More than 500 women a day advertised for sex in Northern Ireland

Research by the BBC has found that over 500 women are advertised for sexual services each day in Northern Ireland, with the majority being coerced and controlled into being sold for sex.

Across four main ‘pimping websites’ advertising sexual services in Northern Ireland, women are advertised as “independent escorts”. Each website lists the women along with a list of sex acts and services offered. The largest site has been in operation for 30 years and lists more than 1,000 women across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

In 2015, Northern Ireland adopted the ‘Nordic Model’ which made paying for sex illegal, and decriminalised selling sexual services to provide support for women to leave prostitution. Running a brothel, or controlling prostitution for profit, is a crime, but running ‘escort websites’ is not illegal.

Since the introduction of the Nordic model, pimping websites have become one of the most common ways that criminal gangs profit from the sale of women and girls. CARE has been closely involved with the current inquiry into pimping websites run by the All Party Group (APG) on Human Trafficking and Commercial Sexual Exploitation.

Ruth Breslin, director of the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy (SERP) Institute, said “the majority of women we see on these sites are women who are being organised, coerced and controlled and someone else is making money and profiting from them being sold for sex”.

“If you look at their profile they are often very young. They are advertised as ‘new to Ireland’ or ‘only in Belfast for a week’,” she said, adding that there were “tell-tale signs that these women are being trafficked into the sex trade.”

Many of the women being advertised have very basic English, which raises concerns about trafficking. “How can they just turn up in this jurisdiction, set themselves up in a website, write a profile, get themselves a local phone number and an address with very basic English? It is very clear they are being organised,” Breslin noted. “These women have very little control over the work they do, how many sex buyers they see and who they see.”

Survivor of the sex trade, Mia Doring, said: “Prostitution is the most brutal expression of misogyny and we don't see it as that because it's kind of couched as work and empowerment. But prostitution is the worst form of toxic misogyny that could exist. So, the men act out their brutal fantasies on the women. They do not care if the woman is trafficked or not. They know well what they are doing is wrong.”