Madam, - Kevin Myers has written about prostitution before and claimed it was a free choice between adults. So now he sees that prostitution is injurious and dangerous with drug addiction as a modern complication (An Irishman's Diary, August 26th).
I do not know the answer to the problems of drugs and prostitution. I feel that both come out of human desperation. However, I honestly do not see how the Irish language or any other language has much to do with it - or even a basic education. My friend Lyn, who was on the streets for 20 years, is an avid reader.
Mr Myers asks: "Why do we not hear from feminists and the Council for Women and Whinging on this issue? Why do they not stand up for these girls? Why?" Perhaps the answer is that some of us have tried and it is very difficult.
I cannot speak for all feminists, but as a feminist I collaborated with Lyn Madden to write Lyn, the story of a woman in prostitution, and she lived with me for a year while we were doing this. During that time she had a safe home and intensive therapy from Prof Ivor Browne, which helped her to see her own worth. Many women in prostitution are so traumatised growing up that they are unfit for normal life.
She had to flee Ireland because of threats from her ex-pimp John Cullen, but often telephones me. From where, she will not say.
Lyn disagrees with Kevin Myers that women can be rounded up and put in safe places for the convenience of men. "It would be like rounding up mice at a cross roads," Lyn laughs. "Some might conform, but there would always be those who are so 'out of it' that they could not."
Also, who would they have to pay rent to? The Government? Pimps would also collect, because a woman in prostitution needs a man in her life, just like most of us, but these men are usually uneducated, unemployed and brutal and would live off her earnings in any case.
Through Lyn I have learned that middle-class norms do not apply and that the feminist attempt in the 1970s to help women in prostitution failed partly because of this. And the Government refused to help.
It was the awful death in 1978 of ex-prostitute Teresa Maguire, off the streets for two years, that brought about the letter of proposals to the Minister for Justice. Teresa was found with an iron bar stuck up her rectum. Lyn Madden, supported by the feminist Margaret Gaj, introduced Dolores Lynch (later murdered by John Cullen) to activism on behalf of prostitutes.
They managed to get Jim Finnucane of Young Fine Gael interested and he interviewed the women for a government paper called "Girls on the Street". Finnucane was appalled to discover the full implications of prostitution in Dublin - "the slavery, the brutality and the way the system works against girls on the street".
In a letter to the then Minister for Justice, Mr Gerry Collins, Dolores accused him of evading the whole issue of prostitution. She wrote: "The girls who make their living on the streets of Dublin are very annoyed and disappointed that you have refused to meet us in the company of the Council for the Status of Women to hear our point of view about the injustice we suffer."
The same letter proposed that the government open a rehabilitation centre to help young girls to abandon their trade on the streets. No reply.
And I ask Kevin Myers: as a man, what are you and your brothers doing about that? - Yours, etc.,
JUNE LEVINE, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.