In defence of the Nordic ‘Sex Purchase Act’

Brigitte Lechner of Stockport Left Unity gives her view.

… it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from this system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.”

(Communist Manifesto)

Prostitution: a market analysis

1. Let’s start with sex. 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.

2. Prostitution offers a replica of a loving sexual relationship but it is shorn of the emotional mutuality of the original. Sure, some people like sex without emotional mutuality; and they are welcome to it. But I am talking about the commercial transaction, a trade between profoundly unequal partners. With very few exceptions, a prostituted woman can no more freely choose to work in the sex trade than a sweatshop worker in a sweatshop factory. Socialists are well placed to understand the link between class, race, inequality and exploitation.

3. What is traded in prostitution is not sex. Sexual activity merely follows from the commercial transaction. What is bought is the temporary use of a person’s body. This body is usually that of a woman or girl but occasionally that of a man or a boy whose body subsequently facilitates the sexual experience of what is mostly a male buyer. Beneath this trade lies the assumption of male entitlement to the use of another body to satisfy sexual desire. A desire for power is also implicated but I will not dwell on this here.

4. As to the market, the end-user in prostitution is overwhelmingly male, the prostituted body overwhelmingly female.ⁱThe accounts of end-users, otherwise known as punters, make it clear the encounter is shallow and empty because there is no reciprocal feeling of affection or desire.ⁱⁱThese accounts make evident that the body of a prostituted person resembles a sexual service station. Even where no money is exchanged, as in sexual slavery, the service function obtains. The punters’ accounts also expose the power many of them feel entitled to exercise over the body they have purchased.

5. Nothing can be bought or sold that is not a commodity; prostituted people are reduced to commodities, they lose their humanity. All trendy talk of choice, empowerment and agency is neoliberal flimflam. Prostitution is a service designed to meet the demand for a fully serviced male orgasm. Though some individuals claim autonomy, the lives of many are tragic in that they are indentured, bonded like slaves, without a contract or health and safety guarantees, and under the control of pimps, brothel owners, or worse. When demand increases beyond what supply is available at any time, the invisible hand of the market will make adjustments by fair or foul means, usually the latter.

6. Let me widen the horizon. A global sex industry has grown out of men’s demand for erotic experiences, including children. In fact, the sex industry creates much of the demand artificially, via porn and prostitution, enticing consumers to want more than they need. Among the many business entities sustained by the sex industry are stock-in-trade retail outlets such as pimps, brothels, massage parlours, cinemas or strip-clubs. Prostitution is a market with an annual turnover of billions. It is also, and therefore, a playground for organised crime. The task before us is to decide how to intervene in this massive, murky market to secure human rights or protect prostituted people from harm.

What is the UK market structure at present?

7. Some countries only prohibit pimping, i.e. the profiting from prostitution. In some countries prostitution itself is illegal. Countries such as Thailand merge the sex trade with the tourism industry for greater profitability so that punters from the States or the UK book the women or girls along with the room and the view. In the UK, it is only kerb-crawling and touting for business that is outlawed, but not the buying of prostitutes, unless they can be identified as being trafficked. Brothels are officially illegal but many operate freely in the guise of massage parlours, pole-dancing or strip-clubs. Many UK cities retain tolerance zones for prostitution. Police harassment and arrests tend to be reserved for prostitutes, but not for punters. It is prostitutes who are given short shrift by police when raped or otherwise violated by a punter. It really is high time something was done about this iniquitous state of affairs.

The Free Market in Prostitution

8. Would liberalisation of the sex trade, a free market for buyers and sellers solve the problem of sexual violence, sex-trafficking (particularly of children) and make this a fair and safe trade? Evidence to date suggests that liberalisation intensifies exploitation. To begin with, in all competitive markets, unique selling points are essential to success. According to evidence collected in countries which have liberalised the sex trade, the quest for competitive advantage results in unprotected or violent sex and to an increase in child prostitution. By far the most highly prized body in prostitution is the young body and the most common question asked on a brothel’s phone line is “What age is the youngest girl you have”.

9. Germany liberalised the market for the sex trade some 5 years ago. Full legalisation of buying and selling was thought to improve the lives of prostituted people – through workers’ rights, unions and access to health insurance. In reality, it resulted in fewer rights and lower rewards because market rates took a tumble in a rapidly expanding competitive market. Germany is now widely regarded as the ‘Brothel of Europe’.ⁱⁱⁱ

Furthermore, the entrepreneurial spirit in the free market has led to brothel camps, chains of multi-story brothels offering different sexual experiences on different floors, female bodies hired for a 24 hour stretch affording multiple serviced orgasms to one or several punters, drive-in-brothels, market segmentation and a massive increase in sex trafficking; not only of Eastern European and Asian but also of indigenous, mainly female, bodies.^ivIf demand increases so must supply with all the adverse consequences for women and children.

10. The evidence is clear: in countries with legalized prostitution, sex trafficking increases. For example, an academic study in 2003, based on data from 150 countries, concluded that in Germany and in the Netherlands, for example, legalisationfailed to achieve its three goals of eliminating the criminal element, of making the selling of sex safe; of re-defining prostitution as a job like any other, i.e. with employment contracts and a health and safety remit.^v

11. New Zealand and the Netherlands have a similar tally^vi. It is Zero Hour Contract territory with health hazards no fireman or miner would be expected to accept. Research also shows that there is little oversight of either business or health and safety practices. Police complain that it is difficult to close down law-breaking businesses since they no longer have permission to investigate brothels. The European Union ratified the Palermo Protocol in 2000. It obliges countries to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons but evidence suggests that such obligations cannot be met in a free market.^vii Research data also suggests that the one sure way to prevent sexual exploitation and sex trafficking is to cut off the profit incentive; to reduce the demand by men.^viii

The Nordic Model in brief

12. In the Nordic Model prostitution is decriminalised. It is the purchase of sexual services that is criminalised. It means a prostituted person can supply sexual services but can seek help if they need protection against violent punters, pimps or traffickers. The police will have a statutory duty to assist, without recrimination or rancour as is currently the case. In addition, prostituted people will have a statutory right to support should they wish to exit the trade: help to detox, for example, find a home or find education or employment. The model also calls for the training of police, the legal profession and the service sectors affected by prostitution or the exiting provisions of the law.

13. The Nordic Model addresses the power discrepancy in the sex trade. It offers the legal protection no hypothetical union membership can provide. This law shifts criminal liability from people who are exploited, to those doing the exploiting, namely the punters, the pimps and the brothels. This law commits Government to protecting and addressing the needs of people who wish to exit the sex trade.^ix

The Nordic experience to date

14. Ending demand in the form of criminalising the buyer was first trialled in Sweden in 1999. The ‘Sex Purchase Act’ aimed at preventing or reducing sex trafficking, reducing the rate of demand by punters and reducing sexualised violence against women. Its main conclusion thus far is that the law has had the desired effect and remains an important tool in preventing and reducing prostitution and sex-trafficking. A bonus feature has been the increased awareness among Swedish men as to the true nature of sexual service provision.

15. Finland, Norway and Iceland followed suit but results have been mixed, depending on the influence of the indigenous pro-prostitution lobby or the will to enforce the law, or both. Whilst Iceland went further than Sweden and shut down strip-clubs as a major source of the exploitation of women, their law tends to be badly enforced. This is partly down to the understaffed government Department for handling sexual abuse which was tasked with enforcement. But police also complain the law is badly written, or that nothing has been done to curb advertising of sexual services. Pro-prostitution groups lobby hard for a repeal of the Sex Purchase Act.

16. In Norway the talk is of sabotage.^x Social Services and voluntary organisation tasked with the implementation of exiting support services are disinterested, as are the police and many academic researchers. An additional problem emerged in the form of a hostile party-political spectrum ranging from conservatives via the Greens to Social Democrats all calling for a repeal of the law. So much so that the topic appeared in their manifesto only 5 years after the act was introduced. Pro-prostitution groups lobby hard for a repeal of the act.

17. It is Norway which is usually wheeled out by the UK pro-prostitution lobby as an example of the failure of the model. Yet there is much evidence to suggest it functions well, even in Norway, in curbing sex-trafficking and sexual violence^xi. The present Norwegian government is said to dread the possibility of a repeal before other strategies for containing organised crime can be found and put in place.

18. Many autonomous prostitutes welcome the Nordic law, exited prostitutes in particular, as does a recent EU report.^xiiSome autonomous prostitutes but particularly pimps and brothel owners do not like the Nordic Model; its success depletes their income. For some years now, strenuous but misguided efforts have been made to establish prostitution as ‘sex work’, on par with driving a bus, perhaps. It has enabled the sex industry to attack calls to end demand. Who in their right mind would prevent workers from working. However, a closer look at the ‘work’ angle via the NZ Guide to Occupational Health and Safety in the Sex Industry^xiiisuggests that provisions are at best box-ticking exercises. Such provisions are difficult enough to enforce with less hazardous and more transparent employment relations.

19. The Scottish Socialist Party adopted the Nordic model a decade ago.^xiv Significant opposition to the Nordic Model understandably comes in the form of neoliberal ideology which gives primacy to the individual, their fundamental right to exercise choice; that choice is thus a measure of empowerment, an exercise of agency.^xv The politics of class, race and gender is omitted from the neoliberal equation. Vague assumptions are made about unionisation, about gold standard regulations. Yet is well known that most members of the union of ‘sex workers’ in the GMB are pimps and madams; that unionisation is the last thing on the mind of people sexually servicing an average of ten strangers a day, whether forced by a pimp, a brothel or individual economic necessity; and particularly not when working under duress.^xvi

Sex trafficking

20. The sex trade encourages sex-trafficking. According to the OECD, every year at least 500,000 persons are sold into prostitution in Europe alone, most of them women and children. The trade in human bodies for the supply of labour power has a long and ignoble history. Female slaves in the transatlantic slave trade were put to sexual as well as physical labour; modern slave-trafficking, too, trades women and children for sexual and physical labour.

21. The slavery of old was recognised socially and endorsed legally. Holding slaves was regarded as an expression of personal freedom – for rich, white, male plantation owners, of course. In 1740, there were 700,000 slaves dispersed on slave-holding plantations. 100 years later there were 4 million. When the transatlantic trade was stopped in 1808, slave owners grudgingly adapted by encouraging their slaves to breed. It took another sixty years for slavery as such to be constitutionally abolished in 1865. It appals us today but at the time the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade was fiercely opposed by the slave-holding class and in many segments of society.

22. People do not rent out their body for sex by choice that is freely made. Trafficking, menaces, a dysfunctional childhood, childhood abuse, drug addiction and financial pressures all play their part in bringing it about as a Hobson ’s choice. The Nordic Model is not against choice; it is not against agency, empowerment or individual sexual freedom. It is about saying NO to sex market liberalisation, NO to men’s demand – and privilege – for access to the body of mainly women and girls for the purpose of their sexual gratification. Let’s end demand. Thank you.