Eilís Ward

Prostitution and the Irish State: From Prohibitionism to a Globalised Sex Trade

Abstract This article argues that while the prostitution policies of the Irish state have changed over a long time from an unambiguous prohibitionism towards a partial abolitionism, overall policy is characterised by inconsistency and contradictions and legal changes have occurred outside of a comprehensive policy review. As Ireland is integrated into a globalised sex industry, with a consequent restructuring of the vice trade, prostitution itself may remain largely beyond the reach of the state, or, policy resistant.

‘Reflexivities of discomfort’: Researching the sex trade and sex trafficking in Ireland

This article theorizes a research process in a highly politicized environment in which we, as feminist researchers, found ourselves standing outside the feminist standpoint which dominated Irish public discourse, viz advocacy of a Swedish-style, neo-abolitionist, prostitution policy. We suggest that our increasing personal and intellectual discomfort as that policy position gained support contained valuable epistemic insight. We theorize this principally by drawing on Pillow’s concept of ‘reflexivities of discomfort’. This article offers an account of the messy dynamics of a research process in which we, in time, recognized our own psychosocial worlds as sites of social critique. We contribute to debates about reflexivity by exploring the insights which this approach brought when applied to the dynamics of power politics between us as researchers and the wider policy field within which we were immersed.

Lap Dancing Clubs and Red Light Milieu: A Context for Sex-Trafficking of Women to Ireland?

In 2007, we published a study on trafficking of women into Ireland for sexual exploitation (Ward and Wylie, 2007), which, inter alia, identified the need for critical analysis of the sex industry in Ireland. That need still prevails, especially since the local sex industry continues to globalize and political attention turns to Irish prostitution law. Current debate in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, has been increasing around a campaign to adopt the ‘Swedish model,’ which criminalizes the demand for prostitution as a way of tackling both prostitution and, now, sex-trafficking. The campaign posits a causality between demand in a domestic sex-industry and the supply of prostitutes through sex trafficking. More generally, the campaign rests on a view of prostitution in which women are universally victims of sexual violence. An Irish NGO-based lobby does exist that shares this underlying philosophy and advocates the Swedish model, but although the Irish government has suggested that the domestic sex trade provides a ‘red light milieu,’ which makes sex-trafficking an attractive option (DJELR, 1998), the state has been slow to move towards a general criminalization of demand with the exception of criminalizing the use of the sexual services of a trafficked person in the Human Trafficking (Criminal Law) Act of 2008.

Human Suffering and the Quest for Cosmopolitan Solidarity: A Buddhist Perspective

This article argues that Buddhist social thought offers valuable insight into debates about cosmopolitan solidarity by raising cosmopolitanisms need to explore more deeply the relationship between the nature of self and the politics of solidarity. It suggests that a radical ‘socio-existential’ account of the individual, which rejects a conception of the self as autonomous and separate from others, mitigates categories of exclusion and offers a robust account of the possibility of solidarity with strangers. Buddhist thought theorises a movement from suffering to solidarity that does not recognise borders or boundaries as containing inherent ethical value.