Blind Eyes In Ireland

The slave next door: police have jailed the husband-wife controllers who were running a large prostitution ring encompassing almost 35 brothels across Ireland. The 70 prostitutes in their service included many women who had been trafficked into the Emerald Isle from Portugal, Venezuela, Brazil and Nigeria.

The court heard women would be sent from their home country with promises of education or steady jobs.
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Women arrived in Ireland via Britain or mainland Europe and were "soon put to work" in rented apartments across Ireland.
The court was told they were frequently moved around flats to in different towns north and south of the border to provide punters with "variety".
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Judge Neil Bidder QC told Carroll and Clark: "You made huge profits from the women who were exploited. You had no care for those women and you were both prepared to profit from their unhappy trade.
"You set up brothels all across the Republic and Northern Ireland, renting from unsuspecting landlords and moving women from brothel to brothel as your economic needs dictated."

Judge Bidder said that, though Clark and Carroll did not traffic women themselves they, "turned a blind eye."
He said: "If you choose to close your eyes to people who bring prostitutes into your business you must share some of the responsibility for their activity.
"It is more than a coincidence that several of the Nigerian women tell dreadful stories of coercion and all ended up working for you."

Using the internet and mobile phones, the couple had been able to move their headquarters from Ireland and supervise their organization from a small Welsh town, Castlemartin, in Pembrokeshire, in order to escape the growing scrutiny from Irish police.

They employed pimps in Ireland to run the brothels.
The women’s services were advertised on the internet. When men rang the Irish numbers on the sites, the phones were answered in Wales by Carroll and his wife, who directed punters to the Irish brothels.

The couple pled guilty to charges of conspiracy to control prostitution for gain and conspiracy to money-launder. Their daughter, a fourth-year law student, was charged with money-laundering. They were not, however, convicted of trafficking, as Judge Bidder explained during the sentencing:

"I'm not sentencing you for trafficking those women and accept you were unaware of the personal circumstance of the women who worked in your brothels and you were not responsible for any violence and threats of violence.
"But the Nigerian women who were threatened with dreadful coercion all ended up working for you.
"You did not ask and did not care what personal tragedies had befallen those women submitting for your profit. You were willing to exploit them."

Are we to believe that today's slaves are so invisible that even those that are exploiting them can be unaware of their existence? If someone is jailed for seven years, is that sufficient justice for cases like this:

Robert Davies, prosecuting, said the business had used foreign sex workers "so they would not have homes to go to at night".
The Nigerian women also underwent "terrifying and humiliating" rituals involving menstrual blood and killing chickens to "put the fear of death in them", Judge Neil Bidder was told.
Instead of the promised work as hairdressers and seamstresses, they were sent to apartments in the Republic and in the North and put to work as prostitutes. Some of the girls were as young as 15.
"They were cynically catapulted into a miserable existence and exploited," Mr Davies said.

For more on the evil of human trafficking in Ireland, see here.

Also please visit Ruhama, a Dublin-based NGO which works with women affected by prositution.