Debate contribution: Adult Services Websites

Debate contribution by Mr Paul Frew on 27 January 2026.

MLA

Mr Paul Frew

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

27 January 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Adult Services Websites

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5345509

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation are serious and disgusting crimes, and we must do everything in our legislative power to stop them. Lord Morrow's introduction of the Nordic model in 2015 was a major milestone in progressing the objective of reducing demand for prostitution and, in turn, for human trafficking. I am privileged to have served in the Assembly with Lord Morrow during the passage of that historic Bill. In 2018, the Home Office estimated that the median time for which a victim trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation was held was 274 days. During that period, a victim experiences 795 instances of rape and sexual assault. In 2024, Sky News shared the story of Sarah, who thought she was attending a job interview. She was lured to a flat, where she was asked to hand over her passport. Her passport picture was later used to create an online profile to advertise her for sex. She had no access to or control over that profile. She was raped by her trafficker and abused by the men who booked her through the website. According to Sky News, the man who abused Sarah is now in prison, but the website that facilitated her abuse is still operating.

Sarah's experience is not a horror story from a distant country or a one-off terrible crime. What happened to Sarah happens every day in towns in Northern Ireland. Women and girls are bought and sold as if they were commodities. They are the product, and the pimps and traffickers who supply them are the profiteers, but so, too, are the websites that facilitate the sale of those women and girls. The websites and platforms are not innocent bystanders. They, too, make money from the sale of human beings. One such platform's profits have been reported to run into millions of euros. The websites are the shopfront of human trafficking and exploitation. Men go to the sites to buy women and girls for sex. The sites serve no purpose other than to meet men's demand to access women's bodies while making a tidy profit. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe points out that:

"Unlike labor trafficking, in which the services of victims do not usually need to be advertised to third parties, advertising targeted at sex buyers is core to the business model of those who traffic persons for the purpose of sexual exploitation. ... The online method has many benefits for exploiters, including allowing traffickers to expose victims to a geographically broader customer base, as well as being correlated with higher numbers of buyers per day compared to solicitation in the context of street-based prostitution."

So-called adult services websites are online brothels, and we allow them to operate with impunity. Of course, central to the crime are the men who buy sex on such sites; men who, as the primary purchasers of sex, have no regard for the plight of the women and girls whom they are purchasing. Those men are not ignorant of the grim reality that exploited women face; they simply do not care. On those sites, purchasers are often able to leave reviews of the women and girls whom they have purchased. Although the existence of that feature is demeaning and degrading in itself, what is, perhaps, more demeaning and degrading are the reviews that men write about the women whom they purchase. The comments are vile and are an indication of the type of men who purchase women. Pimping websites approve access to women for those men, acting as an online brothel where a man can, with ease, browse and order a woman and then review her as if she were a product. That is absolutely grotesque. As has been outlined, the sites facilitate and drive demand for the human trafficking and exploitation of women and girls into Northern Ireland for that purpose. In the past month, a man has been charged with controlling prostitution for gain under article 63 of the Sexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order 2008. It is about time that we see more such convictions.

681 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:22 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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