That's men for you:Two hundred years after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, has slavery reached our shores with men as its final customers?
The question is prompted by the announcement that Scotland Yard has set up a unit to combat sex slavery in Britain, just half-an-hour's flight away.
Sex slavery has become a dark aspect of life in western Europe following the collapse of the old Soviet Union and the communist regimes of eastern Europe.
What has that to do with us, you may ask. And what has it to do with the emotional or physical health of men?
What it has to do with us is that it is highly unlikely that we have remained untainted by sex slavery. In Britain it is believed that about 4,000 women and girls are working as sex slaves. Most have been trafficked into the UK from eastern Europe, duped into believing that they have been recruited for normal jobs.
Some will have been raped and brutalised on the way to break their spirit.
Do you believe, or does anyone believe, that nobody has been trafficked onwards into Ireland?
Sex slaves work in brothels and massage parlours paying off a "debt" arbitrarily set by those who control them. Needless to say, the day never comes when the debt is paid off.
The customers of brothels and massage parlours are men. We could argue about whether brothels and massage parlours should be licensed and regulated in the interests of the women who work in them.
That's another story. Reports suggest that even in Amsterdam, with its ultra liberal attitude to sex and its licensed brothels, there is a sort of lower class of sex slaves trafficked from eastern Europe and who work outside the licensed system.
The customers of the sex industry, as I mentioned above, are almost exclusively men. And we surely cannot say that there is anything healthy in any sense of the word about having terrified and enslaved women "servicing" men in these places.
If you included these women as part of society, then you would have to say that society is morally damaged by this trade. I would have thought this was true regardless of one's beliefs concerning women who choose to go into the sex industry.
Those who have been enslaved have been trapped by nothing more or less than poverty and by a desire to better their lives.
The collapse of industry and of the control exercised over populations by the old communist regimes, have left many young girls growing up to poverty and to very poor prospects indeed.
Western Europe is the land of opportunity which draws them from the fields, villages and towns of eastern Europe. Too often, they are very easy prey for the traffickers. Those involved in trafficking include some women who are in a position to gain the trust of their prospective victims.
Taken across the border or to another country, they are sometimes forced into prostitution on the very first day of their arrival. Police say that women trafficked into the UK and then "sold" for a few thousand pounds may have to see as many as 30 men a day.
And yet the only thing that brought them into these terrible situations was that they were poor and gullible. No doubt many of them had never had sex before in their lives.
The effect on these women must be absolutely devastating. We are all aware of the devastating effects of rape on the lives of its victims. These women are raped every day and many times a day, with little or no prospect of escape.
It is probably fair to say that the person trafficked out of their home country dies very, very quickly to be replaced by a traumatised human being.
Let's hope our Government will play a full part in efforts by the Council of Europe and others to combat this evil trade. But for that to happen, Irish people need to be aware of sex slavery and to be determined that something should be done about it.
Padraig O'Morain's blog on men's issues, Just Like A Man, is at www.justlikeaman.blogspot.com