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IN HER ADVANCE report on Ireland released this month, the UN Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, made the observation that:
“A culture of silence around issues of childhood sexual abuse and exploitation…. means systems are not in place to prevent or quickly respond to violations.”
You would be forgiven for thinking she was referring to our well documented historical failings in responding to child sexual violence, but unfortunately, she was referring to what is happening to child victims of rape today.
The report also noted “a lack of a dedicated and integrated strategy to respond to sexual violence against children”.
The question of how our children are currently protected is disturbingly difficult to answer in any detail.
This is the question that the Rape Crisis Network Ireland laid before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice and Equality as it seeks to understand the reform needs of the family law system in Ireland.
According to the report: Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland, around one in five children is a victim of sexual violence, so it stands to reason that this issue features heavily in the family courts, yet these courts have little by way of specialist practitioners to deal with it.
The vast majority of reported cases of child sexual violence never go to court – so what is being done to protect those survivors?
Getting data
As observed by the Rapporteur, there are gaps in the data we would need to begin to answer that question.
What we do know is the following:
Tusla receives approximately 3,000 referrals of child sexual violence every year. The corresponding number of children will be fewer and that number does not appear to be currently published.
Of those referrals, some will be mistaken or false, at a rate of approximately 2% – 8%, according to a range of research.
After that, according to a sampling done by the Garda Inspectorate in their Report of December 2017, there is a 4% prosecution rate for child sexual violence investigations with less than 2% of investigations resulting in a criminal conviction.
Therefore, our criminal justice failure rate in reported and true child sexual violence is between 90% and 96%.
Unfounded
Children whose disclosures result in no criminal conviction still need protection.
The protection of these children is one of the complex tasks we expect families and communities to undertake informally and which we have mandated Tusla to undertake formally on all our behalf.
Tusla’s response is dictated by its categorisation of these cases, after assessment as either ‘founded’ or ‘unfounded’.
Contrary to what might be a common understanding of the word ‘unfounded’, when Tusla categorises a report as ‘unfounded’ that doesn’t always mean that the sexual violence never happened.
What Tusla seems to mean by ‘unfounded’ by and large, is that it hasn’t found sufficient evidence to categorically say the violence did happen.
Is this categorisation misleading for other agencies?
A series of Parliamentary Questions have elicited the answer from Minister Zappone that Tusla ‘does not collate’ how many child sexual violence cases it categorises as founded or unfounded.
It is imperative that we find out what percentage of child sexual violence reports are treated as unfounded?
Do the other agencies, professionals and vitally, the child’s circle of trust, have a shared understanding of their obligations when there is an ‘unfounded’ finding?
Family Court
To further add to the complexity of child protection the National Rape Crisis Statistics 2015 found that for children under 13 who experience sexual violence, 62% said that the perpetrator was a family member.
Where a child discloses abuse within the family, this disclosure will in many cases result in his or her family breaking up.
All told this means that we can expect that a significant proportion of family separation and child custody cases going through our family courts, involve the rape and sexual abuse of children by family members in the absence of a parallel criminal conviction.
The Family Court Services process on average 11,600 guardianship, custody and access cases every year but we have no statistics from the Courts Service on how many of these cases contain evidence of domestic and sexual violence.
These family courts are held in camera. This means that apart from the very welcome Child Care Law Reporting Project and the work of the Child Rapporteur there is little by way of transparency for insight and reassurance.
The statistics on how many private family law cases involve allegations of child sexual violence is an imperative matter of justice, child protection and public interest.
The fact is our family courts are handling criminal matters of a child protection nature in unknown numbers, in the absence of standardised and fully regulated specialisation.
Almost all advocates are agreed that our family courts need improved specialisation to deal with these complex matters.
Ensuring transparency, accountability and specialisation would form part of a national strategy on child sexual violence. Such a strategy does not exist.
A national strategy would place responsibility somewhere for oversight of whole-of-government child protection activity.
This oversight responsibility is currently not held by any specific government department or agency.
What we have is a system lacking transparency and poorly joined up which, in short, is a system vulnerable to failure.
Where a system suffers from this flawed design, it is not only likely to fail to achieve its child protection objectives but, as history teaches us, it often causes further harm to the very children it is meant to serve.
We need action urgently.
Dr Clíona Saidléar is the Executive Director of Rape Crisis Network Ireland which is a specialist sexual violence policy NGO owned and governed by rape crisis centres.
Legalise the industry and then the government can rake in the tax, just like any other job.
@Gus Sheridan: yeah that doesn’t happen. What pimp is gonna be cool with handing over half their earnings to the government? Use your noggin.
@Veronica: If sex workers were treated in the same way as any other sole trader there would be no need for pimps. Pimping could be a crime – it would make those who wished to legitimately work in the sex trade truly independent and still remove the opportunity for exploitation, trafficking etc. I know its a complicated area but the country has legislated in more complex areas than this and done so relatively successfully.
@Colin B: Any and ALL forced labour should be a crime with stiff penalites, the abuse is in the coercion not the specifics of the work (which will always affect different people differently).
@Gus Sheridan: it’s already legal.
@Colin B: pimping is already a crime. It would be a crime if everything was decriminalized as well. exploiting & coercing sex workers is a crime, just as it would be for any other type of work.
@Gus Sheridan: What about the married punters… Those happily married ones that visit the gay massage with a happy ending ones. Is it not unfair on the wife, even if she is doing it with the milkman at the same time lol.
@Gus Sheridan: sex workers already pay tax
Lets face it this law is all about the religious nut jobs punishing the dirty man for his sins, whether it makes the job more dangerous for the woman is irrelevant, twisted religious dogma must be blindly followed at all costs the man must pay for his sins!
@Peter Hughes: I think both issues are important but a sex worker’s safety can never be irrelevant.
@Peter Hughes: religious nut jobs and leftists like Ivana Bacik who claim my body my choice on abortion, but not for sex. This law will be overturned.
@Peter Hughes: No. It is po faced feminists in league with religious nutjobs.
@Peter Hughes: yep that’s it,introduced between gay marriage and repeal the eight. If anyone has a religious electorate to compromise with its fine Gael.
@Clanrickard: Neither, it’s people in US with virtually limitless money who want to exchange some of it for power over other people’s lives to avoid feeling bored…and power is the most potently addictive drug of all so they buy lobbies to keep delivering more…the topic, and the consequences to innocent people are absolutely irrelevant…it’s disgusting…
https://mymythbuster.wordpress.com/what-can-i-tell-you-my-sister-my-killer/
Criminalising purchase of sex drove it even more underground and made it even more dangerous for sex workers.
Organisation behind the campaign to make purchase of sex illegal: Ruhama.
Founders and owners of Ruhama: the religious orders that ran the Magdalene Laundries, profiting from the slave labour of women and girls.
Those who’ve refused to compensate their former slaves: yup, those self-same religious orders.
Plus ca change…
@Valentine Healy-Rae-Nua: I don’t know a great deal about the sex industry, however this article does appear to be at odds with what is claimed by Ruhama, often on The Journal itself. Some of their headlines include, ‘Pick an apartment block in parts of Dublin and you’ll find a brothel’. ‘Most prostitution here is run by crime gangs’, ‘Concern growing about the number of underage boys being abused in Dublin brothels’, no convictions secured against sex buyers since new laws introduced’.
I don’t know what situation would be ideal, and it’s not exactly a career path I’d hope for a family member, having said that Ruhama portray this as industry as being staffed primarily by migrants and run by criminal gangs. This article appears to contradict that image and suggest the sex industry is, if not voluntary, almost a career path. While acknowledging that a small minority are trafficked and forced into it, that criminality exists, it claims the majority is, if not legal, being forced into the darker parts of our society by this law. Maybe our perception was wrong.
@Arch Angel: Let’s sling out the old view of Ruhama and get it updated to the 21st century?
Any form of abolitionism is, in and of itself, an inappropriate conflict of interest with helping and supporting sex workers because the premise of abolitionism that “sex work must be abolished to send a message to men that women are not sexual objects” makes no allowance for the human rights, welfare and needs of sex workers at all, preferring instead to objectify them and reinvent their reality to artificially support and substantiate the abolitionist agenda rather than determine and provide useful and appropriate support and resources.
It is self-evident that Ruhama have a poor to non-existent relationship with their designated user group, and lobby in direct opposition to most of them. They should, or course, be able to promote any coswallop they like as long as the lobby percentage does not exceed the constraints of their charitable status, or as much as they like if they forgo said charitable status. However, under no circumstances should Ruhama be in receipt of state funding (currently about 75% I think) to “help and support” a user group that (with one or two retired and abolitionist employed exceptions) actively oppose them.
It would be more appropriate to retain funding to “help and support” sex workers within the, nominally more neutral, HSE, and that is saying something.
@Arch Angel: At least they haven’t taken any ideas from Henry Ford to modernise it yet lol.
Target the criminal gangs and traffickers who force women to be sex workers.
I never see any reports of gangs/pimps being prosecuted in the news.
Absolutely pointless targeting individuals, you can’t outlaw human urges.
It’s just pandering to the likes of the Iona institute!
@Dotty Dunleary: I would love to see ANYONE who knowingly places a person in a position where they are driven to sell sex criminalised equally…and let’s extend that to ALL forms of economic abuse that place people in impossible financial positions that threaten their survival. I have ALWAYS wanted to see this.
I think it’s important for fellow commenters and readers to note that decriminalisation and legalisation are two different things. Legalisation would mean that the government would regulate the industry, like in the Netherlands. But Kate is talking about decriminalisation, like in New Zealand, where sex workers are not criminalised by any means (which they can be under a legalised system if they can’t work withing the regulated sex industry). Decriminalisation means that sex workers can access justice safely under employment law.
The government boll#$ up legal activities like healthcare so why would you think they’d actually make a go of making prostitution a safe activity.
@Green Lentils: you are so right, we are ruled by a bunch of ill equipped gormless bunch of gobshytes, keep the recovery going lads/lasses…
This article could have been, and was, written years ago with the words sellers subbed in for buyers.
No one wants to see a person sell their body.But its is our instinct to crave sex…So there is a market.It will be exploited.Making it commercial is wrong.But criminalizing it will force it underground putting those who trade it in danger…is there a middle ground?
@Dave Walsh: The middle ground is right where it always was, in giving adults the freedom to make their own decision based on the complexities of their own situation, needs, limits and nature that nobody else could get right for them, and this is what full decriminalisation is.
“This industry is a mean of survival for us”. I don’t get where this come from. A single mum in Ireland gets welfare if their kids are still in college and can’t find work or is unable to work, their kids get grants for low income household, also collage age students can do part time jobs and help with expenses. They must have other reasons I’m sure, but I don’t see survival or getting their kids through collage being one of them.
@Rosa Lopez:
You are right, for MOST people, but there are always people who, usually due to a combination of factors are left with literally no honest way to survive, often through not fault of their own. The state should strive to minimise that, but frankly, couldn’t be bothered, and those people have a right to survival with a tolerable (just as opposed to intolerable, such as having to sleep in shop doorways) quality of life just like anyone else.
I have been caught in that trap before and currently, at age 61 it is looking increasingly unlikely I will have any way to still be alive this time next year without going back to selling sex – despite the fact that it is against my religion and pretty much the last thing on earth I want to do. So please do not bother telling me it cannot happen.
@Gaye D: I’m sorry Gaye, I didn’t mean to judge personal circumstances. Not long ago there was an article in this paper about mothers being forced to pay back their kids drug debts..that could be one scenario and I’m sure there are many more and many factors than together lead a person to have no other choice than going that road.
What I meant is in normal circumstances the life of a single mum in Ireland with the help available is a constant struggle for her and her kid/s, but is enough to survive and taking their kids through collage without having to sell sex.
I’m very sorry you see yourself in that position, I wish you all the best.
@Rosa Lopez: It makes me feel better just to see that you *DO* understand after all. Usually get pretty obvious when you translate sex workers into a percentage. Highest count I have seen is 7000 for Ireland and that is .014% of the population, so whatever their reasons, they aren’t normal…the least dramatic, but in the old days fairly invincible reason I ever saw was a lovely lady with twins to put through Uni and a dead beat ex…there was no other way to make those ends meet up, there just wasn’t (value of her home priced her out of everything available. Special needs single mums, a reasonable childminder can cost *from €15* an hour…and trust me, the state fails to cover costs more often than it succeeds where there are complex needs – and, in the hot seat you have to ask yourself whether it is best for your child if you leave them 20 hours a week when they should be asleep or 60 hours a week when they are awake? Single dual carers are often in the financial rattrap from hell whether or not it is bad enough to drive them to sell sex…adly there are way too many holes in the social safety net.
Legalise already!
@No One Important: In political terms its called lobbying lol.
Decriminalization means that sex workers are able to work without threat of criminal sanctions. Criminal and administrative penalties on prostitution are repealed. Sex workers’ workplaces are regulated through employment law, enabling workers to hold their bosses to account and form trade unions.
Decriminalization is sometimes presented as at odds with anti-trafficking measures – but it should be obvious that giving workers more rights is crucial to tackling exploitation. Research shows that less than 6 percent of migrant sex workers in the UK have been trafficked; many said they prefer working in the sex industry to the “unrewarding and sometimes exploitative conditions they meet in non-sexual jobs”.
Decriminalization increases sex workers’ power in their interactions with clients, managers, police and landlords. It makes people safer. It reduces the transmission of HIV.
It is for these reasons that decriminalization of Adult consensual sex work similar to the New Zealand model is supported by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNAIDS, the World Health Organization, Sisters Uncut, and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women etc .
@Francis O Toole Art: Darn it, if all else fails, by choosing to sell sex, which is usually the easiest work to get but the hardest to do, when so many of them have been in positions so desperate they would have a 24 carat excuse for lying, cheating, stealing and harming people (which can all, often be legal) instead sex workers DESERVE full human status and exactly the same rights and conditions as any other adult, beginning with out from under the dominion of any abusive org like Ruhama.
Have a look at other vountries where prostitution has been legalised and see if the abuse of sex workers doesnt happen. Wake up
@Ismise Máire: does it happen more or less in those places? Scale matters, just because perfection cannot be achieved does not mean harm reduction/limitation shouldn’t be attempted. Same argument as the one about drugs at the moment – in an ideal world there would be no prostitution and no drug abuse, but we don’t live in an ideal world, so let’s try and do the best that can be done for those affected rather than punish them for daring to illustrate that we don’t live in an ideal world.
@Winston Smith: Winston’s comment- Proactive and sensible.
Máire’s comment- defeatist
@Winston Smith: Well said!
@Ismise Máire:
Abuse happens wherever there are people, but decriminalisation is a way to ensure that, at least, the state and civil society are not active in dishing that abuse out as a present.
You either have a code of ethics to guide society or anything goes. By all means treak or amend the law but I wouldn’t be for letting sex buyers off the hook
@eddie horgan: Laws are meant to protect people, property and organisations. This law harms rather than protects. Therefore the law is not effective and must change. Changing the law has shown that effective regulation, as with the drugs industry, reduces the harm considerably and therefore is worth adopting.
@Ailbhe: Wonderful phrase someone (not me) put on twitter:
“The Nordic Model doesn’t help anyone who isn’t getting a salary out of promoting it” says it all, accurately.
Ridiculous that prostitution is illegal! Legalize it the women pay taxes and are protected! Simple
@Gearoid Mag Lennain: decriminalise. Also workers already pay tax
Oldest profession in the world. Make it safe for the women in the trade & legalise it.
The british police raided nearly 800 brothels and found not one pimp or forced prostitute
So far the only conviction is a 65 year old from a working class area who was caught with independent escorts(no pimp involved). Seriously how about laws to catch some real bloody criminals.
@Dave O’Hanlon:
In the north it was funny, because the first guy they busted really needed busting for anything you could get him on – drunken oaf trying to force money on a petrol station attendant…but down here, after a few days of demonising him by full name and address even Ruhama had to wake up to how cheap and shabby they were making themselves look.
….and not once have they ever shown the slightest interest in how survival sex workers will manage if they achieve the clamp down they are looking for…because sex workers and their lives are as disposablle as used kleenex to them…ok, maybe clients see sex workers that way too, but they have consent and pay sex workers well enough for them to be whoever they want to be in their own lives…Tuhama just impose themselves, destroy and move on to the next game.
How on earth could a resposible mother place her childrens lives at the mercy of an organisation like that even if they had anything relevant to offer? But the truth is, they don’t. Ruhama want to take away the money that gives you a home, a car and some semblence of a life and force you into hostels, on welfare with skewed “personal development” and “women’s studies” course to break the monotony and help you internalise Ruhama’s contempt for everything you are.
Offering something that’s illegal is called conspiracy. Are they not guilty of that because vagina?
have your say