Show me the women

It's a harsh demand, I appreciate.

I should, no doubt, be more unquestioning, more simply accepting of the horror stories constantly presented to me.

I too should clamour for more funding for those fine organisations telling us of these horrible tales of kidnap, deceit, people-smuggling, slavery and rape.

Yet instead, there's a little voice at the back of my head asking, where's the evidence?

Where are all the women being smuggled into Ireland to become sex-slaves in brothels?

Or indeed, where are the native single mums, plunged into the murky world of seasonal prostitution because of the cost of sending their offspring back to school? (Ruhama's latest press release.)

Ruhama keeps telling us incessantly of these tidal waves of women's woe. And if a fraction of what they claim really does exist, then it's truly an appalling set of circumstances that requires police intervention, arrests, prosecutions.

But yet the years go by and never, not once, not ever has Ruhama ever produced a single person ever to validate their increasingly shocking and outrageous claims.

Thousands of women and girls have been trafficked into the Irish sex industry, they claim. Well, where are they? Hidden, claim Ruhama. Accessed only by their kidnapper pimps and the seedy Johns of Ireland who care not whether they rape for money or not.

Yet the Gardai, who have a special inter-agency unit dedicated to people-trafficking, have found only a handful of people trafficked into sex in Ireland.

What the police have found a lot more of, is women from Eastern Europe especially who have voluntarily smuggled themselves to Ireland to work either as prostitutes or in lapdancing clubs.

In other words, illegal migrancy into the Irish sex trade exists, but it doesn't involve coercion and it doesn't involve underage girls, according to what the Gardai have thus far uncovered.

Sex slavery exists and is a real problem, currently in places like Darfur, formerly in places like the Balkans. Basically in any place with an ongoing civil war, rape and sex slavery are used as weapons of conflict.

People trafficking exists and is a real problem too. One need only recall the tearful image of the shipping container full of the dead and dying which was found at Rosslare some years back.

But I'm not convinced that there is a major sex-slavery people-trafficking issue such as Ruhama and their fellow feminist travellers constantly proclaim. There is simply no evidence to support the scale of their incessant claims.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Ruhama receives hundreds of thousands of taxpayers' euro, and need to justify their existence on a regular basis.

This overstating phenomenon is not exclusive to Ireland however. The ever-entertaining delusional behind 'I blame the Patriarchy' is inevitably convinced by similar overstated claims in America, despite acknowledging that a massive investigation in the Dallas Metropolitan area into sex-trafficking uncovered only three women.

A massive investigation lasting months and involving hundreds of officers in Britain led to all sorts of scary tales about women being auctioned off in slave sales held in pub backrooms for a grand.

Yet oddly, when it came time to charge people, nearly all of those prosecuted were done for immigration offences. They did manage to rescue seven girls who claimed to have been held against their will, which was something.

But they provided no evidence that those girls had been trafficked into the country. And not one was underage.

Don't misunderstand me - raping people is wrong, sex with underage children is wrong, kidnapping people is wrong and holding people against their will is wrong.

But we're being told there are a tidal wave of cases where all four of these sordid and appalling crimes meet. And we're being told that by organisations who rely on the shock headline publicity in order to justify their mountainous state grant funding.

So, let's put the issue beyond discussion at long last. Could Ruhama, or some similar organisation, please publish some actual factual data to accompany the shrill claims they make?

Or alternatively, we could just accept that this problem, like the threat of SARS, has been completely overstated, and that the men of Ireland are not complacent rapists happily screwing children smuggled into the country in containers for the financial benefit of kidnapper pimps?