A few posts ago I wrote about the arrests of women in Nordic model Ireland. Now there is proof that the Nordic model harms women but has little effect on pimps or punters. This is from The Irish News.
These figures are from 2009 onwards whereas the Nordic model started in 2017 in Ireland. However, nothing has changed since 2017 in Ireland in terms of women getting arrested except that the penalties for brothel keeping were doubled. So these figures present a picture of what is happening in Ireland today. We know about women who have been convicted since 2017.
They should do a gender impact assessment for the 2017 Criminal Law Sexual Offences Act. It seems many women have been jailed or fined, mostly young women. One man has been fined for paying for sex. There will have been a few men who have been convicted of pimping. I know that it's no excuse to not know the law, but this is the first law where the state has lied about what is legal. People have been told that in Ireland prostitutes have been decriminalised. It's so unfair: they should release all the young women now.
Gunilla Ekberg, a prominent supporter of the Nordic model, said 'if you criminalise women your are in a situation where victims are penalised. It is in violation of international law'. She doesn't understand that prostitutes get arrested in Sweden just as she doesn't understand that the studies she praises showed an increase in active sex buyers after the law was introduced. 'In mid-November 2008 when a new research study was published, the number of purchasers or buyers was down to 8%. This is a good and trust worthy study -- solid, strong, and empirical.' It was a good study - but it showed an increase in 'purchasers or buyers' (active sex buyers) from 1.3% to 1.8%.
A survivor of the Magdalene laundries has been awarded an undisclosed five-figure settlement after she was forced to work unpaid for almost six years. This laundry was run by the Good Shepherd Sisters. They now help to run Ruhama, who campaigned to get the 2017 Criminal Law Sexual Offences Act which is causing all the problems. Why did the Irish state give them so much power then and now?
Also in the newspapers recently is the latest attempt to bring this cruel and hypocritical system to Britain. The Conservative Party Human Rights Commission has brought out a report The Limits of Consent. The chair of this commission is Fiona Bruce MP and she has announced her intention in Parliament to submit a bill to “end demand for prostitution”. Fiona Bruce is an Evangelical Alliance council member and sits on the All Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group. She has voted against allowing same sex couples to marry.
Dozens of academics and experts have criticised the report and issued an open letter. In Bruce's report it states: "Sweden established a ‘neoabolitionist’ approach in 1999 in which the provision of sexual services was decriminalised while the purchase was criminalised". So the young women who have been convicted and deported have been decriminalised? I don't think so.
Let me give you a taste of the sort of thing the report says:-
Like so many of the prohibitionists they use the prevalence rate instead of the incidence rate that they should be using. The prevalence rate is a drop from 13.6% to 8% between 1996 and 2008. The incidence rate is an increase from 1.3% to 1.8% in the same years. I have dealt with this issue in detail here.
The 2010 report they refer to is the Skarhed report which does NOT say that the number of persons in prostitution has halved and does not prove that they had not been displaced. It said that there has been an apparent reduction in street prostitution by half. Not prostitution in general. Street prostitutes have always been a small fraction of prostitutes in general. The report says that as far as it can tell there has been no increase in prostitution in Sweden: it does not claim a reduction.
The Skarhed report does not say they know that street prostitutes have not started working indoors. What it does say is "Nor is there any information that suggests that prostitutes formerly exploited on the streets are now involved in indoor prostitution". So they just don't know. It does say though that there has been an increase in internet contacts and advertisements in magazines.
If the Skarhed report had said "Nor is there any hard data that proves that prostitutes formerly exploited on the streets are now involved in indoor prostitution" that would have been true. But there is plenty of information that suggests that they are.
I have written a lot more about this report in this page here.
Another thing in the news that irritated me is an article that states: “Studies show anywhere from 50 to 90 per cent of women who end up in the sex industry were sexually abused as children”. This is false. It does seem that between 50 and 90 percent of children who were victims of child sex trafficking had been involved with child welfare services.
The article was “Forgotten Women: How girls get swept into the sex industry – and how they can get out of it” by Lucy Anna Gray in The Independent. It seems that the Nordic model can only exist because of lies. There are two sides to this argument, but only one side relies on false statistics.
New research by UglyMugs, a sex worker advocacy service, taken from CSO statistics and media reporting of brothel keeping since 2009, found that young migrant women are the people most likely to be convicted of the offence.So I was correct in my suspicion that most people who are criminalised under the Nordic model are young women. They are not only imprisoned but also deported. The prohibitionists are telling lies when they say they believe that prostitutes should be decriminalised. These young women have had their lives ruined by conviction, deportation and being named in the media.
The results show that the vast majority (85%) of those convicted of brothel keeping are female and most are aged 18-24 (30%) or 25-44 (59%).
All of the sex workers convicted appear to have been non-nationals, and in 22 of 82 of the cases (27%) it was stated that one or more of the sex workers being prosecuted was a mother.
In various cases it was also highlighted that a sex worker was supporting other family members.
In 79 of the 82 cases (96%) it appears the sex worker(s) pleaded guilty, which has stoked concern that sex workers are not availing of their right to have a solicitor present when being questioned. In two of the cases it was found the sex workers did not even have any legal representation in court.
In 42 (51%) of the 82 cases examined the sex worker(s) voluntarily pledged to leave the jurisdiction, or the judge ordered them to do so.
A total of 148 of the 165 individuals (90%) in the cases were named in the media.
These figures are from 2009 onwards whereas the Nordic model started in 2017 in Ireland. However, nothing has changed since 2017 in Ireland in terms of women getting arrested except that the penalties for brothel keeping were doubled. So these figures present a picture of what is happening in Ireland today. We know about women who have been convicted since 2017.
They should do a gender impact assessment for the 2017 Criminal Law Sexual Offences Act. It seems many women have been jailed or fined, mostly young women. One man has been fined for paying for sex. There will have been a few men who have been convicted of pimping. I know that it's no excuse to not know the law, but this is the first law where the state has lied about what is legal. People have been told that in Ireland prostitutes have been decriminalised. It's so unfair: they should release all the young women now.
Gunilla Ekberg, a prominent supporter of the Nordic model, said 'if you criminalise women your are in a situation where victims are penalised. It is in violation of international law'. She doesn't understand that prostitutes get arrested in Sweden just as she doesn't understand that the studies she praises showed an increase in active sex buyers after the law was introduced. 'In mid-November 2008 when a new research study was published, the number of purchasers or buyers was down to 8%. This is a good and trust worthy study -- solid, strong, and empirical.' It was a good study - but it showed an increase in 'purchasers or buyers' (active sex buyers) from 1.3% to 1.8%.
A survivor of the Magdalene laundries has been awarded an undisclosed five-figure settlement after she was forced to work unpaid for almost six years. This laundry was run by the Good Shepherd Sisters. They now help to run Ruhama, who campaigned to get the 2017 Criminal Law Sexual Offences Act which is causing all the problems. Why did the Irish state give them so much power then and now?
Also in the newspapers recently is the latest attempt to bring this cruel and hypocritical system to Britain. The Conservative Party Human Rights Commission has brought out a report The Limits of Consent. The chair of this commission is Fiona Bruce MP and she has announced her intention in Parliament to submit a bill to “end demand for prostitution”. Fiona Bruce is an Evangelical Alliance council member and sits on the All Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group. She has voted against allowing same sex couples to marry.
Dozens of academics and experts have criticised the report and issued an open letter. In Bruce's report it states: "Sweden established a ‘neoabolitionist’ approach in 1999 in which the provision of sexual services was decriminalised while the purchase was criminalised". So the young women who have been convicted and deported have been decriminalised? I don't think so.
Let me give you a taste of the sort of thing the report says:-
Surveys in Sweden show a reduction in the number of men reporting that they had ever purchased sexual services from 13.6% in 1996 (before the law against purchase was introduced in 1999), to 8% in 2008 and 7.5% in 2014. Several submissions reported that the industry did not shrink with the law change but moved online and indoors. However, a 2010 report by the Swedish Chancellor of Justice concluded that the number of persons in prostitution had halved overall and not just been displaced into off-street locations.They are hiding the fact that the same surveys showed an increase is active sex buyers from 1.3% in 1996 to 1.8% in 2008. Hiding the fact that the number of men reporting that they had ever purchased sexual services increased from 8% in 2008 to over 10% in 2011, and that Swedish criminologists have said that the 13.6% to 8% drop is statistically impossible. All the other metrics of demand that increased: number of people selling sex, number of women selling sex, number of schoolgirls and young women selling sex.
Like so many of the prohibitionists they use the prevalence rate instead of the incidence rate that they should be using. The prevalence rate is a drop from 13.6% to 8% between 1996 and 2008. The incidence rate is an increase from 1.3% to 1.8% in the same years. I have dealt with this issue in detail here.
The 2010 report they refer to is the Skarhed report which does NOT say that the number of persons in prostitution has halved and does not prove that they had not been displaced. It said that there has been an apparent reduction in street prostitution by half. Not prostitution in general. Street prostitutes have always been a small fraction of prostitutes in general. The report says that as far as it can tell there has been no increase in prostitution in Sweden: it does not claim a reduction.
The Skarhed report does not say they know that street prostitutes have not started working indoors. What it does say is "Nor is there any information that suggests that prostitutes formerly exploited on the streets are now involved in indoor prostitution". So they just don't know. It does say though that there has been an increase in internet contacts and advertisements in magazines.
If the Skarhed report had said "Nor is there any hard data that proves that prostitutes formerly exploited on the streets are now involved in indoor prostitution" that would have been true. But there is plenty of information that suggests that they are.
I have written a lot more about this report in this page here.
Another thing in the news that irritated me is an article that states: “Studies show anywhere from 50 to 90 per cent of women who end up in the sex industry were sexually abused as children”. This is false. It does seem that between 50 and 90 percent of children who were victims of child sex trafficking had been involved with child welfare services.
The article was “Forgotten Women: How girls get swept into the sex industry – and how they can get out of it” by Lucy Anna Gray in The Independent. It seems that the Nordic model can only exist because of lies. There are two sides to this argument, but only one side relies on false statistics.
