IT has been an accepted "truth" over recent years that ruthless men have been trafficking helpless female sex-slaves into Ireland for prostitution. Why, even I believed it; and it's been a while since I was last invited into the feminist shower to share the soap.

But a recent analysis of a nationwide police operation in Britain against sex-trafficking failed to find a single woman who had been forced into prostitution. Moreover, this absence of any suitable victims was effectively concealed in order to confirm the fiction of wholesale forcible trafficking. And the newspaper which revealed this was none other than the 'Guardian', which is not exactly famed for its Readers' Wives page.

The British operation against sex traffickers, Operation Pentameter Two in which 528 people were arrested, was hailed by police and politicians as a great success. "Months of planning and intelligence-gathering from all the stakeholders involved" had, it was claimed, led to the break-up of major trafficking cartels: though anyone who could use "stakeholder" in such a context must be so deluded by the jargon of process and ideology as to utter any old rubbish. Which, as we now know, was the case.

So of the 528 "arrests", 122 didn't happen. Someone either lied or got carried away. Moreover, nearly one-fifth of the 55 police forces participating in the British investigation arrested no one. Over half of the 406 arrests, 230, were of women -- so much for the ruthless male caricature -- and 106 of the 406 were released without charge. Some 200 of the 406 were cautioned or charged in connection with irrelevant, non-trafficking offences. Another 67 people were charged "in connection with trafficking", whatever that might mean: optics, probably. But even then, most of those charges simply vanished without trace in the bureaucratic maw. So, finally, 22 people were prosecuted -- including two women who had originally been "rescued" by police as victims of trafficking. Seven were acquitted. Of the 15 actually found guilty of bringing women into Britain to work as prostitutes, not one -- NOT ONE -- is known to have coerced anyone into selling sex. In other words, the imported girls chose to work as prostitutes. But thanks largely to the ideologically tainted data resulting from Operation Pentameter Two, the British parliament is passing a bill which will make it a criminal offence for a man to have sex with a prostitute who is "controlled for gain" even if he is ignorant of her condition. So if a man wants paid sex with a woman he will probably seek the services of a street walker, rather than a girl in a massage parlour. This could flush working girls on to the street, where they are more vulnerable to pimps and to violent sex offenders. But of course, the physical vulnerability of working girls is seldom high amongst the moral priorities of "reformers".

The Irish support group for prostitutes, Ruhama, recently reported that more women in Ireland are working as prostitutes and blames the economic crisis. Which means, of course, that some women are choosing to make money through sex. Despite this, Ruhama wants men who use prostitutes to be criminalised -- which is rather like the Busworkers' Union demanding that passengers who pay bus fares should face imprisonment.

Has Ruhama conducted a poll amongst the sex workers of Ireland about its policies?

I suspect the girls would prefer the fuzz just left their punters alone.

Simon Coveney TD put himself firmly on the side of the angels when he recently repeated the Rumaha demand. (Well, there's nothing really like imprisoning people and ruining their lives to make our self-appointed governesses feel better about themselves).

HE declared that in Sweden the criminalisation of men who paid for sex had driven down the amount of prostitution. Where does that oft-repeated claim come from? If the sex trade has gone underground, how can the Sisters of Sweden confidently know how much illegal sex is going on? And might not the Mayor of Chicago have made the same claim about liquor in 1926? All gone; booze is history! Unsurprisingly, the National Women's Council here has never sought to defend the welfare and legal position of working girls, as working girls. For the feminist position on prostitution is predicated on a series of conjoined but contradictory intellectual principles, a fairly common phenomenon -- dare I say it -- within the female mind. One is that a) women are intrinsically victims, and b) women are intrinsically equal. Another bipolar twinset is that a) women's bodies are solely their own business, and b) women may not use their bodies for whatever purposes that feminists consider "degrading".

There's nowhere you can logically go with that cerebral porridge so cut to the real agenda, the one that gives feminists goose-bumps of pleasure, and try to punish men instead. Needless to say, the heresy that adults should be allowed to decide how, as free individuals, they're going to behave is excluded a priori.

And perhaps this is in its own way "normal", for the punishment-scolding instincts of the nanny are probably as widespread amongst humans as are the wanton ways of the harlot. Just give me the non-judgmental company of harlots any day.

kmyers@independent.ie

Irish Independent