The Turn Off The Red Light campaign is calling for legal changes that would negatively impact on sex workers in Ireland (Please see Why is making paying for sex a crime wrong?) However this is not the only way anti-sex work groups are doing Irish sex workers a dissservice.
Sending out a damaging message
The opening webpage of the Turn of the Red Light campaign states that “Very few women choose to willingly engage in prostitution.” This is a very damaging message to send out.
The preaching of anti-prostitution campaigners actively encourages violence against sex workers. They talk of most sex workers in Ireland being controlled by pimps, beaten and raped and forced to perform degrading or un-safe sex acts, and these claims receive much attention and wide acceptance, and this impacts on the lives of sex workers.
For example, in August 2010, Susan McKay, chief executive of the National Women’s Council of Ireland, said of the men having sex with prostitutes (in an article in the Irish Daily Mail titled “Why Men who use prostitutes can be as dangerous as Larry Murphy“):
“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.”
It suits anti-prostitution campaigners to paint such a violent image of sex work in Ireland, as that’s how they get Joe Public to support their aims, but this discourse of hate has real consequences for sex workers.
It is damaging to the confidence of sex workers to be constantly confronted with these negative views. It encourages hate of the sex work industry as a whole. And, most seriously, it actively encourages violence against sex workers.
Anti-prostitution campaigners believe all sex work is a form of violence against women, but this belief is not shared by most sex workers, who believe they do have choices and want to be treated with respect, not told that clients are free to abuse them as they like because they are sex workers and they don’t have any choices.
