The Nordic Model is indefensible: A reply to Lechner’s ‘In defence of the Nordic Sex Purchase Act’

Kelly Rogers from Left Unity Youth and Students joins the debate. This article is written in response to an article by Brigitte Lechner from Stockport Left Unity, which can be found here.

In her article, Lechner advocates a legislative model, first adopted by Sweden in 1999 which criminalises sex workers; denies their ability to consent; and supports their incarceration and violent treatment by police, immigration authorities, landlords, and other state-run services. Sex workers are people who are, like the rest of us, trying to get by to the best of their ability. She backs up her argument by reference to an outdated, moralistic and, frankly, bleak attitude towards sex. I contend here that her defence of the Nordic model is anti-feminist, and flies in the face of some of the most basic principles of socialism.

Left Unity lacks any substantive policy on sex work. This is a failing that needs to be addressed in the coming conference, but we absolutely must not offer our support to the Swedish legislative model. Instead we should call for the full decriminalisation of sex work.

The Nordic Model

The Nordic model refers to the sex purchase law adopted by Sweden in 1999 (sexköpslagen). At its heart the purchase of sex is criminalised, and the selling of sex is, on paper, decriminalised.

In practice, however, the activity of sex workers remains criminalised under the Nordic model, and their working conditions become considerably more dangerous. As a result of the sexköpslagen sex workers have noted increasingly hurried negotiations with clients, especially among those who work on the street, as clients are unwilling to negotiate for long periods of time when they are at risk of arrest. Some clients buying sex online are more reluctant since 1999 to give sex workers identifying information, and untraceable clients leave sex workers all the more vulnerable to abuse. Furthermore, the sex purchase law and the drop in clients willing to buy sex publicly (not overall) has meant that competition has increased, prices have gone down and sex workers are often pressured to offer less safe sex and services. It remains illegal to provide premises for prostitution meaning landlords are obliged to evict sex workers or face prosecution themselves; police have been known to inform landlords that their tenants work in the industry and forcing the eviction. Sex workers working in groups or cohabiting for safety are criminalised for (or prevented from) doing so via pimping laws, laws prohibiting brothel-keeping, and laws against sharing the income of prostitution. Sex workers in Sweden have also reported losing custody over their children; harassment and abuse by the police; and migrant sex workers are detained and deported under the auspices of the prevention of trafficking.

The Swedish National Board has conceded that no causal connections can be proven between legislation and changes in prostitution. “It is… difficult to discern any clear trend of development: has the extent of prostitution increased or decreased? We cannot give any unambiguous answer to that question” (The National Board of Health and Welfare, 2008: 63. See Levy, 2012.) Instead, the sex industry has been pushed underground, to the detriment of those working.

Legalisation vs. decriminalisation

Under a legalised system, like that which exists in Germany and the Netherlands – which Lechner is right to criticise – sex work is legal only in certain zones or brothels, and sex workers have to register with the police. If they fail to do so, or work outside these zones, they break the law. The system of legal zones necessarily requires a network of state authorities, pimps, madams and maids, colluding to police sex workers and ensure that they only work in state-sanctioned areas, where sex workers work to the tune of the brothel-keeper.

The International Prostitutes Collective lists within its demands, the following:

No zones, no licensing, no legalised brothels which ghettoize sex workers; we oppose all forms of apartheid;

Autonomy and self-determination for prostitute women and other sex workers. Sex workers must decide how we want to work: we oppose any form of legalization which gives powers to police, local authorities, pimps, madams or other managers to regulate our wages and working conditions and censor what we demand so that they and those they work for can profit from our work

In 2003, the Prostitution Reform Act came into effect in New Zealand. Sex workers have the right to refuse any client, whether or not they have paid; managers/co-workers/etc. cannot coerce or compel a sex worker to accept a client in any way; and it is illegal to hire a sex worker who is under the age of 18. If a sex work wishes to leave the industry, unlike with other professions, they can go straight onto state benefit, without being sanctioned for ‘voluntary unemployment’. Sex workers do not have to register with the police, when previously they did. The sale of sex, the purchase of sex, and operating a brothel are all legal.

Two things are clear with respect to the New Zealand model: first, claims that the legislation aims to protect vulnerable people has been matched by consideration given to the risks posed by criminalisation and police interference. Second, they have largely turned away from a moralistic attitude towards sex work. Rather, the focus of New Zealand model has been to empower sex workers to organise their own working lives; making exit from industry easier that it was previously; and limiting criminalisation to trafficking, and the hiring/management of under-18 sex workers.

Sex, consent and agency

The Swedish purchase law is justified against a backdrop of radical feminism which constructs prostitution as a form of patriarchal violence against women and follows the theoretical perspective of MacKinnon, Dworkin, Farley, etc. It paints sex workers as disempowered, passive victims of violence, histories of abuse, and drug addiction, rather than agents.

Lechner’s view of consent is anchored in a very problematic notion of sex. She writes “sexuality is an important aspect of the human personality: our capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. These are commonly shared between two people engaged in a mutually loving relationship. Their sexual relationship becomes an expression of the fondness the partners feel for each other”. To define sex and sexuality in this way is ignorant of the many different ways and contexts in which people have consensual sex. Let’s consider for a moment someone who has regular casual sex with strangers because they enjoy it. Married couples who go to swingers’ clubs, because they find fucking someone else’s husband or wife a turn on. A long-term couple who particularly enjoy having threesomes, and who mutually negotiate and decide who they might approach. People who have long-term polyamorous relationships with multiple people, who they might love or might not. A woman who calls themselves feminist, and likes to be submissive in the bedroom because they’re assertive and politically ‘right on’ every other moment of their lives. Someone who pays to have sex because they find it sexy. Somebody who is paid to have sex because, for them, sex isn’t a precious, fragile thing that needs to be guarded jealously, but an act which they are willing to do in return for money and for the opportunity to manage one’s own working life. Lechner vilifies the male orgasm, which she places as at the root of the sex industry, but to do so she has to deny the female orgasm, which, according to her, is an impossibility outside ordinary, romantic sex.

Sex is a way of operating within a complicated world, where people embody manifold gender identities and sexualities, and have volatile, complex relationships with the people around them. So long as all parties consent to the sexual act, and their right to refuse or withdraw consent at any point is respected, then who are we to judge? That is a cornerstone of feminism: people have the absolute right to say “no” to sex. But this is a right that comes hand-in-hand with that to say “yes”. The definition of consent adopted by radical feminist proponents of the Swedish model is dangerous. If we’re telling sex workers that they cannot say yes, then what are the implications when they tell their friends, family, health care professionals or the police that they said no – that they were raped? A woman’s right to choose. A woman’s right to have control over her own body. These are principles at the heart of feminism, which Lechner recklessly disregards.

Exploitative work and self-organisation

Lechner writes, “a prostituted woman can no more freely choose to work in the sex trade than a sweatshop worker in a sweatshop factory”. As socialists we are very aware of the various ways in which workers under capitalism are exploited and harangued into immiserating, alienating work. The same goes for many sex workers, and it is obviously true that large swathes of the sex industry are dangerous and exploitative. But how do we seek to change this?

First of all, we understand that poverty is for considerable numbers of people (but not all), the reason they enter the industry. As austerity hits, more and more mothers are resorting to sex work to feed their children. As tuition fees have gone up, students are in increasing numbers becoming sex workers. Migrant women who often have very little opportunity for other work and are faced with precarity, engage in sex work. If we look at the demands being proposed by sex workers themselves, the solutions are clear: the decriminalisation of sex work; a re-thinking of borders and migration so that migrants have all of the rights and services that citizens have; a dramatic increase in the powers of trade unions and the enshrinement of the rights of sex workers to organise. Policy aimed at promoting economic equality between classes and genders: a guaranteed minimum income; an end to the part-time gender pay gap; free 24-hour child care; secure and affordable housing for all.

We absolutely should not be calling for the state to further criminalise sex workers, their clients, and sex work. In Britain soliciting is a crime and can be met with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order – orders that have been handed out generously to sex workers. Breaking an order can mean time in prison. Collaring sex workers with criminal records for soliciting, co-habiting, or brothel-keeping does not ‘rescue’ them from the industry, it prevents them from leaving. Threatening them with detention, eviction and unwanted intervention from social services and police, leaves them isolated and unwilling to report sexual violence, pimping and trafficking.

As socialists, when tube workers die from asbestosis, when miners die from black-lung, when workers in all industries are injured, killed, or broken mind, body, and soul by the endless drudgery that is work under capitalism for most people – we don’t ask for the abolition of the tube, or the mines, or office work, or building work. We do not rally the forces of the state to organise our working lives for us – to put us in prison or immigration detention centres if we continue to work in these industries. Instead, we call for the self-organisation of workers, within and without trade unions, to fight for better conditions. We attempt to build movements to support workers in their struggles. By arguing for everything that sex workers might do to work together and safely to remain illegal, Lechner is calling for a society in which sex workers continue to be atomised from each other and the wider public: where communicating, collaborating, and organising is almost impossible.

Trafficking

Trafficking is a problem that sex workers, more than anyone else, want to see ended. But how do we prevent the trafficking of sex workers?

In December 2013, police raided working flats in Soho under the auspices of the prevention of trafficking. They dragged scantily dressed women out onto the street, presenting them as trophies for a team of journalists they had brought with them to photograph and report on the raid. Many of these women were migrant sex workers who, despite denying that they had been trafficked, were detained in an immigration detention centre in Heathrow. Many were later deported. The Soho raids were not unusual, police raids are always the same. Fuelled by the desire to be seen as “tough of immigration” and “tough on crime”, and with their ranks filled with misogynists and racists, the police are infamous for harassing and abusing sex workers. It is self-evident that those best placed to report cases of trafficking, or the exploitative practices of pimps, madams and maids are sex workers themselves. If we want to support them in doing so then criminalising their activity, putting their safety at risk, dragging them out onto the street, or evicting them from their homes, is absolutely not the way to do so.

Sex under socialism

I am unconvinced that sex under socialism would look like the bleak, uninspiring sex that Lechner offers us in her article.

We can be critical, perhaps, of the fact that many women want to be subjugated in the bedroom, and how maybe it’s a reflection of their subjugation in wider society. But the solution surely cannot be to repress sexuality, to limit our understanding of “good sex” so that the experiences, desires and identities of innumerable people, of all genders and backgrounds, are obscured and suppressed? Under socialism one would hope that non-normative sexualities and identities would be more freely explored, debated and depicted in mainstream culture, not censored like they are now. A feminist porn that turns us on, but explores relations of power, for instance. If we lived in a society where exploration of one’s own sexual and gender identity were encouraged, rather than prohibited – sex would not be the same; relationships would not be the same; people would not be the same.

Would sex work still exist? It would be different. People would not enter the industry because of poverty or precarity. Sex work would not be for paying the bills, or be done at the behest of anybody else but oneself. For many, however, sex work is a caring industry. Many sex workers have clients that are disabled, or isolated, or may not be having sex for any number of reasons. Those sex workers might not have sex with their clients usually, but they do so to offer relief, intimacy and/or pleasure to people who feel unable to access it otherwise. I believe that transactions such as these, at the very least, would still exist under socialism, that it would still be work, money might continue to change change hands, but that it is just as acceptable and ‘meaningful’ as any other kind of sex.

We need to be thinking, now, about the kind of society we want to live in. We need to articulate clearly what we are struggling for. I am struggling for the autonomy and empowerment of women and all people; for a democratic, classless society and against the drudgery of work; for a world filled with pleasure. Lechner appears to be struggling for prohibitive and limited sexuality, and against a woman’s right to give and withdraw consent to atypical sexual acts and relationships.

Conclusion

The trend, globally, is for governments to extend the criminalisation of sex work, whether of sex workers, clients, or both. The effect of criminalisation is always the same: the conditions of sex work are poorer, the women who work in the industry live more precariously and in fear of state authorities; it is harder to exit the industry. Claims by abolitionists like Lechner that they are ‘rescuing’ the ‘victims’ of the sex industry, are not matched in practice. She calls notions such as agency, choice, and self-organisation “neoliberal flimflam”, and in doing so betrays a very anti-feminist perspective at the root of her politics. Abolitionists are waging a crusade against sex work that is premised upon a refusal of the agency of sex workers, the advocacy of carceral feminism and a moralistic attitude towards sex and sexuality.

The ‘New Zealand model’ incorporates the empowerment of sex workers to take control of their working lives; legislation that enshrines consent as possible within sex work, while emphasising sex workers’ absolute right to refuse/withdraw consent; and an understanding that criminalising sex work does little to protect those within the industry who are vulnerable.

As members of a left-wing party, we should have respect for the agency of sex workers to choose how they want to live and work enshrined in our policy. We ought to be supporting them when they organise in their workplaces, whether that be the streets, brothels, or elsewhere. And we must seek to equip them with the tools to fight capitalism, the system under which they, like all of us, are subjugated. This means, first of all, arguing for the decriminalisation of sex work and recognising sex work as work.

Further reading:

The English Collective of Prostitutes
www.prostitutescollective.net
@ProstitutesColl

The Sex Worker Open University
www.sexworkeropenuniversity.com
@SexWorkerOU

References

Adams, N. (6th November 2014), ‘Listen to sex workers – we can explain what decriminalisation would mean’, The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/06/sex-workers-decriminalisation-amendment-modern-slavery-bill.

Dalla Costa, M. & James, S. (1975), The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol: Falling Wall Press.

Federici, S. (2012), ‘Why Sexuality is Work (1975)’, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland: PM Press.

Global Network of Sex Work Projects (2014), ‘The Real Impact of the Swedish Model on Sex Workers: Sweden’s Abolitionist Understanding, and Modes of Silencing Opposition’ [online]. Taken from http://www.nswp.org/resources/.

Global Network of Sex Work Projects (2014), ‘The Needs and Rights of Male Sex Workers: a summary’ [online]. Taken from http://www.nswp.org/resources/.

Global Network of Sex Worker Projects (2014), ‘The Needs and Rights of Trans Sex Workers: a summary’ [online]. Taken from http://www.nswp.org/resources/.

James, S. (1st November 2013), ‘Sex workers need support – but not from the ‘hands off my whore’ brigade’, The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/01/sex-workers-hands-off-my-whore-france-prostitutes.

Law, V. (2014), ‘Against Carceral Feminism’, Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism.

Levy, J. (2013), Swedish Abolitionism as Violence Against Women. Taken from: http://sexworkeropenuniversity.com.

Smith, M. (11th December 2013), ‘Soho police raids show why sex workers live in fear of being ‘rescued’’, The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/11/soho-police-raids-sex-workers-fear-trafficking