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YOUNG, ISOLATED AND invisible, trapped in a country where they know no one and do not speak the language – this is the life of a trafficking victim in Ireland.
Between 2009 and 2015 a total of 417 alleged victims of human trafficking were reported to or detected by gardaí.
“The real numbers are probably much greater,” Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald said today, as she launched the government’s second action plan to combat human trafficking.
The majority of victims (313) are female, but since 2009, 103 males have been identified as victims of trafficking, and one transgender person. The overwhelming majority report experiencing sexual exploitation.
“We’re seeing an increasing number of women from Eastern Europe,” said Sarah Benson CEO of Ruhama, an organisation that works with victims of sex trafficking.
She said the women are “heavily controlled by gangs, usually speak little or no English, are very young and isolated”.
Her organisation has helped women with intellectual disabilities who were “misled and abused”, women trafficked across different countries and even continents, and women whose “own family and supposed friends were complicit in selling and trafficking them”.
In recent years, a number of women from Nigeria have made specific reference to the Boko Haram terror group. Having fled capture in their home villages, many were left homeless in areas of the country they were unfamiliar with. This left them vulnerable to sexual exploitation, first in Nigeria, and then in other countries they were moved to.
For those who are very heavily controlled, sometimes they won’t even know where they are, what county they’re in – there was one woman I met recently who didn’t even know she was in Ireland, she thought she was in the UK.
Prosecutions
Benson said there have not been many prosecutions for sex trafficking in Ireland relating to the organised sex trade and this is something she hopes to see happening in the future.
In many cases, she said perpetrators are pursued under the Sexual Offences Act 1993 for crimes such as organised prostitution, instead of trafficking, which carries a life sentence.
“Penalties are so far out of date that you have a summary offence as opposed to something that has a really, really strong sanction and so if that legislation is used , even if somebody receives a conviction, they’re not likely to actually really bear a reasonable consequence for what is a very, very serious crime,” she explained.
Launching the action plan today, Minister Fitzgerald committed to a victim-centred approach to what she described as a “heinous crime”.
“Just imagine any one of our children, or nieces or nephews, at a young age in a foreign country, not knowing even what town they’re in and being subjected to this kind of behaviour.”
She said victims could be “forgiven for thinking they were invisible to us” but insisted the government is committed to ending “this despicable trade”.
She urged the public to look for signs and report their suspicions: “Don’t close your eyes to human trafficking.”
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Sickening stories. The perpetrators need swift and harsh punishment. But shouldn’t be conflated with legal prostitution. No one is in favour of sex slaves or human trafficking so it’s a straw man argument.
Totally agreed
Who’s conflating it? As I read it the people quoted are asking the judicial to STOP conflating it – to prosecute trafficking as trafficking rather than simply as prostitution.
@Barry Davidson:@Barry Davidson: And yet there is absolutely no evidence legal prostitution is any safer. Indeed 15 years after prostitution was legalised by the Dutch it remains opaque. Nobody can say even how many work in a sector supposedly regulated. Aside from that voices from the sector have persisted in their opposition to legalised prostitution, insisting on decriminalised prostitution.
To be fair I’ve met a few Yanks, Aussies and even Brits who thought Ireland was in the UK.
Sadly true
Nigerians fleeing Boko Haram. Yeah! As if Nigeria isn’t big enough. I think there are a lot of cock and bull stories here and Ruhama is aiding and abetting illegal immigration in the guise of humanitarianism. Not saying women aren’t trafficked but I don’t believe for the most part, it’s against their will. Once they’re in Ireland word of mouth will tell,them the agencies that will help them in their quest for legal status, welfare and a a life in Europe.
@Margie Murph: Ruhama don’t really care if they’ve really been trafficked or forced into prostitution as long as they get their government check at the end of the year.
When you have criminal gangs transporting women to Dublin and transferring them to different parts of the country right under the noses of Gardai opposite a police station then you know the government doesn’t take this matter seriously.
Fine Gael turn a blind eye to cheap migrant labour being exploited by capitalist enterprises as it ‘boosts the economy’, drives down wages and ties in with their economic ideology.
The level of money laundering and false accounting of wealth by criminal gangs would make the spooks at Apple blush.
@Daniel Fontaine:
But mass-immigration and Open-Borders is cool and brilliant for Ireland, it is so enriching!!
This country has deteriorated so much over the last 20 years.There was an item today about 45 people living in the same house in Dublin. Where did it all go wrong?
@Paul Mc:
A great little country for landlords.
You would nearly think that some TDs are actually landlords ,Oh wait a minute. ………..
Been great for landlords the last couple hundred years, can’t wait til we are all back on subsistance farming some meagre crops to survive
The whole world is a con to make money. Ireland was well behind other countries when things started picking up our government should of looked at other countries and learnt from their mistakes and instead of allowing things to happen, stopped the problems before they happen not would they have just saved tax payers money but so many victims life’s.
@JustMade Ireland:
Look the open door policy(Free Movement) of the EU is responsible for the trafficking. If we had a more controlled immigration policy where people are allowed to move based on their having obtained work in the relevant country then this problem would not happen. people should not be allowed to move willy nilly between countries without having first obtained work in their target country. It is stupidity to allow it otherwise.
@Warthog: That’s just not true. In fact, Ireland has a lower number of trafficked persons than New Zealand according to The UN Office for Drugs and Crime despite having a slightly higher population and being much easier to get to. Your solution would make the problem worse.
Here’s why: Europe is a land area about half the size of the United States. There are no borders between States in the US. Instead, there is a strong external border to their union. Europe should be the same because people aren’t being trafficked from Bulgaria, they’re being trafficked from Africa and The Middle East. We actually used to see trafficking from poor South East European countries in the past because of the difficulty of getting work in the west. That’s because the modus operandi of human traffickers is to take passports from people being trafficked so that they’re left helpless if they try to escape. The removal of hard immigration policies means that not only is there no market for trafficking between European countries anymore, there also are far fewer problems if a trafficked person’s passport is withheld if they are an EU citizen. So the problem is with trafficked persons being brought into Europe from outside Europe. The way to fix this is to introduce hard borders around the the external border of the European Union itself and to have a central European intelligence sharing office so police and investigators in different countries can immediately share intelligence with each other without being backlogged with bureaucracy as they are at the moment. So, in other words, the imposition of interstate hard borders and immigration policies would literally make trafficking worse because you’d be creating a new market for trafficked people.
There’s a fine line between what seems on the face of it to make sense and what research actually shows and we shouldn’t sow disinformation about the success of the free movement policy within the EU. It has been extraordinarily successful.
There has to be some sort of con going on here, who in the western world would play any part in selling a young member of their family to be trafficked in the sex slave trade? We really need to have another look at who are coming into this country and for what reason. Human trafficking is abhorrent, the lowest of the low an EU rules or not we should ban those responsible from our shores for life,
Naive girls in the West get conned into thinking that they are going to work in another country,but it turns out to be a brothel. Or i heard alot of stories of girls being drugged in parties and while they’re asleep they get taken over the border to another country… we don’t sell our girls,but they should be educated more to be careful…
According to Colm O Gorman of Amnesty Ireland, prostitution is to be thought of merely as…. “sex work”.
Just like any other work then is it? Wonder if he’ll be suggesting it to his daughter as a bona fide career choice, and going through the details with the career guidance counselor? Wonder how many women who end up in it had good parents who were around to discuss their future and guide them through life?
Maybe it’s you who are in the wrong for judging sex workers. Just because their choices don’t align with your morals don’t make them bad people or their choices not valid.
@stevenocarroll: spot on, imagine a job centre advertising this work, amnesty led by Colm O ‘Gorman is often promoting a liberal agenda masked as human rights on this and other issues, losing sight of its original mission to support political prisoners of conscience?
Prostitution is legal in many countries and women choose this life for high earnings and think nothing of it. Who are you to say these women are wrong? If society keeps raising the value of money above the value of our self worth then this is going to happen more and more.
As long as Ruhama deliberately continue to cover up Swedish Trafficking Reports , then their crocodile tears about trafficking reports deserve little respect.
Trafficking by coercive means ,whether for labour (described last week by PSNI as the primary form of trafficking in NI) or sex trafficking is amongst the most vile of crimes and most sane people would support the heaviest sentences possible for those perpetrators.
That TORL think that those criminals in Sweden should be airbrushed out of discussion for the purposes of radical feminist ideology speaks volumes.
Its a myth for the most part, a ploy to swing their immigration status
She must have thought it was an amazing coincidence that all the people fornicating with her were overweight pasty Irish men.
Vulnerable women need protection, from unscrupulous gangs who make rich, hiding behind a liberal agenda that supports sex work as some kind of a legitimate occupation?
@frank browne: conflating prostitution with slavery you are.
She had no idea where she was that’s pure bulshit they know what strings to pull to fool the white western fool
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