Curvaceous Kate's meandering thoughts!

Part 1

The meeting started 15 minutes late and I arrived 15 minutes after that, so I will start with the apologies for those that did not attend. Apologies from any known currently working Escort. Oh... wait a minute, no one asked for a representative of the Sex Work Community. In fact the Union that had been set up to protect the needs of the Sex Workers was scoffed at by a certain Rachel Moran, who said it was not a REAL union, but a way for Pimps to protect their financial investment!

Speech

Lord Morrow of Clogher Valley MLA

- I'm afraid I missed the first video entitled 'The Trip', but I did listen to Lord Morrow give his speech. He quite rightly tackled the subject of trafficking and coercion in terms of three areas of concern. That being:

Labour in the work force - factories etc.
Domestic slavery - I.E. - Women used within the home and not allowed out.
Sexual Exploitation - Used against their will sexually for financial gain.

Rightly so, it was explained that men, women and children can all fall victim to trafficking and coercion and that there were potentially 140 cases of this found across the spectrum within Northern Ireland.

This is where something close to a real statistic is replaced with emotive language and two stories of women were explained and stories these were, as it would seem there was no evidence to support their claims. One story Lord Morrow distanced himself from, explaining he had never met the lady, but this was her story and that was of domestic servitude. She had been kept prisoner within a family home for anything from 3 to 5 years and not allowed to leave. She made a cry for help and it was answered. She was rescued and it was a success story for Northern Ireland, which I salute and commend for helping this lady.

However, the second story Lord Morrow alleged to know this lady and had met this lady and made it sound like the story was far more likely to be true and yet the story itself sounded to me (as a current working Sex Worker) like something out of the movie 'Taken' with Liam Neeson. The story purports that the lady was taken from her nursing studies in England where she was studying as a foreign student (she was Romanian). She was a young 20 year old woman and against her will she was taken by two armed men to the airport and flown over to Ireland, where she was put to work as a prostitute. She was made to service between 15 and 20 men a day and bundled across Dublin, Limerick and Galway until eventually she was rescued and released from her plight.

First of all I would like to congratulate Ireland for another success story, where a person has been found and taken out of a terrible situation. I would imagine that this also led to convictions of the Pimps, as they had proof of what was happening? I would also like to believe that the story was followed up to make sure that it was real, because otherwise how ever harrowing... it is just a story. Did anyone contact the Nursing College to ask if the lady was on the course she claimed to be on. Had anyone at the College reported the lady missing and contacted her family? I believe foreign students have a mentor to help them while they are in a foreign country, what actions was the mentor taking to find her and make sure that she had left of her own free will and not just abandoned the course?

Anne (the victim) claims that she was made to service 15 to 20 men per day. This is physically not possible. If we take 20 as the larger number and consider each booking to be of 30 minutes duration, the time working alone amounts to 10 hours. That does not allow for picking up and answering the phone, for people running late on arrival, for people over staying etc, etc. It would also suggest that she was not given any time to wash herself in between, so by the time she had got to the 10th client, she would stink to high heaven. It just isn't physically possible to see that many clients and then there is the fact that the average high volume working Sex Worker currently working in Ireland is lucky if she is able to secure 10 bookings in a day. They are competing with the 800 advertised Sex Workers, with pretty pictures and profiles, all offering luxury and clean towels. This means it takes a certain type of man to choose to see a lady in these conditions and those men are in the minority and they are part of an underground world that most of us are not aware of and never will be aware of.

This brings me on to the clause 6, which advocates the use of the Swedish Model, where currently they are getting no convictions, as they can not get the evidence needed to convict the pimps. A country that puts more importants on fining clients than helping Sex Workers. A country that currently has more prostitution that can not be contained within it's boundaries and a country that has higher HIV rates than Ireland since their bill to make the client pay came in. They have no success stories, they have no convictions.

It is already a crime to traffic or coerce a human in any of these three categories mentioned. There is already support to help the victims and it is a very naive stance for anyone to believe that there is no trafficking or coercion going on in the country that they live in. There is not a country in the world that is free of this and it is degrading and it is nasty, but it needs to be contained and it needs to be given severer sentencing upon convictions and people need to be made to pay for exploiting other humans, but that should be aimed at the PIMPS, as they are the ones facilitating this and taking people away from their regular lives and taking away their freedom. This should be the people that are found to be abusing them in the knowledge that they are there against their will. This law already exists!!!!

Currently the toughest sentence for someone convicted of trafficking is two years. That means that they may be walking free again after one year and assuming they are taken into custody before their sentence is passed, then they could be out before that. It is rare that anyone should get the full term, which means that they can be out of prison and working in the industry again within 6 months to a year. When you consider the vast amount of money they can make from one single trafficked woman, do you really think that this kind of sentence is going to deter a man who is prepared to treat another human being in this way from doing it again? The sentences are feeble, the consequences too light. They do not stop anyone from committing this type of crime, they just take them off the street for a few short months and allow someone else to take their place.

Lord Morrow continued to thank all the supporters for his campaign with regards to stopping sex work and made particular mention to Paul Bailey who he said had read every word of 1200 pages of a report put together by the Justice Committee on trafficking and coercion. This does beg the question of why only one MP has read this information and in particular why Lord Morrow had not considered it worth his time to read it. Surely if this is of such volume, it holds information of great worth and should be considered vitally important.

He then quoted from William Hague who he said was one of his heroes.

You can choose to look the other way,

but you may not say you did not know!

I found this quote to be of particular interest in the knowledge that the voices of the current Sex Workers have largely been ignored, or belittled as not representative.