Why Men who use prostitutes can be as dangerous as Larry Murphy
24th August 2010
By Susan McKay, chief executive of the National Women’s Council of Ireland.
What is it that men in Ireland want, sexually, from women? Significant numbers, it seems, want to be able to have a girlfriend or a wife, with whom to enjoy socially accepted intimate relationships, while at the same time secretly ordering up the sexual services of women who are completely unknown to them and who will remain so, because they are prostitutes.
The small voluntary organisation that works to help women working as prostitutes in Ireland, Ruhama, has recorded an increase of almost a quarter in the number of women using its services in the last year. Ruhama revealed yesterday [Monday] that it had assisted nearly 200 women in 2009, including almost 70 women who had been trafficked to this country, some to work as prostitutes here, others who were en route for other EU countries.
Ruhama is small and seriously underfunded. Indeed its funding has just been cut by 20%. Its staff are well aware that they can only reach a tiny minority of the women currently caught in the nets of this brutal and terrifying industry. Since every prostitute has to have sex with multiple ‘punters’ on a daily basis, it is clear that an enormous number of men in this country are using prostitutes. It is their demand which drives the industry.
When gardai interviewed the women they found when they raided brothels run by Carlow man Thomas Carroll, who was jailed earlier this year, they were shocked by what the women told them about how they had ended up working as prostitutes servicing the sexual demands of men in the towns and cities of Ireland.
They also heard about an oppressive regime in which the women worked 7 days a week, had no right to refuse any client, and were, in effect, enslaved. It was an appalling story all round, but there was one detail in particular which has haunted me since I read it. One of the women, a Nigerian, said that she was reprimanded for crying because, she was told, ‘it puts the clients off.’
The tears destroyed the illusion which a prostitute is required to provide, that she finds the man who is paying to have sex with her, exciting and desireable. One of the women was advertised as “African Nandi, very petite tanned chocolate delight, petite slim size 8, 34c but leggy flexible kinky, Nandi enjoys nudism and exploring her body and yours, making the sessions fun and intimate.” That is the fantasy which is for sale.
The reality is infinitely more bleak. Thousands of miles from home, forced to have sex with stranger after stranger, being moved from flat to flat in town after strange town, coerced by threats into silence and earning a pittance, or even nothing at all. (A prostitute is estimated to be worth over €100,000 per annum, but the money she takes in largely goes to the men who control her, who often insist that she owes them her earnings.) No wonder the young woman could not stop crying. It is no better for Irish born women – many of them suffered sexual or physical abuse and poverty as children.
We learned a lot from the Carroll case. That prostitutes are now mostly ordered through a network of mobile phones, and are more likely to operate from apartments in ordinary estates than from the streets of well established ‘red light’ areas in Irish cities, for a start. We learned that while we might associate prostitution with Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway, there are now brothels in towns like Athlone, Carlow, Kilkenny, Waterford, Wexford, Drogheda, Newbridge, Mullingar and Sligo, as well.
It is not a reality that sits easily with our notion of ourselves as a nation. The author, Maria Luddy, who wrote an excellent history called Prostitution and Irish Society a few years ago, revealed that during the fight for national independence, prostitutes became a symbol for British oppression – the British soldier infecting the Irish nation with disease and immorality. Luddy recalled that when she went to give a talk about her research in Galway in the late 1980’s, she was told that several shops had refused to put up posters advertising the event because the words prostitution and Ireland appeared together.
So who are the men known in the sex industry as ‘punters’ but to Ruhama and others who know about the hurt and harm done to prostitutes as ‘users and abusers’? What is it they think they are buying? And who are the pimps, the men who sell the women’s bodies for their own gain?
Well, it seems that the users are, on the surface, ordinary men. A recent study carried out in the UK, which, whatever fond notions the founding fathers of our state may have had, is, in this regard, culturally similar to Ireland, found that the largest group of users of prostitutes there are men between the ages of 30 and 39, the majority of them married or co-habiting and often with children. They are employed and have no criminal convictions. They come from a cross section of social classes. They have money and they have power – which puts them at the opposite end of the spectrum to the women whose bodies they enjoy.
The difference between having consensual sex with a woman and having sex with a prostitute is that in the former case the man must keep up some semblance of a relationship. He must put up with the woman being a person with her own needs, emotions and desires. In the latter case, there are no such obligations. He can demand that the prostitute perform whatever sexual act he wants her to perform, however repugnant it might be. He can hurt her with acts of physical violence, and he can abuse her with language which is full of hatred towards women. All those words which are used so casually in the everyday world take on a new and menacing potency in the context of abusive, forced sex.
As for pimps, while some are members of organised criminal gangs, operating in global networks, many women are tricked into prostitution by men within their own families or communities. Many pimps are also the woman’s husband or partner.
There is an argument that the existence of prostitutes acts as a safety valve for male sexual aggression, thus protecting other women. This disregards the rights of all women to live without sexual violence, but it is also untrue. Studies show that men who use prostitutes regularly are more likely to be violent to women with whom they are in a relationship. Men who use prostitutes are not men who respect women.
Ruhama’s new report includes some chilling stories from the women the organisation has helped. One woman describes how she has been beaten and robbed over the years, but it took a near death experience to make her seek help to exit prostitution. ‘The end came for me when a guy threw me in the back of his van and tied me up and took me up the mountains and raped me,’ she said. ‘I was so certain I was going to die…’ Last week we were disturbed by the release from prison of Larry Murphy, who had brutalised and raped a woman who was not a prostitute in similar circumstances.
It is horrible to know that there are other men too who were never jailed who consider that it is their right to treat women in this way. Prostitution is violence against women. The men whose demand for it is causing such misery must be prosecuted.
This article was found in the printed version on the Irish Daily Mail on the 24th August 2010
Why Men who use prostitutes can be as dangerous as Larry Murphy
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... where the hell did they come up with that????
Originally Posted by jacksparrow2010
