bill need to go through the Houses. It was the hardest thing to even attempt in any way to think about what I was going to vote for or against, whether I would delay the Bill or whether we would push amendments. Many of us found ourselves in a real dilemma, which we should acknowledge. People, including activists and representatives, have been working on this for a long time, but when one stands here as a Senator and must decide whether to put one's vote behind something when one has not had as full an engagement with it as one would have wished, it is a really difficult position to be in. The Leader of the House said this morning that there was cross-party support for the Bill and that it was widely supported by NGOs, yet Amnesty International, which is the largest human rights NGO in the country, does not support it, so question marks still surround it. Simply because the legislation has been around for a long time does not mean it is not flawed and cannot be improved. I regret that we did not get to a stage at which we could attempt to improve the Bill where we thought it could be improved but I welcome the rest of the Bill. I hope at some stage we can look back, perhaps in the review period, and make amendments in line with some of our concerns.