Northern Ireland’s Anti-Sex Work Law Was Good for Sex Business

A law that took effect in 2015 designed to drive down the demand for paid sex services in Northern Ireland has, in fact, resulted in exactly the opposite taking place, according to new research published this month by the Northern Ireland Department of Justice. The law made it a crime to pay for sex, targeting the customers of sex workers, rather than criminalizing the act of selling sexual services. But according to the new government research study, “the legislation has had little effect on the supply of or demand for sexual services.” In fact, sex workers in Northern Ireland reported “a surge in business in the period following introduction of the legislation,” the study said. As The Belfast Telegraph reported in a summary of the study, the number of sex workers openly advertising their services on a website jumped 5 percent after the law went into effect. The researchers counted 4,717 different sex workers who took out ads. Of those, 1,798 placed their initial ads following implementation of the "Human Trafficking and Exploitation Bill." The law was, and remains, the only law in the United Kingdom that makes paying for sex a criminal offense while allowing the sale of sex to remain essentially legal, according to a New Statesman report. In other U.K. countries, while sale of sexual services is technically legal, many activities associated with that sale are outlawed, such as operating a prostitution business, and soliciting customers on a public street, making sex work for money essentially a crime under many conditions. Sex workers interviewed for the study said that they believed the widespread publicity around the bill as it was debated then put into effect “publicized prostitution to those who had never previously considered it,” leading to the increase in demand, according to a BBC report.  The Northern Ireland Assembly member who introduced the bill, Lord Morrow, dismissed the study as flawed in a televised interview this week, accusing the researchers of bias “in favor of decriminalization.” But one of those researchers, sociologist Caoimhe Ní Dhónaill, wrote on Twitter that Lord Morrow’s claims about the study were “unfounded and untrue. As always in research, the search for the truth was paramount, and we simply reported what was found.” Photo By Kay Chernush for the U.S. State Department / Wikimedia Commons