View Full Version : The Swedish Model
Let's discuss it here, as the topic seems to be fragmented in the general chat section.
The Irish Government is entertaining the idea of implementing the Swedish Model, that is the client will be arrested for buying sex, but it will still be legal for escorts to sell it. Pimping, brothel keeping and (of course) trafficking will still be illegal.
What are your thoughts on this?
funlover12
01-06-12, 10:48
cant see how it applies to escorts, we buy time not sex!
its there in every profile..
escorts =/= prostitutes!
I don't suppose it would be as simple as chnaging the wording from Rates to something like, suggested gift value for 30mins = xyz? That way the client could say he didn't pay, he gave her a gift? Just throwing the thought out there..
funlover12
01-06-12, 10:56
as for the sweedish model, how the fuck does that make any sense? its illegal for him to buy it, but its legal for her to sell it :S double standards much, wtf?? :confused:
and does the sweedish model apply to prostitutes or escorts too?
Do we think that this sudden 're-focus' of the Swedish Model has been highlighted to change the subject of the 'raids' not reinforcing the statistics that were so deeply anticipated?
All they need will be one high profile prosecution perhaps a sting to prove sex is being bought not time
I remember some film where an undercover girl asked the punter to SPELL out what he wanted and bang that was it
I see Belfast becoming the sex capital of the UK as thousands of girls and punters migrate north to continue buying/selling sex
Just the tonic the city needs with all the ghostly vacant apartments around
Its a sort of EU distortion and essentially anti competitive legislation that probably breaches Human Rights Laws if someone were brave enough to test it
Sets the ROI back decades imo
As I understand it the Swedish model was implemented in 1999 criminalizing the buying of sex but not the selling of it. The authorities even went so far as to "name and shame" clients in local newspapers. The approach was supposed to switch the police's viewpoint from the prostitute to the purchaser of services. Sweden claimed that there was a massive drop in street prostitution and that human traffickers no longer find Sweden to be a good market for their trade. However I don't know if it would make much of a difference here because I simply don't know the extent of the human trafficking situation in Ireland. I for one would never visit an escort that I suspected of being trafficked, and I think that most people share that view. If the arrangement is taking place between to adults neither of whom are being coerced, then the government should have nothing to do with it. I posted in another thread about New Zealand, a country where prostitution is totally decriminalized and whose rates of human trafficking are extremely low, even than many countries in which it is illegal, so it seems a bit much really.
hotasice20
01-06-12, 11:09
I don't suppose it would be as simple as chnaging the wording from Rates to something like, suggested gift value for 30mins = xyz? That way the client could say he didn't pay, he gave her a gift? Just throwing the thought out there..
In Canada they tend to use the word 'donation', not rate. Not sure if it's for this reason though.
Let's discuss it here, as the topic seems to be fragmented in the general chat section.
The Irish Government is entertaining the idea of implementing the Swedish Model, that is the client will be arrested for buying sex, but it will still be legal for escorts to sell it. Pimping, brothel keeping and (of course) trafficking will still be illegal.
What are your thoughts on this?
If it happens then that would be the end of my road trips. Would continue to visit but would be in the north only.
Ric Hardgear
01-06-12, 13:00
https://www.escort-ireland.com/boards/attachment.php?attachmentid=61027&d=1338555505
swedish model , sorry well benny was going to do it ,and jaysus sam is very guilty of same ....pray continue
LaBelleThatcher
01-06-12, 13:12
Let's discuss it here, as the topic seems to be fragmented in the general chat section.
The Irish Government is entertaining the idea of implementing the Swedish Model, that is the client will be arrested for buying sex, but it will still be legal for escorts to sell it. Pimping, brothel keeping and (of course) trafficking will still be illegal.
What are your thoughts on this?
Great idea Samlad, especially if our invited guests from Ruhama ever find the courage and integrity to arrive and make themselves aware of who a large proportion of sex workers actually are and what they actually think.
I default to looking on sex work purely as a matter of economics, from the point of view of the sex worker, and it is all very simple.
During a recession, like every other entertainment industry, the market for the sex industry shrinks, at the same time as the numbers of crisis and survival sex workers increase dramatically.
For sex workers, this means that prices and incomes drop, and like any other self employed person, their working life becomes far more stressful. Meanwhile the banks, building societies, utilities credit cards and Tesco all expect to be paid just the same.
So what do you think happens if you criminalise the buyer?
Many women are getting into sex work for the first time because there is no other work - so you can forget that for starters.
E-I (and similar) will be getting a lot of new advertisers from other sectors trying to work around the law or "trafficking" themselves out of Ireland on tour through their sister sites.
If they had the integrity, credibility and moral resources, which they do not, Ruhama do not have the material resources to offer and real assistance to hundreds of women denied their income from sex work. Most of their resources are spent on salaries, premises and lobbying against the wishes and best interests of sex workers. What happened in the 90s recession was that they offered daytime art and personal development classes to women who still had to go out and struggle to find enough business to make a living...not for a few weeks, or months, but for years, feeding them false hope after false hope to keep the claws in and conditioning them to Ruhama's ideology, false memory syndrome (at that time confined to childhood, but now applied to clients and everyday life) and internalised prejudice against themselves for the sex work they still have to do, every step of the way. The psychological and emotional cruelty of it still staggers me to this day, and as Ruhama are so fascinated to know what I have against them so they can pretend to change it, *THAT* would be the biggest part.
Real women will start to lose their livelihoods, homes and families, with no honest "last resort" to turn to to avert the crisis. With their children at stake, I am betting the best (because they are strong enough to abandon personal morality for the sake of their families) and the worst of them will turn to real crime. Some of them will not get away with it, and there you have family after family, that could have been growing and developing in a healthy, nurturing environment, towards the same kind of safe, bright future all the NGO bunnies got to take for granted, destroyed, regulated to sink estates, drug abuse, welfare dependency and crime.
That's reality...THAT is what has me putting in a full time job to fighting this cr*p at my own expense...I cannot live with knowing what will happen to a fair amount of sex workers and their families if "the Swedish Model" happens here at this time...and that fate will not distinguish between women who want to sell sex and women who have to sell sex, except in the that women who *have* to sell sex will usually be hit first and suffer the most.
...and all because the ladies (of Ruhama) love to impose control...not to mention a way to increase their funding...
:angryfire:
But there are issues beyond that (as if there need to be...like E-I I tend to have a "ladies first, last and foremost mindset).
If ye lads were "rapists" then, frankly, the sooner everybody woke up and realised that the better...but there is just one tiny problem. You aren't rapists, and trying to indoctrinate people to see anything as something it is not is a form of psychological abuse called "Gaslighting" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting .
There is a lot of (understandable) focus on how ye lads feel about that, but beyond your feelings, that degree of misrepresentation also has a psychologically damaging affect on the rest of our society, and how we perceive abuse and gender issues...and abuse and gender issues can be such ambiguous things that the last thing we, as a society, need is to permit them to be deliberately distorted.
Something you can see evidence of around you is that this campaign is already beginning to distort the principle of sexual consent. The campaign is cornering sex workers into counteracting it by enthusiastically claiming to enjoy every aspect of their work...but that is not what sexual consent is about.
Bluntly, is is absolutely nobody's business how any person feels about sex in any context. Consent is all that matters and consent is about whether a person voluntarily contracts to have sex, not why. What will happen to the law if rape ceases to be a matter of expressed consent between adults and is tried on third party assumptions about feelings?
The standard pedophile defence seems to be to claim that the child enjoyed it.
Great idea Samlad, especially if our invited guests from Ruhama ever find the courage and integrity to arrive and make themselves aware of who a large proportion of sex workers actually are and what they actually think.
I default to looking on sex work purely as a matter of economics, from the point of view of the sex worker, and it is all very simple.
During a recession, like every other entertainment industry, the market for the sex industry shrinks, at the same time as the numbers of crisis and survival sex workers increase dramatically.
For sex workers, this means that prices and incomes drop, and like any other self employed person, their working life becomes far more stressful. Meanwhile the banks, building societies, utilities credit cards and Tesco all expect to be paid just the same.
So what do you think happens if you criminalise the buyer?
Many women are getting into sex work for the first time because there is no other work - so you can forget that for starters.
E-I (and similar) will be getting a lot of new advertisers from other sectors trying to work around the law or "trafficking" themselves out of Ireland on tour through their sister sites.
If they had the integrity, credibility and moral resources, which they do not, Ruhama do not have the material resources to offer and real assistance to hundreds of women denied their income from sex work. Most of their resources are spent on salaries, premises and lobbying against the wishes and best interests of sex workers. What happened in the 90s recession was that they offered daytime art and personal development classes to women who still had to go out and struggle to find enough business to make a living...not for a few weeks, or months, but for years, feeding them false hope after false hope to keep the claws in and conditioning them to Ruhama's ideology, false memory syndrome (at that time confined to childhood, but now applied to clients and everyday life) and internalised prejudice against themselves for the sex work they still have to do, every step of the way. The psychological and emotional cruelty of it still staggers me to this day, and as Ruhama are so fascinated to know what I have against them so they can pretend to change it, *THAT* would be the biggest part.
Real women will start to lose their livelihoods, homes and families, with no honest "last resort" to turn to to avert the crisis. With their children at stake, I am betting the best (because they are strong enough to abandon personal morality for the sake of their families) and the worst of them will turn to real crime. Some of them will not get away with it, and there you have family after family, that could have been growing and developing in a healthy, nurturing environment, towards the same kind of safe, bright future all the NGO bunnies got to take for granted, destroyed, regulated to sink estates, drug abuse, welfare dependency and crime.
That's reality...THAT is what has me putting in a full time job to fighting this cr*p at my own expense...I cannot live with knowing what will happen to a fair amount of sex workers and their families if "the Swedish Model" happens here at this time...and that fate will not distinguish between women who want to sell sex and women who have to sell sex, except in the that women who *have* to sell sex will usually be hit first and suffer the most.
...and all because the ladies (of Ruhama) love to impose control...not to mention a way to increase their funding...
:angryfire:
But there are issues beyond that (as if there need to be...like E-I I tend to have a "ladies first, last and foremost mindset).
If ye lads were "rapists" then, frankly, the sooner everybody woke up and realised that the better...but there is just one tiny problem. You aren't rapists, and trying to indoctrinate people to see anything as something it is not is a form of psychological abuse called "Gaslighting" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting .
There is a lot of (understandable) focus on how ye lads feel about that, but beyond your feelings, that degree of misrepresentation also has a psychologically damaging affect on the rest of our society, and how we perceive abuse and gender issues...and abuse and gender issues can be such ambiguous things that the last thing we, as a society, need is to permit them to be deliberately distorted.
Something you can see evidence of around you is that this campaign is already beginning to distort the principle of sexual consent. The campaign is cornering sex workers into counteracting it by enthusiastically claiming to enjoy every aspect of their work...but that is not what sexual consent is about.
Bluntly, is is absolutely nobody's business how any person feels about sex in any context. Consent is all that matters and consent is about whether a person voluntarily contracts to have sex, not why. What will happen to the law if rape ceases to be a matter of expressed consent between adults and is tried on third party assumptions about feelings?
The standard pedophile defence seems to be to claim that the child enjoyed it.Brilliant post bella .: doc
Great idea Samlad, especially if our invited guests from Ruhama ever find the courage and integrity to arrive and make themselves aware of who a large proportion of sex workers actually are and what they actually think.
I default to looking on sex work purely as a matter of economics, from the point of view of the sex worker, and it is all very simple.
During a recession, like every other entertainment industry, the market for the sex industry shrinks, at the same time as the numbers of crisis and survival sex workers increase dramatically.
For sex workers, this means that prices and incomes drop, and like any other self employed person, their working life becomes far more stressful. Meanwhile the banks, building societies, utilities credit cards and Tesco all expect to be paid just the same.
So what do you think happens if you criminalise the buyer?
Many women are getting into sex work for the first time because there is no other work - so you can forget that for starters.
E-I (and similar) will be getting a lot of new advertisers from other sectors trying to work around the law or "trafficking" themselves out of Ireland on tour through their sister sites.
If they had the integrity, credibility and moral resources, which they do not, Ruhama do not have the material resources to offer and real assistance to hundreds of women denied their income from sex work. Most of their resources are spent on salaries, premises and lobbying against the wishes and best interests of sex workers. What happened in the 90s recession was that they offered daytime art and personal development classes to women who still had to go out and struggle to find enough business to make a living...not for a few weeks, or months, but for years, feeding them false hope after false hope to keep the claws in and conditioning them to Ruhama's ideology, false memory syndrome (at that time confined to childhood, but now applied to clients and everyday life) and internalised prejudice against themselves for the sex work they still have to do, every step of the way. The psychological and emotional cruelty of it still staggers me to this day, and as Ruhama are so fascinated to know what I have against them so they can pretend to change it, *THAT* would be the biggest part.
Real women will start to lose their livelihoods, homes and families, with no honest "last resort" to turn to to avert the crisis. With their children at stake, I am betting the best (because they are strong enough to abandon personal morality for the sake of their families) and the worst of them will turn to real crime. Some of them will not get away with it, and there you have family after family, that could have been growing and developing in a healthy, nurturing environment, towards the same kind of safe, bright future all the NGO bunnies got to take for granted, destroyed, regulated to sink estates, drug abuse, welfare dependency and crime.
That's reality...THAT is what has me putting in a full time job to fighting this cr*p at my own expense...I cannot live with knowing what will happen to a fair amount of sex workers and their families if "the Swedish Model" happens here at this time...and that fate will not distinguish between women who want to sell sex and women who have to sell sex, except in the that women who *have* to sell sex will usually be hit first and suffer the most.
...and all because the ladies (of Ruhama) love to impose control...not to mention a way to increase their funding...
:angryfire:
But there are issues beyond that (as if there need to be...like E-I I tend to have a "ladies first, last and foremost mindset).
If ye lads were "rapists" then, frankly, the sooner everybody woke up and realised that the better...but there is just one tiny problem. You aren't rapists, and trying to indoctrinate people to see anything as something it is not is a form of psychological abuse called "Gaslighting" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting .
There is a lot of (understandable) focus on how ye lads feel about that, but beyond your feelings, that degree of misrepresentation also has a psychologically damaging affect on the rest of our society, and how we perceive abuse and gender issues...and abuse and gender issues can be such ambiguous things that the last thing we, as a society, need is to permit them to be deliberately distorted.
Something you can see evidence of around you is that this campaign is already beginning to distort the principle of sexual consent. The campaign is cornering sex workers into counteracting it by enthusiastically claiming to enjoy every aspect of their work...but that is not what sexual consent is about.
Bluntly, is is absolutely nobody's business how any person feels about sex in any context. Consent is all that matters and consent is about whether a person voluntarily contracts to have sex, not why. What will happen to the law if rape ceases to be a matter of expressed consent between adults and is tried on third party assumptions about feelings?
The standard pedophile defence seems to be to claim that the child enjoyed it.
Great post, LBT. I've highlighted this section for good reason; implanting false memories may seem like a whimsical concept, but it is very, very real and does affect peoples' lives.
For people not familiar with the concept of false memories, please watch this video (and part two):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhZjxkaCkzk
Psychology studies of false memories I have seen are synonymous with religious organisations.
LaBelleThatcher
01-06-12, 13:49
Just as an interesting PS...Ruhama's sockpuppet has just been "published" on Melissa Farley's site (in case you are wondering who she is, she is, arguably, the "mutha", and I use the word in it's broadest sense, of all this distorted thinking).
If you have nothing better to do over the weekend, take a look. Imagine you know nothing at all about sex work, and you have every reason to believe every word she says:
http://www.prostitutionresearch.com/blog/the_survivors_view/
Even if you take every word she says as gospel truth there is something very, very important missing. Perhaps *the* most important thing of all:
What will happen to the desperate person if they cannot use sex work to survive?
What do you honestly think happens to anyone when they run out of ways to survive?
And never mind the elephant, that would be the pink and woolly mammoth sitting in the middle of the room of life itself.
I have a family ring that was given to me recently to "sell if things get too bad".
If things do get too bad, and you offer to buy that ring from me, for a good, freely agreed price...would that make you a thief?
Let's get our priorities straight again. Whether we can survive is many times more important than whether we sell sex. But this article leaves the desperate hanging like so many voiceless eggs who must, perforce, be broken for their personal omelette to be made.
And part two of the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsXoVYDL_gs&feature=relmfu
LaBelleThatcher
01-06-12, 14:35
The false memory thing can get far more complex.
There is a variation on false memory syndrome where someone who has really been abused unconsciously transfers the memory of that abuse onto an innocent party at some later time.
Our unconscious minds are very, very efficient at protecting us, but not always very scrupulous about it, so this may well happen when the victim finds the abuser more intimidating than the abuse itself so that the unconscious mind transfers the original abuse to an innocent and benign individual in order to avoid being too afraid to stop repressing it and process it.
There is a case I know of (daren't name it or, never mind Ruhama, we will get the hounds of hell plus lawyers landing for a chat :o ) where a woman vacillated between a "fatal attraction" type pursuit of anyone she perceived to be a benign authority figure with some degree of celebrity (always ending in an obviously factitious accusation of abuse, some of which were quite high profile), and, at other times blatantly courting abuse and abusers. She made false accusations of every kind against everybody, including family members...for decades...it was her way of life.
Pretty obvious she was just a messed up, dangerous little fantasist...until her original and actual abuser, confessed as a very elderly man...
A lot of "survivor porn" seems strikingly similar.
Back in the day ('93) Ruhama (and, by extension, their international compadres) were mad keen to prove that the main reason women were in sex work was because of childhood sexual abuse...because then, that was the fashion (check out a movie with Steisand called "Nuts" some time...it's excellent, and if you have more than one braincell, it's message is far more complex and valid than "child sexual abuse makes women sell sex"!). They were quite insistent and invasive about it, always glossing over the various levels of economic imperatives in sex work in favour of it. They did a feck of a lot of damage they have never acknowledged or apologised for that way.
In many ways it was just an extension of the mentality of the laundries that claimed to protect we weak women from our own sexuality...
Women got the pill, and sexual rights and nobody was going to buy into that invasive nonsense any more...so they moved on to claiming to protect us from the a fictional compulsive reaction to sometimes factitious childhood sexual abuse...
Is this the next stage, where vulnerable women are groomed and conditioned to project pre-existing abuse on to anyone who was a benign part of their own constructive attempts to get past and rise above it? As an excuse to claim to protect women from non-existant present abuse?
I'm sorry if this sounds defeatist, but Ruhama will win. It's absolutely guaranteed. There is no way on this Earth that an irish housewife with a vote, or a politician playing to his constituents, is ever going to believe that some women are genuine independent escorts, or that some clients (like me) visit escorts to relax in intimate company. Education of the general public on this issue is impossible.
LaBelleThatcher
01-06-12, 16:27
I'm sorry if this sounds defeatist, but Ruhama will win. It's absolutely guaranteed. There is no way on this Earth that an irish housewife with a vote, or a politician playing to his constituents, is ever going to believe that some women are genuine independent escorts, or that some clients (like me) visit escorts to relax in intimate company. Education of the general public on this issue is impossible.
Don't underestimate ordinary people Mousey...they may not vote *for* us, but you might be surprised how many will vote against the insult to their intelligence the various deceits practised upon them by these organisations represent.
I think you would also be surprised how many women (just like us, after all) find it almost impossible to believe that 21st century woman can be coerced into anything in large numbers and find the suggestion that they could as insulting as we do.
...as for the rest...where your eyes do not see it, all women are raised with a similar set of fundamental truths, one of which is that ye lads will do just about *ANYTHING* for sex, quite blindly at times, and paying for it is only the least of it!
Society hasn't even fully reversed the perception of ye as innocent babes being lead astray by "bold, brassy Jezebels" yet. :)
Don't underestimate ordinary people Mousey...they may not vote *for* us, but you might be surprised how many will vote against the insult to their intelligence the various deceits practised upon them by these organisations represent.
I think you would also be surprised how many women (just like us, after all) find it almost impossible to believe that 21st century woman can be coerced into anything in large numbers and find the suggestion that they could as insulting as we do.
...as for the rest...where your eyes do not see it, all women are raised with a similar set of fundamental truths, one of which is that ye lads will do just about *ANYTHING* for sex, quite blindly at times, and paying for it is only the least of it!
Society hasn't even fully reversed the perception of ye as innocent babes being lead astray by "bold, brassy Jezebels" yet. :)
You are living in Fantasy land.
There is no 'surprise' factor, there is no mass support for Escorts, Pimps, Trafficked victims, Punters etc.....people don't give a fuck.
They listen to the media, take it on board and get on with what is important in THEIR lives, to 'normal' people they don't care
Do you not get this, their is no popularist surge coming for the downtrodden masses......those times are gone if they were ever here
LaBelleThatcher
01-06-12, 20:58
You are living in Fantasy land.
There is no 'surprise' factor, there is no mass support for Escorts, Pimps, Trafficked victims, Punters etc.....people don't give a fuck.
They listen to the media, take it on board and get on with what is important in THEIR lives, to 'normal' people they don't care
Do you not get this, their is no popularist surge coming for the downtrodden masses......those times are gone if they were ever here
You are so right, and yet, also, so wrong, at the same time...of course nobody who isn't directly affected gives a flying f*ck...but either way...
There no "massed support" for "Turn Off the Red Light" either...nobody cares. :)
This is an horrific recession, as a very small country we have a good chance of riding it out, but, the name of the game, for any politician is containment and damage limitation.
Protecting and preserving and any every form of hope is a cornerstone of that.
To preserve stability the one thing any government needs to avoid at all costs is a creating a bloc of people with nothing left to lose. Crack down on the sex industry in any real way and that is what will happen. Not so much in this sector, not immediately, but among the survival and crisis sex workers who, largely, turn to the streets to avert personal catastrophy.
The single parents lobby are becoming increasingly militant at a frightening rate, any significant assault on the sex industry will only accelerate that...hammer the streetworkers and you will literally "light the blue touchpaper" on that barely contained tinderbox...and a domino effect begins.
It will not happen, because no government is ever going to be daft enough to let it. It costs nothing to leave the sex industry in peace, or even facillitate it, and it plugs a hole in the dyke...simple as...
This can be won.
Single patents lobby where......in Dublin...not that frightening...I have not heard
There is no WIN, there is containment, fact!
LaBelleThatcher
01-06-12, 21:10
Single patents lobby where......in Dublin...not that frightening...I have not heard
There is no WIN, there is containment, fact!
If you haven't heard of the rapid rise of a militant single parent's lobby then you are too far out of touch altogether to have the first clue what you are talking about. :)
Or maybe it's just that I am based in Reality land and you are in LaBelle land...
Serious thread here being taken way off topic:
61055
LaBelleThatcher
01-06-12, 23:43
Brock that really is an excellent analysis of the constitutional difficulties.
Raises a couple of questions, for example just how would such a law establish whether there has been payment and who is the payer and who the payee without expecting one party to testify against the other in a conflict of interest situation.
That *HAS* to be some kind of legal minefield! :eek:
If, as has been suggested, the law moves in on electronic communications while legalising the selling of sex it most definately will force many indoor sex workers out onto the streets.
Contrary to beliefs that is not necessarily more dangerous...swings and roundabouts really as long as it is decriminalised, but it most definately *is* a bigger public order issue...and what would that achieve?
The Swedish model doesn’t work; it will only push the industry underground where nobody can keep an eye on the woman at all. The basic premise of the Swedish model is “out of sight, out of mind” which is why the Swedish government provides false statistics to back up their claim it decreases street prostitution and human trafficking. I find the Swedish model anti-feminist even though it descriminates against men in law because it prevents woman from making the choice to become a sex worker in a safer environment as they are forced underground; amazing, a model that discriminates against both men and women.
Anyway the Swedish model won't be implemented here; prisons are over-crowded to the point 15% of inmates are released on parole before their sentence is up, therefore the last thing they need is a new influx of inmates and if they were to prosecute clients here, they would have to have more prisons than schools to lock us all away.
LaBelleThatcher
02-06-12, 00:12
I find the Swedish model anti-feminist even though it descriminates against men in law because it prevents woman from making the choice to become a sex worker
That is the bottom line...feminism isn't about forcing the world to submit to the will of a self appointed feminist elite, it is about giving women the *CHOICES* biology denied to us for millennia, to use as *we* please and see fit.
Thank you Brock for your helpful post as always. You seem to have a clear understanding of the constitution and legislation in ireland which is helpful in these discussions.
One question though? How is such a law legal in Sweden - that one party can be prosecuted and the other not? I fear that our Minister for Justice is takne in by Ruhamma and the TORL and there may be some loop hole to bring in such measures.
I haven't been following all of the raids thread (because it just goes on and on!!) - but I think it signals a new thrust of the garda in regard to escorting. Regardless of the outcome or lack of - I think it may be a more common phenomenon in times to come. And Doodles has already commented in another thread that the legality for the punter almost doesn't matter - the court of common opnion alone is enough to cause enough damage. I can see the garda raiding premises and kicking out (but not arresting punters), and punters will only exit to meet a flotila of cameras led by Paul Connolly and crew!!! This only will need to happen ever so often to produce a significant fear factor.
I digress,...... From all Brock says it sounds like they just can't bring in the Swedish model en bloc. But I do think there is going to be some form of legislation change to appease Ruhamma , the TORL and all their backers (it's amazing what organisations have put their support behind them). Not sure what the change wil be but I can't see it being positive.
Also Ruhama have been pushing for mobile companies to block phone numbers being used by traffickers - ie. escorts phone numbers!!(Because to Ruhama any escort is a trafficked woman.) Thankfully I can't see mobile companies buying into this. Their other thrust is to get internet service providers to block escorting websites!!! Talk about going back to the dark ages....Oh I forgot the Magdalene laundries (birth place of Ruhamma) was from the dark ages!
The Swedish model doesn’t work; it will only push the industry underground where nobody can keep an eye on the woman at all. The basic premise of the Swedish model is “out of sight, out of mind” which is why the Swedish government provides false statistics to back up their claim it decreases street prostitution and human trafficking. I find the Swedish model anti-feminist even though it descriminates against men in law because it prevents woman from making the choice to become a sex worker in a safer environment as they are forced underground; amazing, a model that discriminates against both men and women.
Anyway the Swedish model won't be implemented here; prisons are over-crowded to the point 15% of inmates are released on parole before their sentence is up, therefore the last thing they need is a new influx of inmates and if they were to prosecute clients here, they would have to have more prisons than schools to lock us all away.
As far as I understand Ladytron, in Sweden punters are not jailed but fined a months salary and their names put in the papers!! Which to be honest is a fairly significant deterrent IMHO.
However, as Brock has pointed out there may be more constitutional reasons why they can't just implement the Swedish model as is.
I can see the garda raiding premises and kicking out (but not arresting punters), and punters will only exit to meet a flotila of cameras led by Paul Connolly and crew!!!
Just to put things into perspective; you're more likely to die in a car accident yet that doesn't stop you from driving. And even if that did happen, you could play "the sex addict" card; it worked for tiger woods. Hugh Grant got caught with a street hooker in his car; seems to be doing fine. Alternatively, you could move to the UK, Australia or New Zealand for 15 years; by then the general public in Dublin will have forgotten all about it.
As far as I understand Ladytron, in Sweden punters are not jailed but fined a months salary and their names put in the papers!! Which to be honest is a fairly significant deterrent IMHO.
I have heard of clients opting for the prison term over the fine, albeit rarely. I based that comment on the worst case scenario and being treated to public humiliation is much better than prison where nobody treats you how you want to be treated. Remember they have to convict you first before they put your name in the newspaper, they can't put your name in the paper for doing nothing illegal and slander you based on circumstancial evidence; that's defamation.
LaBelleThatcher
02-06-12, 04:25
Morpheus, please don't fall into the trap of giving Ruhama more power than the government is, it must be hard to see after this week, but they just aren't important, they do not have that kind of power at all.
They are the lunatic fringe on overdrive, and nobody gets into government without having the smarts to see that.
Government TDs have already distanced themselves from TORL (the launch was before an inevitable election...at which point you could have told anyone in opposition all about the cannabalistic rituals of your satanic coven and they would have signed up to support you).
Current legislation has been recognised as inadequate since it came into operation because it criminalises the women and because it makes sex work more dangerous. They cannot completely decriminalise women without decriminalising men...and they know, because this is a recession, that if they just decriminalise there will be a public order nightmare on the streets, just as there was in the early 90s - with loads of extra sex workers and not enough business to go around.
If the interfere with mobile phones they will just be forcing sex work onto the streets, and the element of invasion of privacy is alarming. People are not silly, they do tend to notice that Ruhama are getting funded to *help* sex workers, and always have the hand out for donations to help sex workers, but all they do apart from that is make life difficult for sex workers...
Politicians notice that Ruhama are, to all intents and purposes, functioning as nothing more than a backdoor immigration service, because, apart from a few women looking for residency, nobody will go near them.
...and the government are using every trick in the book to stall legislation...meanwhile the 3 or 4 years strand of funding allocated to Ruhama in respect of trafficking runs out this year.
The government are simply not allocating funds just so people can lobby against them any more...there isn't any money left for such foolishness.
Morpheus, please don't fall into the trap of giving Ruhama more power than the government is, it must be hard to see after this week, but they just aren't important, they do not have that kind of power at all.
They are the lunatic fringe on overdrive, and nobody gets into government without having the smarts to see that.
Government TDs have already distanced themselves from TORL (the launch was before an inevitable election...at which point you could have told anyone in opposition all about the cannabalistic rituals of your satanic coven and they would have signed up to support you).
Current legislation has been recognised as inadequate since it came into operation because it criminalises the women and because it makes sex work more dangerous. They cannot completely decriminalise women without decriminalising men...and they know, because this is a recession, that if they just decriminalise there will be a public order nightmare on the streets, just as there was in the early 90s - with loads of extra sex workers and not enough business to go around.
If the interfere with mobile phones they will just be forcing sex work onto the streets, and the element of invasion of privacy is alarming. People are not silly, they do tend to notice that Ruhama are getting funded to *help* sex workers, and always have the hand out for donations to help sex workers, but all they do apart from that is make life difficult for sex workers...
Politicians notice that Ruhama are, to all intents and purposes, functioning as nothing more than a backdoor immigration service, because, apart from a few women looking for residency, nobody will go near them.
...and the government are using every trick in the book to stall legislation...meanwhile the 3 or 4 years strand of funding allocated to Ruhama in respect of trafficking runs out this year.
The government are simply not allocating funds just so people can lobby against them any more...there isn't any money left for such foolishness.
Thank you Labelle (as always). You always make such sense. I am a great admirer of yours for all you say and your insights. But even more so for your resilience in fighting this fight over so many years. You are a true survivor, and deserve to be a Byzanthine Empress! You were just born a few centuries too late!!
I wish I had your optimism though. I fully agree the money is running out and that will be a blow to Ruhama. It will be interesting to see what their funding is this year. 700 K is pretty good going for any NGO!
You're also right about politicians backing any and every horse before an election. Lets hope they stay true to their form and forget all promises to the TORL as they have done to most other lobbies.
For the record (for the benefit of visitors to the forum), I abhor any form of human trafficking and agree that measures should be taken to stop trafficking and coercion of women for sex work. (And I'm sure that all our regular forum participants will agree with me on this).
However, the automatic assumption that every sex worker/escort/ prostitute is a trafficked (and coerced) person simply isn't true and this is the bone of our contention with the likes of Ruhama and the TORL.
This and the complete lack of acceptance by the above organisations that women can and do make a choice to do sex work is the other bone of contention.
LaBelleThatcher
02-06-12, 17:07
This and the complete lack of acceptance by the above organisations that women can and do make a choice to do sex work is the other bone of contention.
I am going to add the third, perhaps most urgent, point:
If a women feels that sex work is her only realistic option, for any reason, this does not mean her intellect or judgement is in any way defective. In the majority of cases it means that she is, very probably, right, and that being so, anyone in a more privileged position with any kind of integrity who cannot any offer real, appropriate assistance (not tokenism and lip service) should stand aside and leave her in peace to save herself...
I am sure you know Morpheus, any admiration is only mutual.
I am going to add the third, perhaps most urgent, point:
If a women feels that sex work is her only realistic option, for any reason, this does not mean her intellect or judgement is in any way defective. In the majority of cases it means that she is, very probably, right, and that being so, anyone in a more privileged position with any kind of integrity who cannot any offer real, appropriate assistance (not tokenism and lip service) should stand aside and leave her in peace to save herself...
I am sure you know Morpheus, any admiration is only mutual.
The statement below is taken from the Ruhama mission statement:
Ruhama works from a position of respect and uncritical acceptance of the women and seeks to actualise belief in their inner capacity to effect change in their own lives.
It's funny how "uncritical" doesn't seem to encompass the women who feel what you have outlined above Labelle!!
LaBelleThatcher
02-06-12, 17:45
The statement below is taken from the Ruhama mission statement:
Ruhama works from a position of respect and uncritical acceptance of the women and seeks to actualise belief in their inner capacity to effect change in their own lives.
It's funny how "uncritical" doesn't seem to encompass the women who feel what you have outlined above Labelle!!
Ah well, you see, "uncritical" was only ever intended to apply to truly penitent women, who think, speak and do only as they are told.
The Swedish Model seems alright because King Carl Gustaf of Sweden was seen in a brothel :-P and what is good for the King is good for the Servant.