A TALE OF TWO REPORTSOriginally Posted by Patt113
An article in the current issue of The Phoenix magazine takes a somewhat different approach to the Irish Times on that UCD report.
LAST MONTH the Irish Times reported on a review of the impact of anti-prostitution legislation enacted in 2017. The report, from UCD's Sexual Exploitation Research Programme, turns out to have remarkably different conclusions to a similar review across the border.
The editorial in the Irish Times, headlined "Signs of a Cultural Shift", referred to the report's conclusion that the 2017 legislation had made a "very promising" start in interrupting the demand for prostitution. Significantly, however, the report — funded to the tune of E75,000 by the Department of Justice — did not include any interviews with women who identify as sex workers or with any representatives from the Sex Workers Alliance of Ireland (SWAT).
Co-author Ruth Breslin told Goldhawk that virtual interviews would have been required and these were not deemed safe. She also noted "most women in prostitution do not adopt 'sex worker' as their identity". The UCD report, she said, focused on data provided by the anti-prostitution NGO Ruhama and the HSE.
A letter to the Irish Times from Kate McGrew of SWAI criticised the paper's reporting on the UCD review and also pointed to the increase in violence since the change in the law. Certainly, the approach by the UCD team contrasts with that taken by Queen's University Belfast —(QUB), which produced its own, rather different, report on the impact of similar legislation introduced in 2015 in Northern Ireland outlawing the purchase of sex.
The QUB report was published last year and threw its net rather wider, including extensive online surveys of 'sex workers' as well as clients, which "contributed in no small measure to the robustness of this research". The authors also thanked the website uglymugs.ie (which claims to "support the right of sex workers to engage in their work as safely as possible") as well as Lazarus Trading SL, for providing anonymised data from its Escort Ireland website.
Rather than a "very promising" start, the QUB review found that the legislation had had "little effect on the supply of or demand for sexual services", but that there had been "an increase in the number of reports in relation to assaults, sexual assaults and threatening behaviour".
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