Prevent white space in query being converted to percent 20

[eluser]Andy78[/eluser]
I have the following function in my model that I want to use to search for phrases and so on. However if I pass in more than one word the spaces are always converted to the percent20 symbol which breaks my query. How do I avoid this?

Also is this type of query secure? or do I need t escape $term first?

Code:

function get_search_entries($limit, $start, $term)
   {
        
        $this->db->select('statuses.id, title, status, posted_by, created, rating, name');
        $this->db->from('statuses');
        $this->db->join('categories', 'categories.id = statuses.category_id');
        
        $this->db->where('MATCH (title, status) AGAINST ("'.$term.'")', NULL, FALSE);
        $this->db->limit($limit, $start);
        $query = $this->db->get();
        
        if ($query->num_rows() > 0) {
            
            return $query->result();  
        }
        
        return false;      
   }