Sex websites ‘facilitate exploitation of women by pimps and traffickers’

The report said the websites “provide a near-infinite supply of women from whom to purchase sexual access, and manage buyers’ preferences by allowing them to choose women from a ‘menu’ of options such as age, nationality, ethnicity, dress size, shoe size, breast size and the sexual acts offered, to name a few.”

It also says that anonymity through the sites helps pimps and traffickers “avoid detection by law enforcement by advertising their victims as ‘independent escorts’ to create the illusion of free will.”

One woman’s profile showed a photo of a woman whose body was “visibly bruised in multiple areas,” the report said. Another profile showed a photo of a woman who was “visibly pregnant.”

One site had an average of over 850 individual profiles advertised daily, receiving 3 million hits per month.

Just over a fifth of the advertised individuals are between 18 and 25 years old.

Ruth Breslin, director of the SERP Institute, formerly part of UCD’s Geary Institute for Public Policy, said it had analysed one of the main websites used to advertise sex workers over four weeks in August and September. She said the research raised concerns, particularly about the age of some of the women advertised on the site.

Ms Breslin said: “The way some of the young women are advertised and the way some of them are posed in the pictures, they really do look like girls. Some of them are wearing school uniforms and sailor uniforms, and with lollipops, teddy bears for example.”

She was also concerned that some of the text in the ads was almost identical, which could indicate that the women’s profiles were placed on sites by a group that could be involved in organizing the bookings of multiple sex workers.

She saw that there were six women, all of whom were advertised as 20-year-old Brazilians.

The photos do show different women, but there has been little effort to adjust the profile. That tells me right away that there is an organized group behind this that has posted a number of profiles at once.

“The six were only in two locations, which was also notable.”

She also highlighted five other young women whose profiles were on the site at the time of the investigation, from Ireland, Hungary, Russia, Japan and Ukraine, who “all had the same profile”.

Ms Breslin questioned how such websites are allowed to operate freely “in a jurisdiction that sells something that is illegal to buy”.

Indications of exploitation

“We have definitive evidence that exploitation is taking place and we have previously established that advertisements have been placed for victims of human trafficking,” she said.

“This enables exploitation in a fast, easy and cheap way.

“Back in the day, if you were a pimp and you wanted to control who you were controlling, you had to watch women on the street. But now that it’s indoors and online, there’s an infinite opportunity to offer these women to as many buyers as you can think of.”

Ms Breslin acknowledges that there are a segment of sex workers who manage their own profiles and operate independently. However, she said:

I have also met and interviewed women who did not realize they were on that site until much later because they had so little control over it.

The locations where the most profiles were advertised on average were Dublin (364 profiles), Cork (76 profiles), Belfast (51 profiles), Limerick (43 profiles), Kildare (30 profiles), Galway (27 profiles), Westmeath (22 profiles), Louth (21 profiles) and Waterford (18 profiles).

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