There is one issue that I haven't dealt with so far because I don't think it is important. However, other people think it is important so it needs to be addressed. This is the issue of the change of public opinion in Sweden since the introduction of the law in 1999 that prohibits men who pay for sex. More people now in Sweden believe that men should be prosecuted for paying for sex. This is regarded as a major success for the Swedish model.
The reason why I have not addressed this issue before is because it doesn't affect women's safety. It doesn't matter what the public believe. However, in a way it does. If people believe that the Swedish model is a success then it is more likely to be adopted in other countries.
As Dr Brooke Magnanti has written in her book, she doesn't mind opinion. It's when people start false statistics that they enter her territory. People can have any opinion they like but they can't propagate false statistics.
Some people eg Molly Smith and Juno Mac have said that the reason the Swedish government puts such importance on public opinion is because the statistics for a drop in demand are so dodgy. They want to put attention elsewhere. Also, public opinion has changed in respect to sex workers being prosecuted: more people think that prostitutes should be criminalized.
So this is not an endorsement of the Swedish model, or at least not the Swedish model as presented. The Swedish model states that prostitutes should be decriminalized and their customers criminalized. That's why you see the phrase 'shifting the burden' - from women to men. They are dishonest about that though, an issue I have dealt with elsewhere on this blog. The theory and the practice are different, as so often happens in politics.
It seems they want the American model, where both men and women are arrested, and not the Swedish model. Or perhaps they know that the Swedish model is equally harsh or harsher to women than to men. Also, in a 2008 survey only 20% of respondents believed that the number of people who pay for sex had been reduced. So, if they don't believe in its effectiveness then they don't believe in the law. It doesn't sound as if the Swedish public are very caring, they want both men and women to be arrested even though they don't believe it will achieve anything.
There aren't two different opinions about criminalization, there are three. There are people who don't like prostitution, want to ban it, and believe that a ban would work. There are people who don't like prostitution but don't want to ban it because they don't believe a ban would work. There are people (like me) who don't think that prostitution in itself is a problem, don't want to ban it, and don't believe a ban would work. This is how it is with the issue of drugs too.
If you can persuade the second group that a ban HAS worked then they will start to support it. The Swedish government has told their citizens - incorrectly - that the ban has worked. I have dealt with this issue in detail elsewhere on this blog but I will also deal with it briefly below.
Why would the change in the law have changed public opinion? Changes in law don't change public opinion, it is government propaganda that can change opinion. There's been a change in the law and later a change in opinion. We have no reason to believe that the former caused the latter. It is the government's manipulation of the statistics, the perceived success of the ban, which has changed public opinion.
It's not the function of a government to change opinion. In a democracy a government should reflect the opinion of the people. In Sweden there is an authoritarian streak which is very sinister. Changing opinion by manipulating statistics is especially sinister. People are evicted from their homes without being able to defend themselves in a court of law: the government and now the public don't see this as a problem.
I have quoted below one paragraph from a study done by Max Waltman called 'Prohibiting Sex Purchasing and Ending Trafficking: The Swedish Prostitution Law'.
"Moreover, the passing of the law, in and of itself, seems to have changed public sentiment. In 1996, only forty-five percent of women and twenty percent of men in Sweden were in favor of criminalizing male sex purchasers. In 1999, eighty-one percent of women and seventy percent of men were in favor of criminalizing the purchase of sex; in 2002, eightythree percent of women and sixty-nine percent of men were in favor; and, in 2008, seventy-nine percent of women and sixty percent of men favored the law. Furthermore, the number of men who reported, in the national population samples, having purchased sex seems to have dropped from 12.7% in 1996 (before the law took effect) to 7.6% in 2008. The method used for approximation, self-reported anonymous crime surveys, has repeatedly been proven reliable in a number of scientific reviews. Asked about the law’s effects on their own purchase of sex in 2008, respondents stated they had not increased their purchase of sex, had not started purchasing sex outside of Sweden, and had not begun purchasing sex in “non-physical” forms."
You might not have noticed that between 2002 and 2008 there was a drop in the number of women and men who support the law. It is higher though in 2008 than in 1996. I wonder what it is now. Just goes to show that in statistics numbers can go up and down, a point that is often missed by those who like to manipulate them.
The proportion who approve the law was at its lowest in 2011 at 65.5% (lower than in 1996) and at its highest in 1999 and 2002 at 76%. Since 2008 it has moved between 65.5% and 72%. That's just a few percentage points. Not much of an endorsement. Hardly 'normative'.
| 1996 | 1999 | 2002 | 2008 | 2011 | 2014 |
| 67% | 76% | 76% | 71% | 65.5% | 72% |
You would think that the Swedish government - if it really cared about prostitutes - would have surveys every year. From the time they were trying to get the bill passed till today. The same people conducting them, the same number of participants, the same type of survey. Instead they were in 1996, 2008, 2011 and 2014. None since. One in 2017 would have been good then it would have been 3 year intervals. There seems to have been limited surveys in 1999 and 2002. What were the stats for 2011 and 2014 for public opinion?
I've just looked at the Länsstyrelsen 2015 document and it says the figure fell again in 2011 then rose slightly in 2014. There seems to have been a peak in popularity for the law in 1999 and 2002 then a continuous fall with a slight rise but not to 1999 or 2002 levels. Could this be because in 1999 street prostitution stopped altogether? If this had been reported in the news then people would think prostitution had gone. Then it started to come back till in Stockholm in 2007 two thirds had returned to the streets.*
Or could it be that when the law came in it ceased to be a party political issue? You wouldn't want to support the policies of another party.
It does look like the third of the population I mentioned earlier who believed that a ban wouldn't work have been convinced that it does work. So let's have a look at 'the number of men who reported ... having purchased sex'. What Waltman doesn't tell the Swedish public is that there are two sets of statistics for men who reported having purchased sex.
There is the set of statistics for men who reported having purchased sex in the previous twelve months of the survey. This set is there to show numbers of active sex buyers. Then there is the set of statistics for men who reported having purchased sex at some time in their lives. These might sound similar but they are different. In the first set there was an increase in active sex buyers from 1.3% to 1.8%. In the second set there was a drop from 12.7% to 7.6%. Another thing the Swedish public aren't told is that this second set increased in the 2011 survey to over 10%.
Normally you would expect the second set of statistics to follow the first set but more slowly. So if there was an increase in active sex buyers you would expect the number of men who paid at some time in the past to increase too but more slowly. You don't expect the first set to show a rise and the second set to show a fall. Especially such a big fall. What's going on?
When you ask people if they have ever done something there can be misleading rises and falls as older generations become too old to participate in surveys. If you asked people in a survey if they had ever used blankets on their bed there would be older people who would say they used to use blankets all the time but now they use duvets. That would go down as a yes.
When this generation becomes too old to participate in the survey (74 years in the Swedish surveys) then it would appear that there is a sudden change in people's bedroom habits. People suddenly stopped using blankets. No. They stopped using blankets decades ago but that change in what they do in the bedroom has only just showed up. That would happen even if a few people started going retro in the bedroom and started using blankets. So there could be an increase in people using blankets but also an apparent large and recent drop.
So it's not true that fewer men purchased sex after 1999. Yet the Swedish government has managed to persuade the Swedish public that it is true. Although, it has to be said, we don't know if the drop in the number of people supporting the law from 2002 has continued to this day. Even Kuosmanen, who conducted the 2008 survey, seems to have changed his opinion Selling Sex in Sweden: An Analysis of Discourses about Sex Workers and their Human Rights (Katie Sophie Gonser) 2016.
There are people who will feel that it is acceptable for prostitutes to suffer in the short term if it ends their suffering in the long term. Prostitutes can be arrested, evicted and deported for a few years. Then all that will stop because prostitution stops - forever. Even if we never manage to get rid of it, the calculation could be acceptable. If we increase the suffering of prostitutes by 100% yet we decrease the number of prostitutes by 75% then we have cut the amount of suffering by half. Right?
"Of course a reduction in the number of punters makes it harder for those selling sex. But that is one reason why the Nordic Model includes provisions to help women exit, and why it needs to be accompanied by robust measures to address women’s poverty and inequality." A critical review of ‘Revolting Prostitutes: The fight for sex workers’ rights’ by Juno Mac and Molly Smith on the Nordic Model Now! site. There is little help for women to exit in Sweden or Ireland.
No. You have increased the suffering of women. Forever. The law didn't decrease the number of men who buy sex. The 2008 financial crisis is more likely to have changed men's bedroom habits. Less money for sex workers. Less money for cocaine. Not a success for the war against prostitution or the war against drugs.
The last sentence in Waltman's paragraph seems to show that men's attitudes haven't changed. They had not increased their purchase of sex, but they hadn't decreased it either. They hadn't started going to Denmark, probably because they didn't need to. I don't quite know what the final statement means. It seems to mean that they haven't started buying porn and wanking. I haven't bought porn for many years, but that's due to the Internet. They want to stop that too.
What Waltman isn't considering is that Swedish men could be going more to massage establishments. It has been said that there has been a big increase in the number of Thai massage establishments in Sweden. There could be just as much paid-for sexual activity but now more of it is in the form of a woman from a developing country/global south using her hands to bring a man to orgasm.
On the face of it you would think that even if this was the case they could count it as a success. After all, you can no longer say that a man is buying a woman or buying a woman's body. He's not masturbating into a woman's body or using the inside of a woman's body as a workplace. Or using her as a fuck-hole (I read that on Mumsnet).
A masseur uses her hands for massage or a sexual service. Many people in service industries use their hands. You cannot accuse a man of buying her or her body because people use their hands all the time. Mind you it was always a silly argument, even when it's traditional penetrative sex.
So would they be happy? No of course not. They would want to stamp it out as they do erotic dancing and pornography. So all these arguments about buying a woman's body or a right to access a woman's interior are inconsequential. That was never the reason. The reason was because if you have sex with a woman outside of marriage or a long-term relationship then you are using her - so they believe.
*This statistic comes from the document Prostitution in Sweden 2007 by the National Board of Health and Welfare. I will quote one relevant paragraph below, from page 46.
"... street prostitution declined or disappeared in all three major cities (Malmö, Göteborg, Stockholm) immediately after the law against purchasing sexual services was enacted but later returned, albeit on a lesser scale. According to one informant in Göteborg, those who had the opportunity (and access to the Web, mobile phones, hotels and help from taxi drivers) left street prostitution when the law was passed, while those who remained were “at the bottom of the totem pole” – about 30 women whose lives were “in an uproar” for various reasons. This informant has observed that a few new individuals have appeared in street prostitution since the law took effect, but they are usually gone very quickly after exchanging phone numbers with potential clients. The informant relates that female secondary school students used to show up on the street in Göteborg in May-June after the end of the school year. He believes the law has reduced this and other types of new recruitment of young women, but has opened a door to pimps of foreign women who are in Sweden temporarily. While, according to the same informant, Swedish-born women do not remain in street prostitution for long nowadays, migrant women from e.g., Poland, tend to linger."
This is telling us that many sex workers left street prostitution but not prostitution. The remaining ones were 'in an uproar'. I think something is lost in translation here: it seems that they were highly distressed and traumatised. In Ireland in 1993 a new law produced 'an inordinate level of suffering' according to Rachel Moran: the 1999 Swedish law has done the same. Some women go onto the streets and leave quickly with phone numbers (they are less likely to be counted). Others are more reliant on pimps.
"If you are working for yourself, you cannot adequately assess a man down the phone-line, and if you are working for someone else, you do not even have the chance to try." Paid For by Rachel Moran.
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