Ireland

‘Framing figures’ and the campaign for sex purchase criminalisation in Ireland: A Lakoffian analysis

“…By the time the JCJDE opened its chambers to the public consultation, the ToRL campaign, with its many such interventions, had achieved hegemonic status in the on-going debate about prostitution law reform (Kennedy, 2012; McGarry and FitzGerald, 2017). It had had garnered widespread media coverage throughout (Ryan and Ward, 2018; Whitaker, 2019) including repeated coverage of life stories of former prostitutes, such as Rachel Moran’s harrowing account of her experiences in Dublin (Moran, 2013). Its values had been endorsed, as we saw, by the many organisations and individuals who signed up to its platform.…”

“…One exception was the period after the foundation of the state in 1922 when a Parliamentary Committee debated and proposed prostitution law reform, though both its proceedings and its final report remained secret (Luddy, 2007). The veil of silence changed following the ToRL campaign’s emergence in 2001, after which prostitution was rarely out of public debate (Ryan and Ward, 2018: 50–53) and as it secured the support of charities, interest groups, professional associations and political parties (Whitaker, 2013b: 381).…”

“…While my focus is on data and its use, the persuasiveness of these figures necessarily, following Sayer (2017: 155), rests ‘heavily’ on the ToRL’s system of emotion and value, as illustrated graphically in the report’s narratives from both clients and those involved in selling sex. Upon the report’s publication, the ToRL campaign was already eight years old and was firmly established as the dominant frame through which sex work was debated in Ireland (FitzGerald and McGarry, 2015; Kennedy, 2012; McGarry and FitzGerald, 2017; Ryan and Ward, 2018; Ward and Wylie, 2014; Whitaker, 2013b). Informed by radical feminism, this frame casts sex work as the ultimate embodiment of male privilege, a view that translated into a strategy of silencing contrary sex worker voices (McGarry and FitzGerald, 2017), providing for them, instead, an exclusively victim script (Leahy, 2013).…”

‘I miss being honest’: sex workers’ accounts of silence and disclosure with health care providers in Ireland

“…There is an emotional and physical cost of carrying a stigma that can be concealed or hidden and it is the strategies that sex workers engage in to control information related to stigmatisation, including by health care providers, that can cause isolation, anxiety and low selfesteem (Oliveira 2012(Oliveira , 2018Koken 2012). This paper explores these strategies within a newly adopted legal framework in Ireland, which criminalised the purchase of sex in 2017 while maintaining offences against ancillary activities such as brothel keeping (See Ryan and Ward 2018;McGarry and FitzGerald 2017;Ward 2017 on this campaign).…”