Lampedusa: Wasted lives and the limits of European ‘hospitality’

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Ronit Lentin

lampedusaI don’t suppose that tourists, lured to Lampedusa’s Rabbit Beach, off the southern coast of Italy, voted the world’s best beach by the travel site TripAdvisor as having ‘snow-white beaches, unspoiled nature and the crystal-clear sea filled with life’, spare a thought to the island being the primary European entry point for migrants from Africa, the Middle East and Asia.  At least not until last week’s disaster in which some 300 migrants drowned in a desperate attempt to reach ‘Europe’. Lampedusa, I suggest, epitomises the paradox of European asylum policies at their most acute.

After Lybia and Italy reached a secret agreement in 2004 that obliged Libya to accept African immigrants deported from Italy, there was a mass return of many people from Lampedusa to Libya. This didn’t last and by 2006, African immigrants were paying Lybian people smugglers to help get them to Lampedusa by boat. On arrival, most were transferred by the Italian government to reception centres in mainland Italy. Many were then released because their deportation orders were not enforced. Continue reading “Lampedusa: Wasted lives and the limits of European ‘hospitality’”

Legislate against prostitution

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Ronit Lentin

I didn’t really want to write about prostitution again. When I did so in 1981, research exposed a horrible world of sexual violation and violence. I didn’t really want to go there again, but was challenged by Patricia Kelleher who did the research for Turn Off the Red Light, the Immigrant Council of Ireland campaign. When articles by women who I had considered feminists started appearing in the press, defending prostitutes’ right to choose to work in the sex industry, and by implication, men’s right to continue to dehumanise and violate women, I felt I could not be silent any more. Reading Rachel Moran’s book, Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (Dublin: Gill and McMillan, 2013), persuaded me to support the demand to fight prostitution by criminalising clients, hence this article. I was going to use Moran’s photograph to illustrate the article, but decided not to objectify her – her words speak for themselves. Please read the book.

To complete the argument, I am also pasting below the Israeli journalist Vered Lee’s article, calling to criminalise clients, not prostitutes.

The proposal by the Oireachtas (Irish houses of Parliament) to adopt the ‘Swedish model’ that seeks to abolish prostitution by criminalising the buyers rather than the sellers of sex, has incurred opposition by several Irish academics. In a recent Irish Times article Dr Eílis Ward of NUI Galway criticised the lack of evidence for this proposal, based on the ‘Turn off the Red Light’ campaign. Her liberal feminist argument that women should be free to be sex workers ignores the violence, coercion and abuse that dominate the sex trade, in Ireland and throughout the world. Prostitution, she argues, without a shred of evidence, cannot be abolished.

Unlike Ward, I did research the topic. In April 1981 Geraldine Niland and I published a two part series in the Irish Times on the lives of real prostitutes in Dublin. We spent several weeks ‘on the beat’ with the women, interviewing many prostitutes and male clients. The women insisted that without clients, prostitution would not exist. Clients came from all walks of life. From married men seeking casual sex on Percy Place on the way home from the pub, to priests whose dog collars on the back seat gave them away, and who the women described as ‘taking from the poor to give to the poor’. Many of the women were abused as children, most had a drug habit and all spoke of their wish to leave prostitution. For most the decision to enter ‘the life’ was a lack of real choice. Most of the women we interviewed would agree with how one of them described herself: ‘you’re dirt, and no good to anyone’. Continue reading “Legislate against prostitution”

Racism and citizenship

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Ronit Lentin

citizenshipRacism is in the news again in Ireland. Not only has the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) uncovered a high incidence of racism against migrants and people of colour, racism has also been reported widely in the Irish media and – importantly – was highlighted by Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence Alan Shatter in his speech welcoming new citizens last week. ‘The history of this State is now your history and the narrative of your life is now part of our history’ said the Minister to his delighted audience, and I wondered how a person can acquire another people’s history.

Racism, according to the Minister, is ‘attitudes based on hatred and ignorance’ which ‘have no place in our society’, rather a system of categorisation and discrimination. As the seasoned politician he is, Shatter told his captive audience, some of whom, according to The Irish Times, shouted with joy at their newly bestowed citizenship (the cost of which, as I have written here before, is the highest in the Western world; but why be petty?), about his work on a European level to highlight and combat racism. He did this, he said, ‘because failure to live up to the values of the EU in one part of Europe is something that affects all of us’. As if (fortress) Europe itself is not based on systemic racism. Continue reading “Racism and citizenship”