Every wall is a window

Sex Slaves, Channel 4, Sunday, 9pm

The Asylum, RTÉ1, Monday, 9.30pm

Gaybo, RTÉ1, Tuesday

Of late certain television channels are fond of "reality" programmes which (following on from the trend started by the film Boogie Nights) shows the world of American pornography as being like one extended and happily dysfunctional family. Aspects of the sex industry may indeed be like that in some US Happy Valley where everyone with a video camcorder is a diminutive Cecil B deMille. However, as a different and utterly horrifying eye-opener into the european sex industry, Sex Slaves (Channel 4, Sunday, 9pm) made chilling viewing. Major criminals now make more money every year from sex trafficking than from drugs. Women are easier to smuggle through customs. The trade is so vast that half a million women are sold every year, changing hands several times before they wind up in London or Dublin.

These women mainly come from impoverished former Soviet Republics like Moldova, where poverty is so extreme that vulnerable girls are desperate to believe the lies of foreign women who offer them jobs as waitresses and nannies in Turkey. Traffickers have an eye for spotting vulnerable, trusting girls; girls who soon find themselves in a filthy car park in Turkey seeing bank notes changing hands and realising that they have been sold.

The following months and years are spent locked up in apartments, being raped and beaten until they consent to service up to ten men a night as they are told that they must pay off their debt, which – due to constant fines – never happens. They are simply moved on between criminal gangs and countries until, broken in mind and body, they are sent home as mere shells of the girls who were sent off to seek work to feed their families.

The Channel 4 documentary followed Viorel, a Ukrainian man trying to rescue his wife who was lured to Turkey to buy stock for her mother's shop and sold by a small-time trafficker for $1,000. Using undercover cameras, it filmed his attempts to buy back his wife by posing as a trafficker himself. He failed, but caused sufficient trouble for the Turkish gang to simply dump her at an airport. In a wonderful glimpse at the Moldovan justice system, the trafficker who originally sold her got a suspended sentence in court proceedings that lasted a few seconds and from which Viorel and his wife were barred.

While the first week focused on people who have been locked up for decades, this week's episode observed the admissions unit, also called the acute or assessment unit, where patients are first admitted and frequently re-admitted. It made for harrowing viewing, because there has always been something harrowing about St Ita's.

In relation to the two complaints about the programme, I think that Gilseman's documentary never set out to tell the entire story of the Irish mental heath system. There is undoubtedly a important and far-reaching confrontational series to be made on mental health, but a programme should be judged on its own parameters rather than simply criticised for not being what it did not set out to be. I would be less happy in relation to the second accusation of exploiting vulnerable people. On the one hand, it is good to see these people allowed to speak for themselves rather than always being spoken for. However, watching a bipolar man on a cocktail of drugs pacing his room while being interviewed is an uncomfortably voyeuristic experience. While I admire innovative filmmaking, I confess to siding with the angry nurse who found the door locked and angrily banged until the filming stopped. It was disturbing also when one patient kept calling the director "nurse", which left an impression that although she gave her consent, she was confused by Gilsenan's status.

Part of the our unease is that we may simply not wish to glimpse too far into a world that still has such stigma in the Irish imagination, despite the fact that one of four of us will have some mental health problem. My main concern is about how such exposure of a deeply sincere man like the one we see in The Asylum – a man who keeps attempting to construct a life for himself in the wider world – will impact on people's reaction to him. Will they have more understanding of his difficulties or will such exposure make him feel under more pressure? Perhaps only time can answer that question.

De Valera turned up on Gaybo (RTE1, Tuesday) to talk about how uneasy he felt about the power of television to bypass public figures and directly address a nation. His cabinet colleague Todd Andrews felt the same, with his first (and forlorn) instruction to a new RTÉ Director General being to "get rid of that fucker Byrne". Both men would have hated The Asylum, but perhaps it is an example of the power that De Valera feared – the power to stimulate genuine debate and get people arguing, even if many are perturbed by what they see on screen.