Getting in touch with groups favourable to civil rights

[fada1]

Hi, I've just made contact with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and Amnesty International. Its important to get known groups to advocate, similar to what TORL are doing. I think we should avoid adverserial approaches with them. End of day their intention is good, just their solution is misguided and based on incomplete and biased research. They do magnficient work and we should try and bring them over to the side we are advocating which is regulation and taxation as we agree and advocate the law against criminals and violence be strengthened. More binds us than seperates us. We should cut loose those seen in Prime Time who have no care for sex workers. Groups like TORL provide great help, lets try to get them on board and show the reasonableness of our approach even if we may be met with closed eyes and dogma from moral grounds!

[LaBelleThatcher]

Hi, I've just made contact with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and Amnesty International. Its important to get known groups to advocate, similar to what TORL are doing. I think we should avoid adverserial approaches with them. End of day their intention is good, just their solution is misguided and based on incomplete and biased research. They do magnficient work and we should try and bring them over to the side we are advocating which is regulation and taxation as we agree and advocate the law against criminals and violence be strengthened. More binds us than seperates us. We should cut loose those seen in Prime Time who have no care for sex workers. Groups like TORL provide great help, lets try to get them on board and show the reasonableness of our approach even if we may be met with closed eyes and dogma from moral grounds!

Don't be daft fada!

1. They have never done any real work at all that I can ascertain, apart from abusing their funding to advocate against the best interests and expressed wished of their supposed user groups.
2. They make up their own statistics and evidence as they go along to suit themselves.
3. They insist on claiming to speak *for* sex workers without consultation or consent.
4. In 23 years I have tried every approach known to man to get these people to even *CARE* about the harm they are doing and the only result has ever been that they have found ways to gag me and abuse me for it.
5. They openly affiliate with and encourage the gutter press KNOWING that they persecute sex workers.

People worth good intentions *CANNOT* never mind *DO NOT* behave like that!

Some of the women gave them a chance in 1993, and all they have done since is betray every promise they ever made (some I was eyewitness to) and work consistently towards criminalisation. Do you seriously think giving them some kind of credit now will magically change that?

[LaBelleThatcher]

...and, of course, I forgot the most important part:

Turn Off the Red Light want to take away the livelihood of hard working women in a recssion, when there is little or no chance that they would ever find other work, and they are not doing this in well intentioned ignorance either, they not only know, full well that some of these women are absolutely despoerate, they are also doing this while paying a fortune in state funds for advertising to announce that all the women who's income they are planning to take away are absolutely desperate.

When you take away the income from someone who is already desperate you are leaving them up sh*t creek and taking away their only paddle...

...and ladies, just because you are elective, do not imagine you are immune to any ill effects of having your business and livelihood taken away...

I have been making a lot of enquiries, talking to a lot of people, and there are elective architects, civil engineers, graphic designers etc who lost their job in the crash, have taken second degrees for new careers since and STILL cannot get jobs, and that seems more the rule than the exception.

You familiarity with self employment will, of course, give you an edge, but still..

If TORL get their way, your income in Ireland will drop dramatically at once, and so will prices because there will be so few clients willing to challenge the law. You may keep you regulars, but go away and do the math on that, and factor in the lower prices. Give it a year or two and TORL will be out there demanding the law be enforced as well. There will be raids, the clients will be too afraid...

...your livelihood drops off a cliff...within 4 or 5 years that will stabilise, people will begin to find ways to work around that and set up venture aimed at doing so, usually in return for 50% of your earnings...but... for 4 or 5 years you may write off your earnings in Ireland..

Now you may say "that's cool, I will work somewhere else", but Scotland, England, France and Spain will IMMEDIATELY start holding up a, largely fictitious, "Irish Experience" as a model for future law reform.

Will it be so "cool" then?

[fada1]

Okay, well I don't have any experience of this group, I didn't realise that they are dogmatic to the extent you say. Its no harm even if so to pretend naivety meanwhile counteracting. Either way, the two organisations I mentioned are strong in their own way and people most be prepared to support them. I've emailed TORL to advise them of the danger their approach risks, so its open to them to reply or not. Luckily I'm quite belligerent and not to bothered what others think. My only problem is I'm not self employed that I could speak out without a possible backlash of vengeful press articles etc..

[LaBelleThatcher]

Okay, well I don't have any experience of this group, I didn't realise that they are dogmatic to the extent you say. Its no harm even if so to pretend naivety meanwhile counteracting. Either way, the two organisations I mentioned are strong in their own way and people most be prepared to support them. I've emailed TORL to advise them of the danger their approach risks, so its open to them to reply or not. Luckily I'm quite belligerent and not to bothered what others think. My only problem is I'm not self employed that I could speak out without a possible backlash of vengeful press articles etc..

The ICCL are usually ok, Amnesty International are in a very dodgy place on this (because Colm O'Gorman's "One In 4" signed up to TORL against their own mandate vis a vis clerical abuse)...but stay well away from Ruhama and TORL. They are nowhere near as powerful as they like to claim in any real sense, and are only hanging on to state funding by a thread at this stage.

Any alliance with them gives them an excuse to continue to be funded when it would, otherwise, be withdrawn as they are insistently failing to meet specific structural criteria for continued funding, in the sense that the bulk of funding must be spent of projects that *directly* benefit the target group (as opposed to campaining against them, which has turned Ruhama and TORL into a sick joke in the real corridors of power).

Of course there is always the implied threat of a backlash from the gutter press (that they encourage and endorse, they even gave their only journalist of the year award, in 2009 to Eamon Dillion of the Sunday World who specialises in exposing, and destroying ordinary, decent sex workers) if you stand up to them, but hey...I have been standing up to them sincE 1990 and...



...and, believe me, I am as vulnerable as any of you...

They could lose this round...HARD!

[fada1]

Reply from TORL:

Thank you for your email. The Turn Off the Red Light campaign originated out of research commissioned by the Immigrant Council of Ireland which sought to find a solution to the growing problem of sex trafficking in this country. That research "Globalisation, Sex Trafficking and Prostitution: The Experiences of Migrant Women in Ireland" can be found online here: http://www.immigrantcouncil.ie/image...NGTH_FINAL.pdf . The findings of this report dispelled the myth that human trafficking does not occur in Ireland, by uncovering concrete evidence of 102 victims of this crime detected by front line services over a period of less than 2 years. What was most shocking was that 11 of these women were children at the time they were trafficked. Since the launch of this research, two consecutive annual reports published from the Department of Justice confirmed the prevalence of sex trafficking in Ireland, with 55 victims detected in 2009 and further 56 in 2010. We are extremely concerned that 15 in the 2010 report are children, and 14 of them were found in brothels. These numbers are by all means an underestimation of the real scale of human trafficking in Ireland, since they are only based on the number of women who managed to escape.

While there are a minority of women who work independently in prostitution and profess to be happy and comfortable in their situation, their voice is used to silence the much larger majority who's path into prostitution begins with little or no element of true self-determination. Most women become involved in prostitution because of lack of choice and many are groomed, pressured and/or coerced by pimps or traffickers. It is well documented that a majority of women in prostitution are poor, homeless and have already suffered violence and abuse throughout their life. Many enter prostitution before age 18. Once in prostitution, 9 out 10 surveyed women would like to exit but feel unable to do so. Traffickers recruit these women through deception, force and coercion. Traffickers pray on the vulnerability of people, the same way pimps pray on the vulnerability of women in prostitution. They exploit their situation of poverty, isolation and fear and bind them to their sickening business, pretending to be their friends and saviours. Once in Ireland trafficked women are being handed over to Irish pimps, and end up in indoor prostitution to be sold to Irish clients – over and over again, for the profit of the agents.

These women are the real face of prostitution, but they do not have readily available access to internet, and do not post on the forums of escort sites, therefore it can be easy to forget them.

Those who say prostitution is a job would find it hard to justify the extensive physical and emotional damage women in prostitution suffer. International research shows that mortality in prostitution is ten times higher than that of the general female population. Other reports exploring the emotional trauma sustained by women in prostitution speak of post traumatic stress disorder that appears at the same rate as it appears among soldiers who have participated in combat. Furthermore, women are living in constant fear of violence from procurers and buyers.

Once again,thank you for your email. If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to send them to me.

Best regards,

The thing is while no doubt what they are saying is true, their solution is the problem, it is not a reason to punish the few for the many or many for the few, as no doubt it will not achieve its objective but will make things worse. This is the point I have put to them.

That is why I suggest writing into papers, arguing their solution is ill-concieved rather than condemning them. While you may not like their modus operandi, they to identify I suspect realities in the industry which we can't brush under the carpet. Likewise they can't also brush their nose at the voluntary workers which they seek to do. Two wrongs don't make a right, by either side.

[fada1]

I am enquiring into progress from Amnesty International and am asking questions re Colm and TORL, as to their position. No reply from ICCL yet. I will email them.

[fada1]

BTW, just realised hadn't emailed ICCL so did just that now

[Half Man and Half Dildo]

The NGO's are not interested in the rights of sex workers. They want control over them and want to put them out of business by criminalising their clients.

[Cassandra]

since when did any NGO care about rights? It's all a money game at the end of the day