Breda O'Brien“It is no coincidence that the move to normalise buying and selling sex came from those who work as pimps”, writes Breda O’Brien
Amnesty International once had clear objectives such as working for the release of prisoners of conscience, and opposing torture and the death penalty.
In recent times, it has changed in profoundly troubling ways, such as deciding that abortion is a human right. This has alienated many supporters, leading some people to set up an alternative called the Benenson Society, named for Amnesty’s founder, which operates as Amnesty once did.
However, the decision to promote abortion is not the only abhorrent resolution. At a Dublin meeting last year, Amnesty voted to support the decriminalisation of sex workers, including brothel owners and pimps.
So unlike the Nordic model, which decriminalises people working in prostitution, the Amnesty proposal supports decriminalising everyone connected with it – the brothel owner, the pimp and the person buying sex.
They claimed that two women living together and working in prostitution could constitute a brothel, therefore it was better to decriminalise everything in case the two women could be arrested. They did not appear to consider the fact that legislation could be drafted to define a brothel owner as one who profits from the prostitution of others.
Familiar
Some of Amnesty’s tactics are familiar. One of its webpages has a photo of women working in prostitution in India. One is holding a poster which proclaims “Sex work is not a crime, nor are we criminals”.
While it is absolutely true that prostitution is a crime in many places, there is no support among women’s groups and human rights organisation for the criminalisation of those involved in prostitution.
In fact, national and international advocacy organisations virtually all support decriminalisation of those working in prostitution, a model that has been working successfully in Sweden for many years, and was recently adopted here in Ireland, and just before that in Northern Ireland and France. The key difference is that some also support decriminalisation of those who profit from prostitution and those who buy sex.
The second tactic is selective use of human rights instruments. The United Nations 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others states specifically that “State Parties agree to punish any person who… exploits the prostitution of another person, even with the consent of that person”.
So that would seem to rule out decriminalising brothel owners even when there is alleged consent. Conveniently, Amnesty chose to ignore the Convention.
Industry
It is no coincidence that the move to normalise buying and selling sex came from those who work as pimps and brothel owners.
For example, a man called Douglas Fox, owner of a successful English escort business, was a member of Amnesty, and urged others in this industry to join also. He was part of an Amnesty group which in 2008 proposed an unsuccessful motion along the lines now adopted by Amnesty.
He certainly feels that he has achieved his aim, even though he did not succeed at the time. In 2014, in the Northern Irish newspaper, the News Letter, he confirmed that he asked his supporters to join Amnesty and lobby from within. “It is exactly what I hoped for,” he said. “I am very, very pleased that Amnesty has taken this position.” Amnesty denies any involvement by Fox in their policy. Instead, they say they consulted widely.
Did they read the Der Spiegel exposé of what happened when Germany legalised prostitution? Including the comments of a retired chief detective who says that Germany has become a “centre for the sexual exploitation of young women from Eastern Europe, as well as a sphere of activity for organised crime groups from around the world”?
Amnesty says that trafficking is a separate issue. They are wilfully blind, because it is an industry that always demands what it abusively calls ‘fresh meat’, and therefore trafficking will always be part of it.
The Der Spiegel piece recounts horror stories of young Eastern European women working in dreadful conditions, terrified to complain, yet Amnesty claims that consensual sexual activity for money is fine.
Consent
Has Amnesty devised a scale which can measure from afar the degree of consent involved when a woman or a man, with the possible involvement of a pimp, performs a sexual act for money?
Rachel Moran, Irish author of Paid For, My Journey Through Prostitution, and a survivor of this inhuman industry asks how women can consent to prostitution, when so many enter the industry below the age of consent?
In an interview with Susan McKay, she talks about why so many of them resort to drugs “to numb the simple awfulness of having sexual intercourse with reams of sexually repulsive strangers, all of whom are abusive on some level… many of whom are deliberately so”.
And this is what Amnesty endorses by lobbying to decriminalise it?