One of the reasons why some people think that the amount of prostitution has decreased in Sweden since the introduction of the 1999 law is that there is a statistic that says that in 2008 there were 600 female prostitutes in Sweden. This is compared with a 1995 estimate of 2,500 to 3,000 prostitutes in Sweden.
The 600 statistic comes from Charlotta Holmström, a Swedish academic. However, it is quite clear that she did not mean that the total number of prostitutes was 600. She wrote that there seems to be 300 women involved in street prostitution, and they have found 300 who advertise on the Internet. The total number of prostitutes working indoors would be much higher than that though.
In 2008 she and her colleague May-Len Skilbrei reported this in 'Prostitution in the Nordic Countries'. The figure appeared in the 2010 Skarhed report. Anna Skarhed made it clear that the knowledge of 'people who offer sex in other arenas than on the street and the Internet' is very limited.
In 2017 Holmström and Skilbrei produced another report, 'The Swedish Sex Purchase Act: Where Does it Stand?'. There are many interesting facts within it. They ask a number of questions, has there been a reduction of the extent of prostitution, has there been a 'normative change', what is the impact on trafficking? Have there been unintended consequences such as changing where they work and social stigma and contact with authorities?
They start by looking at the 1996 study by Månsson and the 2008 study by Kuosmanen. They mention the supposed drop in the proportion of Swedish men who had bought sexual services at some time in their life. They don't seem to be aware of the increase in the proportion of Swedish men who had paid for sex in the previous twelve months. Neither are they aware of the proportion of Swedish women who had been paid for sex at some time in their life.
This wasn't mentioned in the 2010 Skarhed report either. How is it possible that Holmström, Skilbei and Skarhed were not aware of these important statistics that Mujaj and Netscher were aware of in their 2014 report?
Holmström and Skilbrei go on to mention the Kotsadam and Jakobsson study that says paying for sex is highest in Denmark and lowest in Sweden, with Norway between the two. The implication is that it is lowest in Sweden because of the law that bans paying for sex. I don't accept that: perhaps it has always been lower in Sweden (just as the murder of prostitutes has always been lower).
They next mention Stockholm Department of Criminology and the Swedish National Police Board who cast doubt on the idea of a decrease. The Department of Criminology pointed out that if you ask people in surveys if they have ever done something at any time in their life a rapid decline doesn't make sense statistically. For more about this see point 14 of this.
Below I have quoted what I think are the most important points of the 2017 Holmström and Skilbrei report.
"When the official Swedish evaluation [Skarhed 2010] of the Sex Purchase Act takes various figures at face value and claims a causal link between these and the law, this indicates an understanding of the law as working independently of other social processes, as if the rule of law operates directly upon the world."
"While the studies above indicate that vulnerability and risk-taking have increased, and that prostitution has moved to less safe arenas, the question remains as to whether this is due to the Sex Purchase Act or to other factors, including market developments. Some suggest that sellers’ decisions to move from street to online prostitution may have concurrent reasons, of which the Sex Purchase Act is only one. Edlund and Jakobsson argue, for example, that safety is not affected just by the Sex Purchase Act, but also by how the prohibition against procurement prevents people selling sex from working together, something which had served as a protection."
"As mentioned above, the evaluation [Skarhed 2010] of the Sex Purchase Act concluded that increased stigma linked to prostitution should be regarded as positive. The aim of the Act, however, was to combat prostitution by shifting the focus from seller to buyer. If the legislation has resulted in increased stigmatisation, reduced trust in authorities and fear of discrimination in encounters with police and welfare agencies, and this at the same time is considered a positive outcome, this does not work towards establishing such a shift. Instead this indicates that people who sell sex still bear the burden of being considered the problem in the realm of prostitution. Stigma, shaming and discrimination are experiences shared by people who sell sex in many different empirical contexts, often with very different legal regimes than that in Sweden."
"A second theme is the relationship between law and normative change. Studies of attitudes to prostitution before and after the enactment of the legislation indicate a change in attitudes to how prostitution should be approached legally. Public support for the criminalisation of buying sex is strong, but so is support for criminalising its sale. If the Swedish population unambiguously considers prostitution to be a form of violence the seller is a victim of, which is the argument behind the Sex Purchase Act, they would probably not support criminalisation of the seller. The normative change thus does not seem to be moving in the intended direction. The kind of instrument that law is in contemporary society is a subject for theorisation in several disciplines. Building on Foucault, Hunt emphasises that the law does not act on individuals in a straightforward way, but rather establishes particular acts as normal, not meaning ‘average’ or ‘typical’, but ‘ideal’, and is thus a normalising instrument. This is relevant to how the emphasis on law as the solution to the problem of prostitution can take part in normalising criminalisation per se, and can contribute to what is often conceptualised as ‘juridification’, as well as take part in the continued construction of women who sell sex as different from other women, as evidenced through the way the intentions behind the law were formulated.
The third theme is the link between prostitution and human trafficking. As described above, prostitution policies might affect the extent of sex trafficking. The data applied in empirical studies on this are highly contingent on national definitions of trafficking and the resources and competences of authorities. This poses methodological problems for attempts to analyse the effects of legislation. The assumption that lower demand for prostitution decreases trafficking is also conceptually flawed, as argued by Anderson and O’Connell Davidson. Trafficking is produced by a range of factors, and more policing of the prostitution market may very well also produce more trafficking, as it creates a market for brokers that sex sellers grow dependent on and are vulnerable to. This has political consequences. If Anderson and O’Connell Davidson are right, policy makers should be more concerned with whether prostitution policies create harsher conditions in prostitution that might make people more vulnerable to trafficking."
I shall summarize the important points made by Holmström and Skilbrei in the paragraphs above:-
- the official Swedish evaluation took some figures at face value
- it unreasonably claimed that the 1999 law was the cause of the change
- women are less safe now but there may be several reasons for that
- one reason is that women aren't allowed to work together for safety in Sweden
- the government thinks that stigma, shaming and discrimination will help to eliminate prostitution
- that's not shifting the burden from women to men, from sex workers to their clients
- are Swedish people sincere when they say sex workers are victims?
- if so why does the government wants stigma etc to continue?
- why do Swedish people want sex workers to be criminalized?
- that's not support for the Nordic model and it not a normative change
- we have no idea how much trafficking there is
- it is an unwarranted assumption to think that lower demand results in less trafficking
- sex workers in Sweden may well be more dependent now on pimps and traffickers
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