Amnesty International is as right-on, bleeding heart, liberal as it comes. Since 1961, when it was launched hand-in-glove with the caring souls at the Guardian, it has redefined colonialism by imposing the views of the Islington crowd on populations as diverse as Eritrea and China. ‘Global Equality’ is its watchword, by which it means ‘my views are superior to your views’ and thus you must adopt my views…

It has considered its views superior to those of the Christian church – ‘you will allow homosexuals to marry’; democratic governments; health organisations; you name it, there are few social groups that Amnesty doesn’t consider it has a mandate to force change upon. Whether you consider that the organisation does ‘good work’ and should be supported rather depends on whether you believe that ‘your views’ are morally superior to those of which ever (generally) brown skinned section of the global family Amnesty has turned its attention to.

So it comes as some surprise, that Amnesty International doesn’t consider its views superior to those of the Irish prostitutes. In fact it seems to have quite a high opinion of them, believing that absent coercion, violence, or other criminal acts for which there is already adequate legislation, their voices are entitled to be heard, their decisions valued, and their lives and livelihoods should not be criminalised.

As you may imagine, this has caused some consternation amongst social justice warriors who wish to redefine victimhood from the safety of their anonymous keyboards.

Show them a foul mouthed harridan, perfectly capable of reducing an entire posse of drunken sailors into gibbering wrecks, built like Godzilla, endowed with all the charm of Esmerelda, happily pounding her beat and stashing fifty pound notes into her retirement fund – and they will still see a frail waif who doesn’t realise that the man she conned into paying her fare to Belfast was actually ‘trafficking’ her across the border, that violence can only ever be inflicted on women – and should she beat up a non-paying customer that doesn’t count as violence merely a spirited attempt to escape the misery of her situation.

(Please don’t imagine that I think all Irish prostitutes are foul mouthed harridans – I know perfectly well they are not – ‘some of my best friends’ etc., etc. I merely wish to illustrate that no matter how unlikely a victim figure they may cut, the moral guardians will still see them as helpless creatures, so long as they are female).

‘Women are victims by virtue of being women’. That is the message pounded out relentlessly by the army of organisations setting themselves up to ‘rescue’ helpless women who stupidly imagine that they have chosen their way of life out of their own free will.

There is big money in rescuing victims. Thus they are not interested in merely rescuing those who are under-age, those who have been coerced, those who have been trafficked by unscrupulous gangsters – they want to rescue every women from a life of sexual slavery. The best way to do that is to criminalise paid sexual activity, that way the courts will obligingly turn out a regular diet of new clients, week in, week out. The oldest profession will not grind to a halt; those who think they are acting out of their own free will, will go on practising their craft, so you will never run out of people for whom you require a grant to ‘save’. Over and over again. It’s one heck of a business model.

One such organisation is Space International. Space stands for ‘Survivors of Prostitution-Abuse Calling for Enlightenment’. Space was started by Rachael Moran. Rachel wrote a book called “Paid For’. (Of course she wrote a book, they all write a book, it is the building block on which every self respecting victim saviour stands tall…) Rachael tells us that she pounded the paved slabs of Wellington Lane in Dublin from early evening ‘until the small hours’ in search of a man who would pay to abuse her.

Strangely, there is a group of prostitutes who worked that patch of Wellington Lane – in fact the very corner that Rachael claimed to be on – and they never set eyes on her. They were so incensed by her claims that they took themselves off to a solicitor and swore an affidavit, a copy of which I have, which further refutes her claim to have been arrested for soliciting ‘before 1993’. An impossibility.

At no time did I ever see, or hear of “Rachel Moran” author of “Paid For” and founder of “Space International” nor anyone resembling her, working in that area. In her book she claims to have worked near the corner of Wellington Lane from early evening until “the small hours”, which would have placed her within 15 yards of me for several hours most nights.

I have asked several people I retain some contact with, or could locate, from that time and nobody else can remember her, or anyone like her, not only there but in any form of sex work indoor or outdoor, at any of the times she claims to have worked, between 1991 and 1998.

Beyond this, in her book “Paid For” and online blog “theprostitutionexperience” she has described several people, but not one of them even resembles anyone I ever met or heard of.

Perhaps Rachael, mouselike, was hiding in a dark corner, eh? Though I would say that managing to conceal yourself so well that not one of your fellow workers was aware of your presence would seem to be counterintuitive if you wish to advertise your services by being out on the street?

Never mind, Rachael has done well for herself; a book to flog, and grants to apply for, outrage at Amnesty to muster.

One thing puzzles me though. Amongst all this talk of ‘the patriarchy’, and imbalance of power, of how evil men force these women to trade their bodies for a meagre bowl of gruel for their children, and ‘give us more money to save ’em’ – there is never any mention of the ‘other role’ that men play in this charade.

Men are only ever mentioned as the ‘purchasers’ of sex (or the traffickers!). Who is going to save all the male prostitutes from these, er, evil men? There is little literature on male prostitution, and what there is paints a very different picture.

We have found that the majority of male prostitution is voluntary. Most of these sex workers are not dependent upon the money that they earn by performing sexual acts. Even those forced to work in illegal brothels began on a voluntary basis.

The John Jay study of children in the sex industry in New York discovered that an astounding 50% of the ‘trafficked children’ were in fact boys. Nobody mentions them.

It is estimated that of the 40 million prostitutes in the world, 8 million are thought to be men. In San Francisco, it was found that 25% of the prostitutes were transgendered – so I suppose everyone grabs them to bolster their statistics.

One survey of web sites advertising sexual services revealed that nearly half – 42pc – of all prostitutes in the UK (totalling 104,964) are in fact male. Professor Victor Minichiello has written an excellent book, Male Sex Work and Society – he looked at the situation in Ireland:

In terms of the regulation of sex work in Ireland, male sex work is rendered virtually invisible within political and policy discourses. This is reflected in recent government reviews and political debate about sex work in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, where the criminalisation of sex work and the purchase of sex services are favoured.

He says one of the misconceptions regarding male prostitutes is that it is an exclusively homosexual transaction:

“increasingly women are also seeing the male body as a commodity and as they have more income and power they purchase it if appropriate to them. It is no longer the case that men are only the buyers of sex; some sell it to others. It is a reality and governments need to recognise the changing face of the sex industry as a result of e-technology and broader acceptance of sexualities.”

The bias of the ‘rescue’ industry is towards the ‘weak and unwilling girls’, and relies on men being seen as predators. It has more to do with Feminist ideology than a desire to rescue either children or vulnerable women. You can’t be a predator and a victim – consequently they ignore 50% of those trafficked child victims in New York?

That same bias was shown a couple of weeks ago when the CPS issued its report of ‘Violence against Women and Children‘ which managed to tuck 17,000 abused men into a footnote at the bottom of page 19, hoping no one would notice that they comprised 16% of these battered ‘women and children’. Alison Saunders was forced (Oh probably by a man!) to come out with a garbled apology.

The women I have talked to, and specifically Irish women who have worked as prostitutes, yeah, on Wellington Lane – and there are people who remember them there! – may have been victimised by all sorts of things in their lives; poverty, the abuse of an over-powerful state, religion, useless parents, undoubtedly.

Quite why they should now be victimised by legislation preventing them as adults from working as they wish, in order to further the ambitions of feminist grant-grabbing ideology, defeats me.

Unexpectedly, I find myself cheering Amnesty International for having the courage to stand up to the bullying and coercion of these women.

Tagged as: Amnesty International, Feminism, Irish Prostitutes, Sex-Workers, Taffywood.