Interesting Review of How That Law is Being Policed in Northern Ireland
Here is an interesting take on how the law is being policed or not or not capable of being enforced in Northern Ireland, Now I caveat it in that I have not read it in full!
http://www.antitraffickingreview.org...ticle/view/224
file:///C:/Users/Owner/Documents/Anti%20Trafficking%20Review%20-%20Northern%20Ireland.pdf
A few sample extracts:
the PSNI [Police Service of Nortjern Ireland] was not convinced by the evidence from Sweden on the impact of its law on trafficking for sexual exploitation. In an interview, a police officer in charge of collaborating with the Swedish police on international human trafficking explained:
‘Now, I’m not going to criticise the Swedes on the Swedish model, but they had no idea this was going on in Sweden. So we said, well listen, this crime gang from Romania are all based in your jurisdiction, you need to look at this crime gang. [But instead] there are significant resources against punters as opposed to seeking out the gangs involved in trafficking.’
This point was raised within the Assembly proceedings where a PSNI official told the legislators that ‘there is still a significant prostitution in Sweden. More so there is still a significant human trafficking problem in Sweden’.
In an interview, a PSNI officer explained that enforcement of the SPB in Sweden relies on ‘sensitive intelligence gathering methods’ such as telephone interception (i.e. listening in on the phone conversations between clients and sex workers), surveillance cameras in private apartments or hotel rooms and operations by undercover officers. In Northern Ireland, such tactics need approval from the authorities under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), and are meant to be employed only in cases of serious crime, including terrorism. An interviewed police officer commented:
‘Our assessment is that in that scenario of (…) a non-trafficked girl conducting herself as a prostitute, and a non-controlling person who wants to buy a sexual service, then the consensual act between those two adults doesn’t trigger the point of serious criminality, where we can use any covert tactics. Surveillance—you would really struggle to justify that as a tactic.’
Proponents of the SPB [sex purchase ban] furthermore relied heavily on the personal accounts of a small number of survivors of prostitution, who described the sex industry as inherently violent and supported the ban. At the same time, the experiences of current sex workers which drew a much more nuanced picture of the sex industry were dismissed as irrelevant or non-representative. One committee member advised that evidence from ‘so called prostitutes’ collective groups’ be treated with extreme suspicion. It would be better, he said, to talk to prostitutes individually when they are ‘not being coerced by their pimps and controllers, rather than the so-called groups which are clearly front people’.
In the end, the Justice Minister suggested that the research he commissioned precisely to allow an interrogation of the Swedish law and its impact in NI was dismissed because the findings ‘portrayed the views of sex workers who had until then not been heard and because it destroyed a lot of the stereotypical imagery of prostitution’.
In response to a DoJ official’s comment that while there may be international patterns in how the sex industry is expressed, local information was required, one Committee member argued:
‘Some of us do not need any research or evidence. For some of us the very principle of purchasing a woman is sexual violence, full stop. That is a principled position, and some people do not need to have an evidence base to come to the conclusion that men are currently empowered to continue to subject that type of activity upon women.
It may be indeed that the Assembly members who voted for the adoption of the SPB were content with the PSNI’s view that Clause 6 might at least ‘send a message’, regardless of the actual effects on the sex industry. If this is correct, we can conclude that evidence regarding the actual effectiveness of the SPB [sex purchase ban] is of little interest to the proponents of the ‘Swedish model’.
It seems to suggest 3 things -
1 The main purpose of the law was to send out a message to men, that sex is not a commodity
2 Much of the TORLERS dont care that it is not being enforced (probably they only care about money)
3 If it's a case where there is no trafficking or coercion or underage sex involved, the police cannot get the surveillance sanction and resources to police consenting adults having sex with each other in private and indeed why should they!
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Originally Posted by Forceuser
