Ash Regan's bill and evidence from France

Ash Regan's bill has been rejected by Scottish MSPs. So now there is no chance of having the Nordic Model in Scotland for the foreseeable future, not that there was much chance to begin with. I have been finding out what she has been telling people, and this document shows it more than any other that I have found. It is a transcript of a committee meeting from late last year.

"We can look at Sweden. After the buyers were criminalised, the share of men paying for sex fell by almost half, and Sweden now has one of the smallest prostitution markets in Europe."

This is not true. She may be referring to the surveys in Sweden that showed a drop from 12.7% to 7.6% between 1996 and 2008 in the proportion of Swedish men who had paid for sex at some time in their life (not 'men paying for sex'). Or she may be referring to the drop in the number of street-based sex workers. I have dealt with this extensively on other parts of this blog so I won't go over it again.

There is something new that I wish to talk about. Many people are saying that the reason why the Nordic Model failed in Ireland, both North and South, is because of lack of enforcement. Ash Regan has been telling people that France is different, France has enforced the law and it is working there.

"Other countries are not having trouble with enforcement. The latest statistics that I saw from France, which has not had the law in place for nearly as long as Sweden has, show that it has convicted 5,000 men. I know that France is a large country in comparison with Ireland and Scotland, so the context is different, but it shows us that enforcement of these offences is possible."

Again this is not true. There may have been thousands of fines but there haven't been thousands of convictions. If a man pays the on‑the‑spot fine there is no conviction. If a man doesn't pay the fine he often gets away with it. Many buyers simply ignore the notice. Enforcement agencies often lack the resources to chase non‑payment.

Then there is the question of increased violence against sex workers in France since the Nordic Model was introduced in 2016. It does look as if violence has increased. Ten sex workers were murdered in France in 2019. All of them were street-based sex workers (working on the street or in a park but not indoors), even though outdoor sex workers are a small minority of all sex workers.

It seems that the police in France have been going after men in Paris who pay for sex with street-based sex workers, leaving the men who pay for sex with indoor sex workers untouched. In any country, street based sex workers are only between 10% and 20% of sex workers.

"Most of the arrests take place in the public space (and not online) within the scope of street prostitution."

It seems that women are being forced off the streets and into flats. This is what happened in Ireland in 1993. I don't like street prostitution, I don't have anything to do with that, so I would not get arrested in France especially outside of Paris. The one advantage of street-based sex work and the reason why some women chose it is independence.

Before 1993 in Ireland there were many street-based sex workers. They were nearly always independent. When they were forced to work indoors many of them needed pimps. If they couldn't afford to rent a flat or to advertise they had to go to work for a pimp who could. So the 1993 law increased the number of pimps in Ireland.

You can read about this in Rachel Moran's book Paid For and in the research done in the 1990s by Ann Marie O'Connor and her colleagues. What you can't read in the book or the research is anything like 'They lose most of their earnings to the pimp who is controlling them and become addicted to mind-numbing substances simply to endure the disassociation and develop complex post-traumatic stress disorder'. Or any of the other unrealities of prostitution outlined by MSP Michelle Thomson in the last few days in this debate.

I believe that this happened in Sweden in 1999, was made worse in Ireland in 2017, and would happen in Scotland too if Ash Regan managed to get her way. The pimps are benefitting from the Nordic Model. Pimps like it when women can't be independent.

I don't want to see more pimping. I want to see more women working without pimps, working together for safety, making the rules for themselves and keeping the profits for themselves. That can't happen with the Nordic Model, the only way it can happen is with decriminalisation. Or just stop arresting young women for 'brothel-keeping': you'd think that we could all agree on that.

"These fines "are very unevenly distributed across the territory," notes the Observatory led by the Interministerial Mission for the Protection of Women against Violence and the Fight against Human Trafficking (Miprof). A majority of them (58%) were issued in Paris, while over the same period no fines were recorded in 36 departments, he said.

For the secretary general of Miprof, Roxana Maracineanu, "it is clear that the victims of "prostitutional violence" are "still largely invisible, going under the radar of the security forces and the public authorities in general"."

Pimping is spreading over the Internet, as it says below. Prostitution of minors is on the increase.

"However, in some parts of France, the law continues to be only partially implemented: the criminalisation of 'clients' remains largely inadequate and too heterogeneous across the country, and pimping is spreading over the Internet."

"The digitalisation of the prostitution system goes hand in hand with the increasing digitalisation of society. As a result, the victims of prostitution are increasingly invisible, as are the "clients" and the pimps. All stages of prostitution are now dematerialised: recruitment of victims on social networks, advertisements published on specialised platforms, appointments arranged by SMS and encrypted messages, etc. This new reality is forcing associations working in the field to adapt by developing digital outreach services. At the same time, while France ranks as the 2nd country in the world in terms of pornography consumption, FACT-S observes that pornography has become the most commonplace and violent form of online prostitution."