The purpose of this page is to show that the Nordic Model isn't what people think it is. I will give all of the evidence to show that sex workers in Sweden and elsewhere are arrested, evicted, deported and have their children taken away. This is a response to a particular feminist web article Remembering the murdered women erased by the pro-sex work agenda written by Penny White in 2015.
The article states "Sweden has adopted the Nordic Model, which decriminalizes women like Jasmine, but continues to criminalize pimps and johns" and tries to show that sex workers are safer in Sweden than in New Zealand. Originally the article said that Petite Jasmine had lost custody of her children because she was selling sex. Then it was edited to say that the real reason was because of an accusation made that Jasmine was drinking and using drugs.
There were many comments made on this article, but they petered out about 2 years ago. There was one by someone called Annie about 8 months ago then another by Zenitha Smith Westberg, who was the mother of Petite Jasmine (real name Eva-Marree Kullander Smith). Zenitha was annoyed that the article was suggesting that her daughter had been drinking and taking drugs. She stated that you can't take someone's children away because of an unsubstantiated accusation of drinking and taking drugs, contradicting what the article is saying and what Julie Bindel has said in her new book.
I made a comment on the article, which I have copied-and-pasted below. I used the name Pyramus.
This is my reply to that.
Her reply was to state that "The number of men who pay for sex went from 1 in 8 to 1 in 13. That demonstrates the law has had an impact.". Someone else gave a link to two articles, one of which was from the Vancouver Sun where apparently their statistic comes from. The statistic is wrong though.
The origin of the part of the statistic seems to be Prostitution in Sweden 2014 The extent and development of prostitution in Sweden.
The figure for men who have bought sex in the past year is 0.8 percent, which is the figure that should be used if we want to know if the number men paying for sex has increased or decreased. The text says that this figure of 0.8% is 'relatively constant over time'.
There was a 1996 study by Månsson that showed a figure of 13.6 percent (about 1 in 7) for men who have paid for sex at some time in their lives. This seems to be where the other part of the statistic comes from. This study also says that it was more common to buy sex abroad than in Sweden, another reason why it doesn't seem to be of much use in telling us how much prostitution there is in Sweden.
The only way that the figure could go from 13.6% to 7.5% is when men become over 74 and so no longer show up in the surveys. Or they are not being honest. When you consider that 0.7% of men said that they have sold sex in 2014 but no women said they have sold sex, someone is not being entirely honest in answering the survey. It doesn't make sense.
Just as odd is the fact that between 1996 and 2008 the number of men who said they had paid for sex in the last year went UP (1.3% to 1.8%) and yet the number of men who said they had paid for sex at some time in their lives went DOWN (13.6% to 7.9%). The new law was introduced in 1999. This doesn't make any sense. Also, between 2008 and 2014 the number of men who said they had paid for sex in the last year decreased by a whole percentage point (1.8% to 0.8%) but the number of men who said they had paid for sex at some time in their life hardly changed at all (7.9% to 7.5%).
A man who was 18 years of age in 1942 would have been 72 in 1996, the time of the first survey. He would have been young enough to participate in the 1996 survey, which was for men between 18 and 74. He would have been 84 years old in 2008, too old to participate in that year's survey. Sweden was a non-combatant in World War 2, but Swedish men were conscripted into the Swedish armed forces. If there was a culture of paying for sex in the war, then the high 13.6% figure for men who have paid for sex at some time in their lives is because of that. The drop from 13.6% to 7.9% is nothing to do with the new 1999 law punishing men for paying for sex, but because conscripts who paid for sex in the war became too old to participate in the second survey. This seems to be the only explanation that is consistent with the rise in the number of active sex buyers between 1996 and 2008.
If you believe the statistics then there was a drop from 1 in 7 to 1 in 13 early on (1996 to 2008) then hardly any change after that. It's not really believable, but in any case it's the statistics for the men who say they have paid for sex within the past year (active buyers) that is the important one. It shows a small change, but that is likely to be a statistical blip.
According to this site the figures cannot be true. And yet they are often used, as they were by MP Sarah Champion in a debate in the House of Commons.
The next section is evidence that women in Sweden are punished for being prostitutes, from "Why Amnesty International Is Calling for Decriminalizing Sex Work" in NY Times.
This article explains that in Norway women are evicted and deported. The same is true for Sweden. Amnesty International think this should not be happening. Julie Bindel and other radical feminists think that Amnesty International have got it wrong though and blame the influence of Douglas Fox. Douglas Fox is described as a 'pimp' and may or may not have got the ball rolling when it came to Amnesty's investigation of the Nordic model. However, he was never high up in Amnesty, and Amnesty did not fabricate the evidence against the Norwegian police. They care about human rights abuses and decided to investigate, without believing what we're all being told by governments.
In Julie's new book The Pimping of Prostitution she also writes about Peter McCormick, another 'pimp', who 'funded the campaign opposing the introduction of the Nordic model in Ireland'. Well, he doesn't seem to have had much influence, considering that the Nordic model was adopted in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
If it's sinister influences you want to talk about, let's talk about 'Mr Wells'. Julie quotes him at length in her book, as does Kat Banyard in her book, without either of them revealing that Mr Wells in Jim Wells, the Protestant politician in Northern Ireland who later lost his job because of homophobic comments ('his Christian faith helped him after he lost his job following remarks about gay couples'). Now he is comparing abortion to the holocaust. Julie doesn't even have an entry for him in the index of her book.
Kat quotes his 127 statistic, but Julie doesn't; presumably she knows it's false. He said that 127 prostitutes in the Netherlands were killed since decriminalization, when actually most of that number were killed in the 15 years before decriminalization, not the 15 after. He was trying to show that the Nordic model saves lives when there's no evidence for that.
So here we have a religious bigot using false statistics and emotional blackmail to get a law passed where the first man who is arrested is arrested along with three women. "Three females were also arrested and interviewed for keeping a brothel" as it said in the Guardian. That means three prostitutes who tried to work together for safety treated like pimps. Yet Julie was on Woman's Hour recently saying "They shouldn't be arrested - ever".
In the words of a Swedish prostitute "In addition, the pimping laws force us to work alone. It’s also illegal to rent out premises to us. Many work from home, and if the landlord finds out, he is forced to evict you. So they want to save us, but they punish us until we are willing to be saved. And if we say we want to be 'saved', all they offer is therapy." I think that sums it up.
The Swedish and Norwegian governments have a carrot-and-stick approach to prostitutes, a big stick (eviction, deportation, child custody problems and arrest) and a small carrot. ‘Pimps’ are the women themselves if they choose to work together, or their landlords if they choose not to evict them.
When it comes to eviction, the police contact the landlord of a suspected prostitute. They tell him or her that he or she is living off immoral earnings but that they will let him or her off if he or she evicts their tenant. The landlord is treated as a potential pimp.
When it comes to arrests, if two or more women choose to work together for safety they can be arrested using pimping laws. The prostitutes themselves are treated as pimps. This happens in Britain too - 'keeping a brothel'. The introduction of the Nordic model in Northern Ireland hasn't changed that, despite what Julie Bindel says on Woman's Hour.
When it comes to having your children taken away, the police can't just come in and take your children away. There has to be a custody dispute. They can't take your children away because of an unsubstantiated accusation of drinking or drug taking. The Swedish law needs more than that. Petite Jasmine didn't have her children taken away because of an accusation of drinking and drug taking. (I call her Petite Jasmine rather than Eva-Marree because she was a blogger and that was the name she apparently used on her blog.) So why did she have her children handed over to their violent father? Because she was an unrepentant prostitute. There's no other reason than that. That's why she's dead.
There's a very good book about prostitution which has a chapter on Sweden and other countries. They are saying much the same thing as I have said here but much more. The book is called Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights by Juno Mac and Molly Smith.
The main documents which show what has happened in Sweden are the 2010 Skarhed report, which doesn't claim a drop in the number of prostitutes overall or a drop in demand. There is the 2007 report by The National Board of Health and Welfare. Then there are the results of the surveys in 1996, 2007, 2011 and 2014. It is important to remember that there are two different sets of statistics in the surveys, that for active sex buyers (men who report that they have paid for sex in the previous 12 months) and that for men who have paid for sex at some time in their lives. One of these can go up as the other goes down - as indeed is the case. That might seem strange but there are explanations for that, and it is the number of active sex buyers that is the more important of the two and the only one that should be used to determine if demand has increased or decreased.
Another good site is this one. The Swedish Sex Purchase Act: Claimed success and documented effects. Many important points are made for example 'According to social workers interviewed by the National Council for Crime Prevention it has become more difficult to count the number of sex workers, since they have moved to side streets and cover a larger area than before.'
For a more complete list of the various reports on the success of the Nordic model go to this page.
The article states "Sweden has adopted the Nordic Model, which decriminalizes women like Jasmine, but continues to criminalize pimps and johns" and tries to show that sex workers are safer in Sweden than in New Zealand. Originally the article said that Petite Jasmine had lost custody of her children because she was selling sex. Then it was edited to say that the real reason was because of an accusation made that Jasmine was drinking and using drugs.
There were many comments made on this article, but they petered out about 2 years ago. There was one by someone called Annie about 8 months ago then another by Zenitha Smith Westberg, who was the mother of Petite Jasmine (real name Eva-Marree Kullander Smith). Zenitha was annoyed that the article was suggesting that her daughter had been drinking and taking drugs. She stated that you can't take someone's children away because of an unsubstantiated accusation of drinking and taking drugs, contradicting what the article is saying and what Julie Bindel has said in her new book.
I made a comment on the article, which I have copied-and-pasted below. I used the name Pyramus.
This article tries to prove 4 things. 1 The number of murders of prostitutes increases when decriminalization is introduced 2 The number of murders of prostitutes decreases when the Nordic system is introduced 3 The amount of prostitution substantially decreases when the Nordic system is introduced (hence the reduction in murders) and 4 in countries using the Nordic system prostitutes are treated humanely. The article doesn't prove the first two. You would need to compare numbers of murders in a country before and after a change in the system, not compare two countries eg Sweden and the Netherlands or New Zealand. There were no murders of prostitutes in Sweden for many years before the introduction of the new law, we have no reason to believe that murders have increased in number in either the Netherlands or New Zealand or anywhere else.
There is just as much prostitution in Sweden today as there has always been. There might have been a reduction in street prostitution to begin with but they were a minority and it's gone back up. Prostitutes in Sweden are regularly evicted from their homes, deported or have their children taken away. Taken away because they are unrepentant prostitutes, not because of drink or drugs. Prostitutes are not treated humanely in Sweden. They can also be arrested if they try to work together for safety, using anti-pimping laws, as happens in the UK.Someone called Meghan Murphy, who is the editor of the site where this article appeared, quoted the second paragraph of my comment and replied to it "These statements are not true.".
This is my reply to that.
Let's take each statement in turn. First, the question of how much prostitution there is in Sweden now. From Selling Sex in Sweden An Analysis of Discourses about Sex Workers and their Human Rights by Katie Sophie Gonser:
"The National Board for Health and Welfare concludes that the consequences of the ban are equivocal; as such it concludes in its report (2008: 63) thusly:
[H]as the extent of prostitution increased or decreased? We cannot giveany unambiguous answer to that question. At most, we can discern that street prostitution is slowly returning, after swiftly disappearing in the wake of the law against purchasing sexual services. But as said, that refers to street prostitution, which is the most obvious manifestation. With regard to increases and decreases in other areas of prostitution – the “hidden prostitution” – we are even less able to make any statements."
National Board of Health and Welfare,. Prostitution In Sweden 2007. Socialstyrelsen, 2008. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.
Her reply was to state that "The number of men who pay for sex went from 1 in 8 to 1 in 13. That demonstrates the law has had an impact.". Someone else gave a link to two articles, one of which was from the Vancouver Sun where apparently their statistic comes from. The statistic is wrong though.
The origin of the part of the statistic seems to be Prostitution in Sweden 2014 The extent and development of prostitution in Sweden.
According to the latest population survey in 2014, the proportion of individuals in Sweden who have bought and sold sexual services is relatively constant over time. Those who have stated that they have bought sexual services are exclusively men. Approximately 7.5 percent of Swedish men between 18 and 65 years of age have bought sexual services at some point in their lives, which is a low figure compared to other Nordic and European countries. The proportion of Swedish men who have stated that they have bought sexual services during this past year is 0.8 percent, a figure which is also relatively constant over time. KAST, units in the three largest cities in Sweden carrying out programmes targeting buyers of sexual services also report that they encounter men solely. In the latest population study carried out in 2014, 0.7 percent stated that they had sold sexual services at some point. Only men have stated this, which is line with previous surveys where a larger share of men stated that they had had experience of selling sexual services, compared to women.I have emboldened the most important points. The question that was asked in the survey was not 'do you pay for sex?' but 'have you, at any point in your life, paid for sex?'. This is men between 18 and 74 years old. The figure for that is 7.5 percent, which is where the 1 in 13 statistic comes from. A 60 year old Swedish man who paid for sex when he was 20 would answer yes to the survey question, even if it was abroad.
The figure for men who have bought sex in the past year is 0.8 percent, which is the figure that should be used if we want to know if the number men paying for sex has increased or decreased. The text says that this figure of 0.8% is 'relatively constant over time'.
There was a 1996 study by Månsson that showed a figure of 13.6 percent (about 1 in 7) for men who have paid for sex at some time in their lives. This seems to be where the other part of the statistic comes from. This study also says that it was more common to buy sex abroad than in Sweden, another reason why it doesn't seem to be of much use in telling us how much prostitution there is in Sweden.
The only way that the figure could go from 13.6% to 7.5% is when men become over 74 and so no longer show up in the surveys. Or they are not being honest. When you consider that 0.7% of men said that they have sold sex in 2014 but no women said they have sold sex, someone is not being entirely honest in answering the survey. It doesn't make sense.
Just as odd is the fact that between 1996 and 2008 the number of men who said they had paid for sex in the last year went UP (1.3% to 1.8%) and yet the number of men who said they had paid for sex at some time in their lives went DOWN (13.6% to 7.9%). The new law was introduced in 1999. This doesn't make any sense. Also, between 2008 and 2014 the number of men who said they had paid for sex in the last year decreased by a whole percentage point (1.8% to 0.8%) but the number of men who said they had paid for sex at some time in their life hardly changed at all (7.9% to 7.5%).
A man who was 18 years of age in 1942 would have been 72 in 1996, the time of the first survey. He would have been young enough to participate in the 1996 survey, which was for men between 18 and 74. He would have been 84 years old in 2008, too old to participate in that year's survey. Sweden was a non-combatant in World War 2, but Swedish men were conscripted into the Swedish armed forces. If there was a culture of paying for sex in the war, then the high 13.6% figure for men who have paid for sex at some time in their lives is because of that. The drop from 13.6% to 7.9% is nothing to do with the new 1999 law punishing men for paying for sex, but because conscripts who paid for sex in the war became too old to participate in the second survey. This seems to be the only explanation that is consistent with the rise in the number of active sex buyers between 1996 and 2008.
If you believe the statistics then there was a drop from 1 in 7 to 1 in 13 early on (1996 to 2008) then hardly any change after that. It's not really believable, but in any case it's the statistics for the men who say they have paid for sex within the past year (active buyers) that is the important one. It shows a small change, but that is likely to be a statistical blip.
According to this site the figures cannot be true. And yet they are often used, as they were by MP Sarah Champion in a debate in the House of Commons.
The criminologists at Stockholm University write in their response to the official evaluation that figures from surveys do not tell us anything about what is going on in reality, as opposed to what people say. They also show why the above-mentioned figures cannot be correct. If the responses are to be considered representative, then all men who answered “yes” to having ever purchased sex in 1996 should have also been represented in the 2008 survey (with the exception of the twelve oldest age groups) and would still have answered “yes” if they were answering truthfully. Even if no one bought sex after the Sex Purchase Act came into force, such a major decrease in the prevalence of buying sex amongst men simply cannot be achieved in that time.The statistics come from Evidence Assessment of the Impacts of the Criminalisation of the Purchase of Sex: A Review.
The next section is evidence that women in Sweden are punished for being prostitutes, from "Why Amnesty International Is Calling for Decriminalizing Sex Work" in NY Times.
Norway adopted the Nordic model in 2009 (following Sweden, which did so in 1999). Amnesty’s researchers spoke to 54 people in Norway, including police officers, prosecutors, academics, social science providers and 30 sex workers, including three victims of trafficking. (Many of the other sex workers said they sold sex because of economic hardship. Recognizing this, Amnesty also called for broader access to education and other employment.) Amnesty’s basic finding is that Norway’s laws punish people who sell sex — not through arrest but in a variety of other ways. One researcher told Amnesty that police forces in Oslo “often use terms like they are going to ‘crush’ or ‘choke’ the [prostitution] market, and unsettle, pressure and stress the people in the market.” Or as an expert adviser to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security put it: “It comes back to the question of ‘is it a problem that people in prostitution are in trouble.’ No one has said at a political level that we want prostitutes to have a good time while we also try to stamp out prostitution.”
In Norway, women engaging in sex work are evicted from their homes and also deported, according to Amnesty. If the police find condoms, by searching someone who is carrying them, they consider them evidence of criminal activity. Sex workers remain “at high risk of violence and abuse” but rarely turn to the police. A 2012 study found that only 16 percent of 123 women reported receiving help from the police after a violent incident. One sex worker told Amnesty: “If a customer is bad, you need to manage it yourself to the end. You only call the police if you think you’re going to die. If you call the police, you risk losing everything.
This article explains that in Norway women are evicted and deported. The same is true for Sweden. Amnesty International think this should not be happening. Julie Bindel and other radical feminists think that Amnesty International have got it wrong though and blame the influence of Douglas Fox. Douglas Fox is described as a 'pimp' and may or may not have got the ball rolling when it came to Amnesty's investigation of the Nordic model. However, he was never high up in Amnesty, and Amnesty did not fabricate the evidence against the Norwegian police. They care about human rights abuses and decided to investigate, without believing what we're all being told by governments.
In Julie's new book The Pimping of Prostitution she also writes about Peter McCormick, another 'pimp', who 'funded the campaign opposing the introduction of the Nordic model in Ireland'. Well, he doesn't seem to have had much influence, considering that the Nordic model was adopted in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
If it's sinister influences you want to talk about, let's talk about 'Mr Wells'. Julie quotes him at length in her book, as does Kat Banyard in her book, without either of them revealing that Mr Wells in Jim Wells, the Protestant politician in Northern Ireland who later lost his job because of homophobic comments ('his Christian faith helped him after he lost his job following remarks about gay couples'). Now he is comparing abortion to the holocaust. Julie doesn't even have an entry for him in the index of her book.
Kat quotes his 127 statistic, but Julie doesn't; presumably she knows it's false. He said that 127 prostitutes in the Netherlands were killed since decriminalization, when actually most of that number were killed in the 15 years before decriminalization, not the 15 after. He was trying to show that the Nordic model saves lives when there's no evidence for that.
So here we have a religious bigot using false statistics and emotional blackmail to get a law passed where the first man who is arrested is arrested along with three women. "Three females were also arrested and interviewed for keeping a brothel" as it said in the Guardian. That means three prostitutes who tried to work together for safety treated like pimps. Yet Julie was on Woman's Hour recently saying "They shouldn't be arrested - ever".
In the words of a Swedish prostitute "In addition, the pimping laws force us to work alone. It’s also illegal to rent out premises to us. Many work from home, and if the landlord finds out, he is forced to evict you. So they want to save us, but they punish us until we are willing to be saved. And if we say we want to be 'saved', all they offer is therapy." I think that sums it up.
The Swedish and Norwegian governments have a carrot-and-stick approach to prostitutes, a big stick (eviction, deportation, child custody problems and arrest) and a small carrot. ‘Pimps’ are the women themselves if they choose to work together, or their landlords if they choose not to evict them.
When it comes to eviction, the police contact the landlord of a suspected prostitute. They tell him or her that he or she is living off immoral earnings but that they will let him or her off if he or she evicts their tenant. The landlord is treated as a potential pimp.
When it comes to arrests, if two or more women choose to work together for safety they can be arrested using pimping laws. The prostitutes themselves are treated as pimps. This happens in Britain too - 'keeping a brothel'. The introduction of the Nordic model in Northern Ireland hasn't changed that, despite what Julie Bindel says on Woman's Hour.
When it comes to having your children taken away, the police can't just come in and take your children away. There has to be a custody dispute. They can't take your children away because of an unsubstantiated accusation of drinking or drug taking. The Swedish law needs more than that. Petite Jasmine didn't have her children taken away because of an accusation of drinking and drug taking. (I call her Petite Jasmine rather than Eva-Marree because she was a blogger and that was the name she apparently used on her blog.) So why did she have her children handed over to their violent father? Because she was an unrepentant prostitute. There's no other reason than that. That's why she's dead.
There's a very good book about prostitution which has a chapter on Sweden and other countries. They are saying much the same thing as I have said here but much more. The book is called Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights by Juno Mac and Molly Smith.
The main documents which show what has happened in Sweden are the 2010 Skarhed report, which doesn't claim a drop in the number of prostitutes overall or a drop in demand. There is the 2007 report by The National Board of Health and Welfare. Then there are the results of the surveys in 1996, 2007, 2011 and 2014. It is important to remember that there are two different sets of statistics in the surveys, that for active sex buyers (men who report that they have paid for sex in the previous 12 months) and that for men who have paid for sex at some time in their lives. One of these can go up as the other goes down - as indeed is the case. That might seem strange but there are explanations for that, and it is the number of active sex buyers that is the more important of the two and the only one that should be used to determine if demand has increased or decreased.
Another good site is this one. The Swedish Sex Purchase Act: Claimed success and documented effects. Many important points are made for example 'According to social workers interviewed by the National Council for Crime Prevention it has become more difficult to count the number of sex workers, since they have moved to side streets and cover a larger area than before.'
For a more complete list of the various reports on the success of the Nordic model go to this page.
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