You don’t know who I am in Limerick. I will end you,” the man spat down angrily into Barbara Babeurre’s face as she attempted to push him out the door, trying not to inhale the stench of his armpits.
“I thought he was going to beat the shit out of me,” Ms Babeurre said.
“I told him I’d call the guards when he refused to leave and he said, ‘what about you? You’re working together, what you do is illegal. It's a brothel.’
“I was shocked. That’s the first time anyone ever said that to me.”
The Sex Workers Alliance Ireland (SWAI), a peer-led service for anyone who sells sex, estimates that violence against sex workers has increased by 92% since the End Demand model was introduced in 2017.
The Sexual Offences Act 2017 prohibited the purchase of sex and increased penalties for workers sharing a premises.
SWAI has been calling for the legalisation and regulation of sex work which they say will better protect workers.
Ms Babeurre agrees. She has worked in Germany, France, the UK, her native Czech Republic and Ireland.
She said that she felt safest working in Germany, where both selling and buying sex are legal, regulated and taxed.
Criminalising women for working together — labeled as brothel-keeping — is endangering the lives of sex workers, she believes.
But she also believes that criminalising the buyer endangers sex workers by pushing the trade further into the shadows.