TVScope: Sex Crime Northern Ireland, UTV, Thursday, 10pm
'What's your price?" The first in a three-part UTV series, which aims to lift the lid on the sex trade in Northern Ireland, brought the human face of prostitution into the living rooms of what the Rape Crisis spokesperson described as "polite society who refuse to face up to the facts".
The programme succeeded in showing us the real price of prostitution, not through earnest discussion but by talking to two women involved at the opposite ends of the industry.
At the high end, "Stacey" was the cool, calculated voice of the independent, touring "escort". She travels regularly from her home in Liverpool to work as a prostitute in upmarket Belfast hotels and apartments. For Stacey, sex is just another market commodity and she sees no point in giving away free something she can make a lot of money out of. She claims to enjoy what she does more than "going out on a Saturday night and pulling a bloke".
At the low end, we heard the voice of "Diane", a street prostitute forced into selling sex against her will. "I was very frightened he would come after me and beat me. I made money but it didn't go into my pocket - it went into his drink."
The statistics behind the Dianes on the streets are grim - 70 per cent of Belfast's street prostitutes have been in care, 85 per cent have been physically abused and up to 50 per cent have been sexually abused as children.
Many are dependant on alcohol and drugs, and they are at high risk of being beaten, raped and even murdered by their "clients". Their world is a far cry from Stacey's one of bookings made through internet chat boards, where the men rate the "escorts" and the women post feedback on the "clients".
In between the worlds of the Stacey and Diane lurks the dark underbelly of Belfast's thriving brothels, increasingly controlled by redundant paramilitaries. A police spokesman described the cat and mouse game in which the police, using the Achilles heel of the brothels' need to advertise, locate them and close them down - 60 were closed in the past year alone.
However, the police know full well that all the entrepreneur pimps do is to up sticks and move around the corner. Among the women most at risk in the brothels are the young women being trafficked into Ireland from eastern Europe and far beyond. A Europol official described how these women, with no English, have their passports removed and are threatened into selling sex. Meanwhile, the laws in the North relating to prostitution lag behind the rest of the UK, and kerb crawling is not an offence.
As the sex industry in Ireland thrives, we need to look at what we can learn from others in how we deal with it. The Netherlands have led the way in legalising the sex industry, to the extent that it is a tourist attraction. In contrast, Sweden, which has a zero-tolerance policy, prohibits the purchase but not the selling of sex, and thus penalises those who use prostitutes.
The remaining two programmes in this challenging series deal with the sexual exploitation of children, which will no doubt continue to bridge the gap between what is real and what we would rather not hear.
Review by Oliver Travers, a clinical psychologist