Feminist Ire

The Oslo report on violence against sex workers

Posted on July 1, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

[Hi, Feminist Current readers! Please see this response to the piece that brought you here.]

A couple years ago, as many readers will know, the Swedish government commissioned a report into the outworking of that country’s sex purchase ban. The so-called Skårhed report had numerous flaws which have been dissected elsewhere, such as terms of reference which explicitly precluded repeal of the law (“One starting point of our work has been that the purchase of sexual services is to remain criminalized”), and the fact that only seven active sex workers participated in the study and their views were dismissed anyway. Nonetheless, the law’s advocates repeatedly point to the report as if its official status rendered it ipso facto a definitive statement about the law’s impact – so I’m sure they’ll be the first to latch onto the new report commissioned by the City of Oslo, right?

Well, maybe not. For one thing, the Norwegians haven’t been as quick to have it translated as the Swedes were, although there’s a brief English-language article about it here. From that headline you’ll guess the other reason this report won’t be trumpeted by the same people who took the Swedish report as gospel: because its own findings, based on questionnaires completed by 123 active sex workers as well as interviews with police and social services, paint a decidedly more negative picture than Anna Skårhed’s.

I’m not going to get into the statistics in the Oslo report, first because (as I’ve often said) I think figures are inherently problematic in this field, and there are some methodological limitations which call for caution in interpreting the findings. It’s important to note that the authors themselves state, on page 54, that

This data does not explain whether the high incidence of violence and the vulnerability that women in prostitution experience are due to the criminalization of buying sex or other factors.

So it’s unsafe to conclude from these statistics that the law has led to more violence against sex workers. It is, however, entirely safe to state that the evidence undermines claims that the law somehow protects sex workers, either by putting manners on their clients or improving their relations with police. In fact, on page 51 the report says:

[A] 2008 report noted the possibility that the criminalization of clients can be something that protects women, they can threaten customers who behave badly, or want to break the contract, to report sex buyers to police (Tveit and Skilbrei 2008:113). Nothing in the surveys we have conducted among women and assistance services suggests that criminalization could protect women against customer violence

Since this is one of the major arguments put forward by the law’s supporters, it is extremely relevant to the debate if neither sex workers nor their support services have found it to actually have that effect.

Based on interviews with police and support services, the report identifies a number of grounds on which sex workers may now be more vulnerable to client violence. Many of these, we’ve heard before:

Another trend is that the customer base has changed in that there are fewer “good” customers than before. “Good” clients refers to men who seek out women to buy sexual services, you pay the agreed price and adhere to the agreement. These are customers who are often the typical “man in the street.” With criminalization many people believe that fewer of these types of men are buying sexual services, because this client group often consists of law-abiding citizens. They refrain from buying sex now because of the new law. These customers are known as the easiest to operate.

A reduction in the number of “bad” customers is not reported, however, from either the police or other assistance. The term “bad” customers is used about customers who do not adhere to the agreement, try to push the prices, will not have sex with a condom, show lack of respect for women by being derogatory, violent/ threatening, intoxicated, mentally unstable/ill or who attend the women with the motive to violate them – not just to buy sexual services.

The consequence of the reduction in the number of customers in total, and that there are fewer “good” customers while the number of “bad” customers remains constant, is that the “bad” customers make up a larger portion of our customer base to more women than ever before. This means that although the number of “bad” customers has not necessarily increased, sales of sexual services have become more dependent on this particular group because the earnings base from the “good” customers is reduced. (page 38)

Meanwhile, for the (mostly Thai) women selling sex out of massage parlours,

there are reports that several have stopped prostitution activities in the establishments, for fear that the business shall be identified by the police. They now include agreements in the selling of sex at massage establishments, to meet the customer at a later stage in his own apartment for the implementation of the sexual services. (page 40)

Clearly, this poses a risk to the sex worker sent off to the client’s apartment. The latter page refers also to the “individualisation” of prostitution, in which

the community of women who sell sex has been reduced… Prostitution is not something we do together in selling sex from the same street corner/flat/establishment, but which is an isolated and personal project.

And with that goes the safety-in-numbers effect. Page 41 cites one potential positive of this individualisation, namely

Police believe this has meant that women are less vulnerable to traffickers because it is harder for traffickers to organize prostitution.

However, it goes on immediately to say:

Nevertheless, the police believe that the women in many ways are more vulnerable to other actors, such as customers, because women are more often alone in contact with them.

It then continues on a familiar theme:

In street prostitution, services reported that the time pressure to conclude an agreement with the customer has increased considerably since criminalization. Customers are more stressed because they fear that the police will find them, making contact on the street need to be done quickly and to get away from the area quickly. For many women this poses major challenges in contact with the customer because it is difficult to achieve a clear agreement with the customer about the price, sexual favors, place of execution and condom use before they must be off with the customer. The agreements are made only when one has come to a place that is “safer” for the client, such as in a hotel room, in a vehicle or in one of the parties’ apartment.

So when buyers are criminalised, it seems, there’s an inverse relationship between their safety and the seller’s – and his is paramount in the transaction.

Unsurprisingly, the report finds that sex workers may now be more vulnerable to riskier sexual practices:

As the customer base has been somewhat reduced … several support services also report that women have had to lower the requirements they have for customers. Many women have previously had clear demands on the clients they take, nationality, substance abuse, mental health/client’s appearance are examples. The women also have other standards that were absolute, the sexual services they sell/don’t sell, how they conduct the sale, the number of customers they take the at same time, the price they take and the use of condoms. More services believe that women have been forced to lower their original demand to get clients and earn the money they need. Whether this has led to increased violence and increased rates of infection of sexually transmitted infections, it is difficult for aid services to consider, but it seems like there is a broad consensus among aid services that the women feel more vulnerable, more at risk and that they have less control of themselves in relation to the customer than before – just because they have had to lower their demands. (page 41)

This is what is known as a “buyer’s market”, where

customers to a greater extent than in the past may set the terms for the sexual services they want to buy, price, where the prostitution act shall be implemented and condom use. (page 38)

Another area in which sex workers are reported to have less control is in arranging their accommodation. This is because of an ongoing police operation, which carries the incredible name “Husløs” (homeless), aimed at enforcing the laws against indoor prostitution. Page 39 explains that this operation

means that the police notify owners of apartments / offices / hotels where prostitution is found that they will charged with pimping, if the tenancy is not terminated

As a consequence,

the rental market has become narrower for women in prostitution – both in terms of rental apartments to live in and in relation to operating a massage establishment. Prostitution support services report that according to the women, at times it has been difficult to find space for a massage establishment, because landlords will not rent apartments / rooms for people from ethnic groups associated with prostitution.

One wonders how many non-sex workers from those ethnic groups are also affected by this law. The result is that rather than being able to run their own establishment,

some women have had to get help from a Norwegian person to rent a room/studio in his name

… which means that rather than preventing dependency relationships, the law in this respect may actually encourage them. Page 39 reports a similar trend for drug-using street workers:

Among the addicts, women who still sell sex have many modified methods of how they come into contact with customers. Most aid services find that women are included in more long-term relationships with men who are referred to as “friends”, “boyfriends”, “uncles” or acquaintances. These are men they keep in touch with over the phone and that they are with for long periods, it can be about hours, days or weeks. They have sex with men in exchange for the men supplying them with drugs, money and other necessities. Many of the aid services say they feel women are very vulnerable in these relationships. The women are very dependent on the few customers they have.

Operation “Homeless” (I’m still utterly gobsmacked they call it that) also helps to explain why sex workers are reluctant to report violence to police. As page 42 notes:

Few women in the indoor sector contact the police when there is violence in the establishment or the apartment they work in because they fear that they will affected by operation “Homeless”, report aid services.

And then there’s my usual bugbear, the use of “anti-prostitution” laws as an immigration control measure. Page 37 states,

In relation to the foreign people who sell sexual services, police checks for valid identity and residence papers have soared.

On the next page,

The increase in immigration control has led to a strong presence of police in parts of the foreign prostitution environment and more are taken from Norway, while the use of various provisions of the order has resulted in more fines and being expelled for a period from various downtown areas.

The increased control of the market has meant that many of those who sell sex feel they have been criminalized. This is despite the fact that legislation has not changed in relation to those who sell sexual services. Both the police and aid services report on this trend.

Many of the aid services also report that police are no longer perceived by women as an ally they can turn to when they have been the victim of a crime because they fear that they will be checked for other conditions while in contact with the police.

This is an entirely predictable consequence of a crackdown on a market with many undocumented immigrants – and yet pro-criminalisation advocates still claim that their law will make sex workers more comfortable with police. Why in the world is this so hard for them to understand?

Notwithstanding my suspicion of figures, there is one in this report I think is worth highlighting (the usual caveats apply). On page 37 there is a reference to a study published in 2008, just before the law against buying sex took effect, in which sex workers were asked whether they thought the law would have an impact on their vulnerability to violence. 74% said yes, and of these, 90% said they would be more exposed – citing many of the same reasons already discussed here. Even accounting for any methodological weaknesses in that study, there were clearly significant concerns among sex workers as to what the law might mean for them. Why were those concerns ignored?

Page 41 gives a possible answer to that question: namely, that sex workers themselves were conceptualised as the problem that the law would address. Never mind that feminist stuff in Sweden, here it was seen as a public order issue and a highly racialised one at that:

Several support services, particularly prostitution services, report that in recent years there has been a shift in how the outside world reviews and relates to women in prostitution. This tendency can be traced back to 2006/2007 when the Nigerian women took the street prostitution market in Norway and started to sell sex in new and visible public areas. The debate often revolved around that these women acted inappropriately and immorally. Women in prostitution became more and more often referred to as disruptive and unwelcome, than as people in difficult circumstances. This focus was very clear in the debate prior to the criminalization of buying sex.

Unsurprisingly, the push for criminalisation has increased the stigma faced by sex workers:

The services reported that the direction the prostitution debate took in advance of and in connection with the ban has had a major impact on how “the man in the street” looks at women who sell sex, and they hear more women share experiences where they are harassed by strangers in public places than before.

In recent years, prostitution initiatives regularly received reports of people who attend the prostitution district of Oslo and harass women. The episodes that have been described, for example, are that individuals seek out prostitutes to shout abuse, throw things at women and behave rudely to them.

The Oslo report doesn’t address the key question in the Skårhed report, namely, whether the ban has reduced the amount of prostitution. This article cites a separate report which does; I’ll probably look at that at some future date. It’s pretty clear, though, that whatever about the statistics, the perception among those closest to the action – sex workers, their support services and the police – is that conditions are pretty rotten for those on the game in Norway’s capital and largest city. “The man in the street” in Oslo may not care about them, but for those who do or who claim to do so, there really can be no excuse for ignoring the very strong warning signals in this report and focusing immediately on how to improve these conditions – even if it means taking the foot off the End Demand train for a while.

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Your girlie bits offend some people.

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Stephanie Lord

A PR disaster for feminine hygiene company Femfresh developed on the internet this week after their refusal to use the word “vagina” on their facebook page. Femfresh make feminine hygiene wipes – that is, wipes for vaginas, among a range of other products from gels to washes that serve the same purpose. One would expect that a company in the business of selling vagina-related products wouldn’t have any problem with saying the word vagina.

It was not to be. Instead of saying the v-word they took to using a number of words instead of it such as “va jay jay, kitty, nooni, lala, froo froo!” to describe women’s vaginas. It would be interesting to see transcipts of the discussions of their marketing meetings where that decision was made.

If you cared about your Lala at all you dirty girl, you’d buy our stuff.

Their Facebook page, which has now been deleted as a result of the uproar, was aghast with comments from rightfully disgruntled women who took umbrage with the fact that the Femfresh felt the need to give their vagina a new, rather infantilised, and for many insulting, name. The Facebook page showed an image of a woman at a festival under which someone added the most wonderful comment;

“I can’t go to any festivals! I’ll be too busy sitting at home crying about the embarrassing smell of my shame-shame.”

It generated a very interesting discussion on various blogs about why women took offence to the Femfresh idea that there was something offensive about the word ‘vagina’ and why it really didn’t need another name because the word ‘vagina’ was sufficient in itself.

The thing is though; nobody should be really surprised that Femfresh would consider that the word ‘vagina’ is too offensive to use on their facebook page and that a more sanitised word should be employed instead. Their whole business is based on the premise that vaginas are inherently offensive and in need of sanitising -coincidentally, women have the opportunity to make their genitals less offensive if they buy Femfresh products to wash themselves with. It wouldn’t do to let women believe that their genitals are pretty much fine in their natural state.

This is about sending women a message that female bodies, where they are not aided by products that alter their natural state, be it their skin colour, hair levels, or ph balance for that matter, are unfeminine and unnatural and it is imperative that women engage in the alteration and self-regulation of their own bodies. To just wash normally, according to Femfresh, would not be hygienic enough, despite being contrary to all known medical evidence, so one must buy their product and do something extra. Where is Foucault when you need him?

There are rules within patriarchal capitalism and women who do not conform to the self-regulation of the body must be painted as being abnormal lest it threaten the sales of body-altering products. Although she wrote on the issue of weight, it’s rather similar to philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s idea that women’s bodies in their natural state in Western societies are construed as being uncontained, uncontrolled and dangerous to a Western Patriarchal order. The woman’s body is positioned as being in need of control when in its natural state – almost as if it possesses a formlessness and disorder that threatens the order of patriarchy if left untamed. A body in no need of “untaming” would have no need for the purchase of commodities to tame it, and where would that leave capitalism?

Medical discourse decides what is healthy, and Femfresh (as well as other companies selling similar products) have attempted to appropriate the ability to control the “ph balance” of a vagina despite the fact that the vagina is self-regulating when it comes to its ph balance. But products sell much faster when you convince people that it’s for the good of their health.

There are many similarities to the marketing of these products and menstruation products. Simone De Beauvoir wrote about the idea of shame attached to the female body as far back as 1949;

“It is not easy to play the idol, the fairy, the faraway princess when one feels a bloody cloth between one’s legs”.

And even today despite its normality (for the majority of cis-women at least) menstruation or even the natural and normal activity of what goes on between a woman’s legs is deemed to be a tainted aspect of femininity that she must keep hidden and secret at all times – because any other party’s knowledge of it would damage her femininity.

Advertisements for Femfresh style hygiene products as well as menstrual products depict the unattended woman’s genitals as a threat to the traditional image of femininity. Even the packaging for the products is specifically designed so as to be “discrete” and the secrecy of compliance with menstrual etiquette serves to reinforce to women their status as objects, and not as humans. This type of grooming is portrayed by these companies as a method for women to self-improve on the way to self-fulfilment; liberation will be found in the idealised body type – you must look a certain way, and you must smell a certain way. As they frame it, to not engage in this practice is to let yourself go and for a woman – according to the terms of patriarchal capitalism – to let yourself or your body go is to reject womanhood itself.

Thus self-improvement can be achieved, but it must be purchased by using more products and spending more money. For Femfresh the process is not an optional extra – it is about being healthy and maintaining a ph balance after all – it is about paying to bring the body to a state of normality as they have defined it and rescinding the body’s own control of itself.

Confidence problems? Femfresh will sort that. All you need to do it wipe your ladybits and make sure it smells like a meadow down there. Or else, no confidence for you!

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New edition of Look Left out now

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

Just a short announcement that the new Look Left is out now, featuring a piece by yours truly on the Swedish sex trade law (along with an opposing view). For a list of places to buy it, click here.

ETA: You can now read a PDF of my article here.

It’s also got the following articles:

* Another Europe is Possible
* Interview with Mandate General Secretary John Douglas
* Michael Taft on the possibilities for building a progressive future
* Conor McCabe on the myth of NAMA’s ghost estates
* Gavin Titley on the media’s reporting of the economic crisis
* The Price of Corruption
* Belfast: Divided by Walls, United by Poverty
* The politics of the Pogues
* Brian Hanley on Frank Ryan’s Street Fighting Years
* Lauren Arrington on Delia Larkin and the Irish Women Workers’ Union
* What Now for the ULA?
* Egypt’s Permanent Revolution?
* Stormont’s Policies a Recipe for Poverty

Well worth the €2. Please check it out. And thanks to the editors for inviting me to contribute.

Is the legality of buying sex in Ireland a “loophole”?

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

More and more lately, I’ve been hearing advocates of a sex purchase ban in Ireland claim that it is a “loophole” in Irish law that makes it legal to buy sex. This letter in today’s Sunday Independent is an example.

The law governing prostitution in Ireland is the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 1993, which makes it an offence to solicit in public (whether as buyer or seller) for the purposes of prostitution. The Act does not, as that letter notes, make the purchase (or sale) of sex per se illegal.

But is that a loophole?

The word “loophole” implies that when the law was drafted, legislators unintentionally left an aspect of the subject matter uncovered, thereby leaving a particular action legal that was not meant to be left legal. Or as Wikipedia defines it:

A loophole is an ambiguity in a system, such as a law or security, which can be used to circumvent or otherwise avoid the intent, implied or explicitly stated, of the system.

Which means that the absence of a prohibition on buying sex can only be a loophole if the law was actually intended to outlaw the purchase of sex, but was drafted in such a way as to inadvertently fail to do so.

As it happens, Irish parliamentary debates are online and so it’s quite easy to see exactly what the intent of a law was. And here we see the then-Minister for Justice, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, who introduced the bill, explaining its purpose to the Seanad (Senate):

I have explained in both Houses that prostitution is not illegal. What transpires in private between consenting adults is no business of the criminal law. The law must be concerned with the nuisance and annoyance caused by the public face of prostitution which is, in effect, soliciting, importuning or loitering for the purposes of prostitution.

This really couldn’t be any clearer. There was absolutely no intention in the bill to make the exchange of sex for money illegal, for either party, so long as it takes place between consenting adults behind closed doors. There was neither explicit nor implicit intention; there is no ambiguity. There is no “loophole”.

I suspect that pro-criminalisation advocates know this, and that their use of the word “loophole” is simply a discursive strategy aimed at portraying their proposal as a modest one. It seems to be a reaction to the plan of the current Minister for Justice for a consultation process on whether and how to reform our prostitution laws. By portraying their proposal as the tightening of a loophole rather than an actual policy change, they imply that there really isn’t a need for a consultation process at all, and if it has to go ahead, it should be merely a formality to get over and done with quickly.

It’s a clever enough strategy, but one fundamentally grounded in untruth.

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Human trafficking in Ireland, part 2 (and about those brothel raids)

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

In the comments to this post a few weeks ago, where I looked at the Irish government’s latest human trafficking report, a reader pointed me to the text of a presentation given recently by Detective Superintendent Noel Clarke of the Garda Síochána (Irish police)’s Human Trafficking Unit. I promised to give it a post of its own, which I meant to do last weekend, but something else intervened. Which turned out to be just as well, because in the meantime we’ve had the island-wide brothel raids which I referred to in this post – and what we’ve learned from those raids ties in very neatly with the contents of the presentation.

Much of Clarke’s statement is bland operational stuff but a couple points drew my attention. The first is his reference to the administrative status available to trafficked persons:

In the cases where the potential victim was not legally in the State and there were reasonable grounds to suspect that crime had occurred they were granted a Recovery and Reflection period and a subsequent Temporary Residence Permission… In 2011 only one of the 57 potential victims did not have a permission to be in the State and that individual was granted a Recovery & Reflection period and a subsequent Temporary Residence Permission.

This underscores what I said in the earlier post about the status serving as an anti-deportation measure, hence not being applied to persons who already have some kind of protection against deportation. But as you can see from the stats in that post, that status is “asylum seeker” for the majority of persons reported. And around 95% of asylum seekers in Ireland will lose their protection against deportation once their claims have been determined (that’s the approximate rejection rate). The Department of Justice gives the impression (paragraph 10) that the administrative arrangements will kick in automatically for identified trafficking victims should their other permission expire, but that’s not what actually happens: instead, failed asylum seekers who have been trafficked must ask for recognition under the arrangements, as a last-ditch effort to avoid deportation, at precisely the time when their immigration status is most precarious. Which is an awfully cruel procedural hoop to put vulnerable people through. It’s one of only several reasons why the arrangements are woefully inadequate for the people they are meant to assist, but that’s a subject for another post.

Another interesting thing in the presentation is that Clarke says:

The one significant trend emerging from the data is that in approximately two-thirds of the cases and after a detailed investigation no evidence of human trafficking has been disclosed.

Or to read it the other way around, only about one-third of the cases that are reported to the Gardaí as involving human trafficking actually do involve human trafficking. This is not too far from my interpretation of the 2011 data as showing only 14 confirmed cases out of 57 reported (that’s actually around one quarter, but the difference between a third of 57 and a quarter of 57 is only five people).

And that brings us neatly to last week’s brothel raids, which for all the hoopla seem to have been something of a damp squib as an anti-trafficking operation. To the best of my knowledge, there are no reports that any trafficking victims were found in this jurisdiction, though apparently three were found in the North (bearing in mind, however, the much broader offence of trafficking there). And according to this piece in today’s Sunday Independent,

Senior sources said that all the young women who were detained or questioned said they were working in the sex trade here voluntarily…Gardai disagree with claims by Catholic and feminist groups that there are high levels of human trafficking involved in Ireland’s sex trade.

Now, there should always be a health warning attached to statements attributed to anonymous “senior sources”. But in this case we have a named source saying pretty much the same thing. To return to that Noel Clarke presentation about the data in the Department of Justice report:

we are of the view that is it an accurate portrayal of the extent and nature of the problem in Ireland.

And if it is an accurate portrayal, then there aren’t high levels of human trafficking involved in Ireland’s sex trade because at most there were 14-19 victims last year while according to the pro-criminalisation lobby themselves there are over 1000 women in the Irish sex industry. Less than 2% is not a high level by any measure.

These kinds of figures are unreliable, of course; I’m always the first to say that. Undoubtedly there are cases that have gone undetected. But when even a police operation of last week’s scale fails to turn up evidence of a large number of victims, the burden of proof can’t keep being put on the side of the sceptics. It’s all well and good pointing out that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence but as justification for a potential legal change with significant consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods, it’s nowhere near good enough.

One final thing I want to address about the raids is the claim that police were not targetting the women selling sex. That is patently not true for the North, where three Polish sex workers have been prosecuted despite acknowledgement from all sides that there was no trafficking or pimping involved. There don’t seem to have been any arrests of sex workers in the South (despite the admission by Gardaí, in this piece again, that it is usually sex workers rather than pimps who face brothel-keeping charges), but look at what this article says:

An unknown number of prostitutes were spoken to by gardaí and their immigration details were checked. They will not face prosecution but may become witnesses.

All those congratulating the Gardaí for “not going after the women” seem to have missed that little detail emphasised above. If they were truly “not going after” them, why would they need to check their immigration status? What exactly do supporters of these raids think the Gardaí are going to do with the knowledge gleaned from those checks? In a country where even trafficking victims from outside the EU aren’t safe from eventual deportation, you can be damn sure that migrant sex workers won’t be; at best, they may be kept around long enough to serve as witnesses (if they don’t make themselves disappear before then). An undocumented person has more to fear from the police than prosecution alone. That’s something criminalisation advocates who think the Swedish model would turn sex workers and police into BFFs really need to get their heads around.

On RTÉ’s Prime Time last Thursday, Paul Maguire, the reporter whose February “exposé” of the online industry arguably set the stage for these raids, queried whether they’ve had any effect. He pointed out that the number of escort ads the day after the raids was actually higher than it was the day before. But why would the number go down? After all, there were as many women struggling to pay their bills the day after as the day before. There were as many migrants without employment permission the day after as the day before. And for those can truly be said to be in the business by choice – the so-called happy hookers – well, they weren’t the raids’ target anyway, were they?

None of the above means I don’t think there is exploitation in the Irish sex industry, or that it shouldn’t be investigated. But it is legitimate to query whether the outcome of this particular operation justified its considerable cost, and to ask whether more could have been achieved with less heavy-handed tactics. And if the professed concern for the women is genuine, then we need also ask about the impact of the raids on them. It simply cannot be assumed that they’d welcome such interventions with the same enthusiasm their would-be rescuers do. Particularly if, as the evidence we have suggests, such a small percentage of them actually need rescuing in the first place.

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Quick note on last night’s Vincent Browne

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

In the wake of a massive brothel raid police operation, the Vincent Browne show last night debated the issue of prostitution in Ireland. If you missed it a playback should be available soon here.

I don’t have too much to say about it but there are a couple points made by the anti-sex work speakers that I want to address. First, in response to a viewer’s claim that the rape rate in Sweden has skyrocketed since the sex purchase ban was introduced, Susan McKay of the National Women’s Council flatly denied that this was true and said that crime has generally gone down in Sweden.

The official statistics on reported offences in Sweden are here. I’ve taken a screenshot of the relevant time period (click on it to enlarge):

As you can see, the viewer was correct: the reported rape rate has gone up significantly since the sex purchase ban was introduced. Sarah Benson of Ruhama, another panelist, was correct to point out that Sweden broadened its definition during the period – in 2005, I believe, interestingly the same year that the Netherlands broadened their definition of trafficking– and in any event, these are only reported rapes so it’s impossible to know for sure whether the number of actual rapes has increased. And I’m sceptical of the claim of any link between legality of prostitution and rape in the first place, not least because there is no evidence that making it illegal to buy sex actually stops men from doing so. So I am not posting these statistics to make a claim that the rape rate has increased because of the law. My point is that Susan McKay responded to the allegation by not only flatly denying it but making a further claim about the general crime rate which, as you can see from those stats, is also wildly off the mark. With the exception of theft offences, it is absolutely, 100% untrue that crime rates have decreased since the law was introduced, and its advocates really need to be hauled over the coals for their willingness to make such breathtakingly false claims. (I’ll give McKay the benefit of the doubt that she may have been merely repeating something she was told since, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere, the Swedish authorities routinely fudge the truth around the law’s effects.)

The other thing I wanted to highlight was Sarah Benson’s assertion, in response to the point that Teresa Whitaker of the Sex Workers Alliance made about the UNAIDS Advisory Group on HIV and Sex Work report, that HIV is not an issue for Irish sex workers. Yes, you read that correctly, HIV is not an issue – because the HIV rate is so low, except among injecting drug users, who apparently don’t count.

I frankly find it astonishing that anyone who works with sex workers should dismiss the relevance of HIV – and it’s worth pointing to this document on the Ruhama website in which Benson says the opposite:

Women and children will contract sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV. This does not magically happen. Buyers are the source of infection and transmit it to women…

But the other point to be made here, and my tweet to this effect was read by Vincent Browne but ignored by the panel, is that the law they are advocating has the potential to make HIV much more of an issue. As I wrote about here and here, Norwegian health services are already seeing a rise in other STIs since the sex purchase ban was introduced, which they attribute to a greater reluctance to use condoms: where sex sellers are struggling to make a living because their clients have gone elsewhere, they are more vulnerable to demands for unprotected sex. It’s not rocket science. So even if Benson was correct that HIV isn’t an issue for Irish sex workers now, there’s a very good chance it will be if she gets her way on the law. Indeed, that’s pretty much the point the UNAIDS Advisory Group Report makes.

Finally, I look forward to a future Vincent Browne episode featuring the voices of actual sex workers. We need to remember that they are not, as Benson also (remarkably) put it, “burgers” but people with their own views on what they do and what the law should do about it. We need to create an environment where they can speak out and not only contribute to but actually shape the debate, which is, after all, about their lives and not ours. I’ll close here by linking to the Stories From Behind The Red Light blog, which is run by actual Irish-based sex workers. They are the people who should have been up on that panel last night.

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On Labour Women’s Statement on the EU Fiscal Treaty

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

Earlier this month, several female elected representatives of the Labour Party held a press conference and issued a statement calling for a Yes vote in Thursday’s EU Fiscal Treaty referendum. Their message was aimed at women, and Mairead Enright has a good piece here pointing out the tired essentialism in their appeal.

The first thing I thought of when I read this was a poster put up by the Yes side during one of the last referendum campaigns:

I never saw the “Ireland for Europe” group’s explanation of what they meant by this slogan – safer from what? – but the message was pretty clear. It was written in the first person singular, “I” rather than “We”, indicating personal and not collective safety. It featured a woman – can you imagine it featuring a man? – of an age where personal safety is likely to be a matter of significant concern; she is past the fearlessness of youth, but is neither so old that voters see her age before her gender, nor too young for senior women to identify with. In short, she is Everywoman, with the exception only of those women young enough to be targeted in the “young people” category. While the Yes campaign generally traded on fear, it was a peculiarly gendered, intimate type of fear that this poster aimed at instilling.

The Labour Women statement of the current campaign isn’t quite so brazen, but there is still a current of intimate fear running through it. Note, again, the reference to women’s safety in their support for the Treaty:

Joan Burton opened by reminding us that for women a YES vote is the safest option.

There is very little in the statement about what the Treaty will actually do to improve women’s lives – in fact, one of the speakers openly admits to the lack of direct positive consequences of a Yes – but a lot about what might happen if we don’t pass it, which Labour Women threaten could amount to no less than “devastation” for “you and your family”.

As Enright’s post shows, the statement makes a lot of suggestions as to why a Yes vote should appeal to our womanly nature. But it gives only one real concrete reason to vote for it: to get access to European Stability Mechanism funding. Without this funding, it is implied, social welfare will have to be cut, gender inequality will worsen, poverty will increase. Not mentioned is the fact that the Treaty also requires a commitment to the same austerity measures that have already led to social welfare being cut, gender inequality worsening and poverty increasing. Measures which Labour themselves have been implementing in government, through the very woman (Joan Burton, the Social Protection Minister) who opened this press conference.

Labour, of course, were firmly opposed to austerity while in opposition. In her response to the final budget of the previous government, Minister Burton said:

There is enough austerity in today’s announcement by the Minister, Deputy Lenihan, to make even the most ardent Tea Party fan grin in delight. There is pain for the poor, money for the rich, particularly for the bankers, and the rolling back of the State.
…
What has all the austerity and deflation done for us as a country so far? In more than two and quarter years of austerity, unemployment has risen from 4% to 14%, which is 435,000 people. Austerity has slashed growth, it has killed consumer confidence and turned us into a nation who are busy paying down debt or saving – anything but spending.
…
We all know about the famous three Rs that are the bedrock of early education. There is another set of three Rs that became the bedrock of economic recovery in the post-Depression era and formed the basis of the post-war politics in Europe, irrespective of the country or party in power. These three Rs are reflation, redistribution and reform. If the Labour Party is in Government after the next election, reflation, redistribution and reform will be what its participation in government will be about.

During the election campaign, plenty more promises like that were made by Labour, and all of them were broken. The three Rs we’ve got from this government have been recession, redundancies and repossessions. When asked to explain this about-face, Labour often responds by blaming the EU-ECB-IMF Troika. Burton again:

I am conscious that the reforms which are on the table may be painful for some in the short-term.

But we are constrained in what we can achieve by the fact that we are living on borrowed money, borrowed money which comes with many conditions attached.

In other words, having loaned Ireland the money it needs to run itself, the IMF and its Troika partners are also dictating how it is spent. The internal Labour line, or so I’ve been told by a party apparatchik, is that the Troika has people with veto power monitoring every government department. Now either that’s not actually true and the Labour/Fine Gael government are implementing these measures of their own accord, or Ireland is part of what can only be deemed an extremely unhealthy relationship of financial dependence, in which the other party controls all the purse strings.

The Labour Women statement, incredibly, implies that the solution to the problems created by this financial dependence is to sign up to more of it. The statement admits that the Treaty won’t bring us jobs, investment and growth, but since Ireland can’t access ESM funds without it, we

depend on this treaty to be passed to have a more secure future

At the end of the day, this is really what it’s all about: “security” is equated with “access to [someone else’s] money”. And to be entirely dependent on someone else’s money but have little control over what we can do with it, that’s not a bad thing. To be making huge sacrifices in a relationship that we’re not getting anything else out of – including things that we really need – that’s not a bad thing either. Forget things like autonomy, self-fulfilment and self-determination; as long as we have that security in our lives, that’s all that matters.

What kind of message does that send to women?

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Posted in Politics and tagged EU, Fiscal Treaty, Labour Party. Bookmark the permalink.

“There was no lack of buyers” – Swedish sex trafficking trial concludes

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

It may have escaped your notice if you rely on what the Swedes tell other countries about their sex trafficking problem, but last week several men were convicted for what Swedish prosecutors have called one of the largest trafficking rings of its kind ever uncovered in that country. It involved Romanian women who were brought to Sweden, some of them on the pretence of working in legal industries, and forced to sell sex in various Gothenburg arenas. You can read more about it here, here and here.

I won’t cite all the tragedy porn in those links (though I have no doubt supporters of the Swedish model would, if it had happened in a country where buying sex was legal), but there are a couple things I think are worth drawing attention to. The first is the quote in the title of this post, which comes from the third link. That article goes on to report one of the women’s testimony that she had seven or eight customers on her very first night. This doesn’t say much for the supposed deterrent effect of the sex purchase ban.

The second is the breakdown of ages (in the final link) of the men convicted of buying sex from these women: 36% were born in the 1960s, 21% in the 1970s and 30% in the 1980s. The other 13% aren’t accounted for except to say that the oldest was 76 and the youngest 17. So nearly a third, and perhaps slightly over that, were teenagers when the ban was introduced in 1999: further evidence (as I discussed here) that it hasn’t had the normative effect it was supposed to have on younger men.

The 17-year-old’s conviction is interesting for another reason. If Wikipedia (and all the other links I’ve found by Googling) is correct, Sweden’s age of majority is 18, which means that he is legally still a child. There’s nothing unusual about minors being convicted of crimes, of course, but the way that prostitution is conceptualised in Sweden does make this rather remarkable. The ideology underlying the sex purchase ban is that women cannot choose to sell sex; evidently, however, Swedish law considers that male children (at least of a certain age) can choose to buy it. In other words, when it comes to trading sex for money, adult women are less competent than male children. Could there be any clearer illustration of how this law infantilises women?

(It’s true that at least some of the women involved in this ring didn’t actually choose to sell sex, but the law doesn’t make a distinction between those who do and those who don’t. As far as I can tell from the various reports, the men were convicted for buying sex simpliciter, not for buying sex from trafficked persons, which does not appear to be a separate offence in Swedish law. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.)

Nor is this an isolated incident. Last month, the same journal carried a story about another “large scale sex trafficking ring”, involving an even greater number of women, in Stockholm. In fact, the Swedish-language paper Sydsvenska, discussing the Gothenburg trial, says that “Många” (many) human trafficking cases have been reported since the law was brought in. The law’s advocates, funnily enough, seem to leave that detail out of their propaganda.

Some of the other Swedish language reports have equally interesting comments. I tracked down the source of that client age survey, this Dagens Nyheter (Daily News) article, in which I found the following information about the Gothenburg sex trade (Google Translate C&P job, but you get the gist):

The two worst pimps were convicted of trafficking and the other four for aggravated procuring. But in the street sex trade going back to normal. “Moreover, there prostitution in more arenas than we can access,” says social worker Ms Malmström…

We have also attempted to examine the major internet sites and SMS sent and email to over 300 who sell sex on the net, says Ms Malmström, so the market is actually much larger.

This article in the Gothenburg Post states that the men convicted included a municipal councillor, a Premier Division footballer, and several directors and sales managers. It also reports the County Police Commissioner as saying human trafficking is “a business with huge income and relatively low risks”. Not quite what we’ve been told about Sweden being an unattractive market for traffickers, is it?

I could go on but I think I’ve made my point. The picture that advocates of the Swedish model are painting outside of Sweden is clearly very different to the reality inside Sweden. Furthermore, the Swedes don’t seem unaware that they still have significant issues with prostitution and sex trafficking – they just don’t want the rest of the world to know about it. And so, they send their spokespersons out to lobby for the sex purchase ban in other countries, by making claims that are directly contradicted by their own officials in their own media. And credulous moralists and anti-sex work feminists swallow it wholesale, no questions asked.

What’s the Swedish for “con job”?

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Posted in Migration, Sex work, Violence against women and tagged Criminalisation, Human trafficking, Sweden. Bookmark the permalink.

Human trafficking in Ireland, 2011

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

The Irish Department of Justice’s Annual Report of Trafficking in Human Beings in Ireland for 2011 was published recently and I’ve now had a chance to look it over. As you’d probably expect, the coverage of it has been pretty superficial, but that’s not entirely the journalists’ fault: it’s a pretty superficial document, which leaves a lot of really important questions unanswered. That said, no one’s exactly asking them, either.

So here are my thoughts about what this report tells us – and doesn’t tell us – about human trafficking in Ireland in 2011. First, a bit of context. Trafficking is prohibited under the Criminal Law (Human Trafficking) Act 2008, which you can read here. Sections 1-4 are the parts that set out the definition of the offence, and if you don’t mind a bit of legalese it’s interesting to compare them to the international definition set out in the Palermo Protocol on trafficking, which we finally got around to ratifying two years ago. The Irish statute is much wordier, which is entirely typical of domesticised versions of international law: the latter are typically aspirational, unenforceable and constructed through compromise, so detailed definitions are usually neither necessary nor (from a state’s perspective) desirable. The former, however, are the actual law in a country and so need to be drafted with precision.

Length aside, there are three differences I want to focus on between the Irish and international definitions. These are differences in how the two texts deal with what I’ll call the “what”, “why” and “how” of trafficking. The “what” difference is really just technical: in the Irish law (Section 1), “trafficking” itself is a neutral term and is not an offence per se. If you give someone a job, or a place to live, or put them on a bus to another county, you’ve trafficked them. It becomes an offence only if you do these things in a certain way (the “how”) and for a certain purpose (i.e. exploitation, the “why”), which I’ll get to shortly.

By contrast, under Palermo “trafficking” is defined by the simultaneous presence of the “what”, “why” and “how”, so trafficking must always be a crime. I’m not sure that this difference has any practical significance (the Irish statute’s broad definition has no relevancy outside this Act), but it’s one of those things that law nerds like me get excited about.

The second difference, which is much more important, is the restriction that Irish law places on the meaning of “exploitation” (the “why”). Palermo states that

Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs…

The Irish law, on the other hand, spells out what “other forms of sexual exploitation” are included, and draws out (without really adding anything) the non-sexual labour provisions, crucially omitting Palermo’s “at a minimum” phrase. So whereas in international law a highly abusive practice with all the other elements of trafficking could conceivably qualify as such without fitting into any of the specified types of exploitation, in Ireland at least one of the boxes has to be ticked before the exploitation can be deemed to amount to trafficking. This isn’t a criticism of the Irish law; if it did include an “at a minimum” phrase, it could probably never be used or a person convicted under it would have a constitutional challenge for vagueness. But it helps to explain why it can be so difficult to show exploitation amounting to human trafficking, even where exploitation in the everyday sense is obvious.

The final key difference is similar; it’s the way the two texts define the “how”. In the Protocol, it’s

by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person

Here, too, there’s a catch-all that can potentially encompass a very broad range of circumstances. It’s the clause about “abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability”. A person with limited migration and/or employment options is almost by definition in a position of vulnerability; a person with the ability to facilitate or deny them access to those options is by definition in a position of power. What constitutes “abuse” is not defined, and is therefore open to a wide degree of interpretation (and ideological spin).

The Irish law adds a significant qualifier to its version of this clause: under Section 4(1)(c) of the 2008 Act, abuse of this type is only sufficient to bring about a trafficking charge if it

cause[d] the trafficked person to have had no real and acceptable alternative but to submit to being trafficked

So, in Ireland the abuse has to pretty much reach the level of coercion before the law is breached. This is pretty clearly an intentional narrowing of the Protocol’s definition, and gives rise to what could be an important question in adjudicating trafficking cases: who decides what is a “real and acceptable alternative”, and how?

Where children are concerned, both the Protocol and the Irish law have a similar feature in that they both disapply the “how” provisions: as long as the “what” and “why” are present, the child has been trafficked. And the Irish law adds a few things to the “what” of child trafficking. I’ll come back to this later.

So after that rather lengthy introduction (I didn’t actually think it was going to be that long when I started it, apologies) let’s move on to the actual report. We’ll begin with the statistics since that, unfortunately, is what people are usually most interested in. Page 8 has a table summarising the data on victims reported to the Department by the Irish police, An Garda Síochána:

Then on page 17, there’s a table of the victims reported to the Department by NGOs:

A couple important things here. First, the report states that the figures in the first table should be assumed to largely include the figures in the second table, although the Department’s Anti-Human Trafficking Unit didn’t collect personal data on the victims so couldn’t be entirely sure.

The second important thing is that these are all reported – not confirmed – victims. In the first table, they are persons whom the police investigated as possible trafficking victims. In the second table, they are persons whom the NGOs (according to page 6)

believed exhibited indications of having been trafficked

In a similar vein, that strange “uncategorised exploitation” category in the first chart is explained on page 3 to mean that

while at the time of reporting there were general suspicions that these persons could be victims of human trafficking there were no firm indications that either labour or sex trafficking had occurred

So regard must be had to the possibility that in some of these cases there actually was no human trafficking. And the figures, of course, do not take into account those cases that were never detected or reported at all. As with every other human trafficking report in every other country, it is really a record of human trafficking (and alleged human trafficking) reporting, rather than being a record of human trafficking itself.

Page 10 gives a breakdown into age category, cross-referenced with exploitation category. Unfortunately all under-18s are lumped under the heading of “minor”; it would be useful to have more information on where the 7 reported child victims of sexual exploitation and 4 child victims of labour exploitation (plus one each of “both categories” and “uncategorised”) fell on the age scale. It’s all the same legally, of course, but I think there are few people who don’t recognise some kind of difference between a 17-year-old and a 7-year-old – at the very least they would call for rather different preventive approaches.

In terms of the child sexual exploitation, recall what I said above about the broad definition of “trafficking” where children are concerned. Just this week we had this case, in which a man was charged with attempted child trafficking after pulling a girl off her bicycle with the aim of abducting and raping her. A horrific crime, to be sure, but not exactly what most people think of when they see headlines like this. Those who are tempted to see those 13 reported victims as evidence of a growing problem of child trafficking (as it is commonly understood) should bear in mind that some of them may have actually been victims of a type of abuse we’re much more familiar with in Ireland.

Page 11 gives a breakdown of region of origin, and there’s no surprise here: around two-thirds were from outside the EU, which in most cases means they had very restricted, or no, access to the legal labour market. This, as I’ve discussed repeatedly, is a major risk factor for trafficking (both for sexual and non-sexual exploitation). Six of the reported victims were Irish, and the article linked to in the last paragraph says that they were all underage although I can’t find that in the report. Nine were EU citizens, but we don’t know from where – and this is very important, because it too would affect their access to the labour market (Romanians and Bulgarians, remember, are still generally excluded).

Page 14 gives their immigration status:

Under the table is this footnote:

Please note that the reported immigration status reflects the status of persons at the time the information was provided to the AHTU and not when persons were reported to An Garda Síochána.

So with the presumed exception of the EU/Irish citizens, we have absolutely no idea what status the victims entered the country with, or what their status was at the time they were being trafficked within Ireland. That’s a shame, because it would be useful to know whether they’re coming in as asylum seekers, on work permits or bypassing border controls completely (by, for example, crossing the land border with the North). It would also be useful to know how many of them entered the asylum system after being trafficked because the possibility of refugee status offers them their only hope for remaining in Ireland.

On that note I’ll turn to the figure for “Administrative Arrangements”: this is the status for people who have been recognised by the police as victims of trafficking, and allowed to remain for a “reflection and recovery” period. At first glance it seems striking that only one person out of 57 has been granted this status. But there are a couple things worth bearing in mind. First, the main effect of the AA status is to give (limited) protection against deportation – so it doesn’t in any case apply to Irish and EU citizens, who have their own protections already. Thus it’s really one person out of 42. More significant are the figures on page 26, on the “Criminal Justice response to human trafficking”. This states that trafficking investigations are still ongoing in 32 cases (out of a total of 53 – some of these cases account for more than one of the 57 victims); in one case the claim was withdrawn; and in 6 they couldn’t find enough evidence to show that any trafficking took place. In such circumstances, the grounds for recognition really aren’t there. So now we’re down to one person given AA status out of 14 confirmed trafficking cases (that’s assuming that those 14 actually are “confirmed”, which isn’t explicitly stated on page 26 but seems to be the implication). And we don’t know how many of these 14 victims were Irish or EU citizens and so not entitled to AA status anyway. There were 15 reported Irish/EU victims in 2011, so conceivably it could be all of them. On the other hand, it could be none of them. Without better data, we don’t know – but we shouldn’t jump to knee-jerk conclusions based on one quick glance at the overall numbers.

The final thing I want to look at is the breakdown of cases reported by NGOs, by exploitation category and gender. Page 17 states that 22 of the 27 NGO cases were sexual exploitation, and one was labour + sexual. Page 19 says that all of the 27 were female.

It would be easy to cynically assume from this that Irish NGOs just aren’t interested in labour exploitation or in male victims. And, in fact, two of the four reporting NGOs do only deal with sexual exploitation, and one of these only works with women. But the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, for whom I have huge regard, focuses pretty much exclusively on labour exploitation and takes a gender-neutral approach. And in fact, only a day or two after this report appeared, the MRCI were quoted on the evening news as saying they’d found something like 167 cases of forced labour in the past few years (I can’t find a link to this news broadcast, so you’ll have to take my word for it). So why did they only report 4 cases of labour trafficking last year?

I don’t have a definitive answer to that question, but I can think of a possible explanation. Quite simply, the Migrant Rights Centre exists to promote migrant rights. And human trafficking is not a rights-based concept. It should be, ideally, but trafficking law as conceived at both national and international levels is fundamentally a criminal justice instrument, aimed more at punishing perpetrators than protecting victims.

From this perspective, the Administrative Arrangements would be problematic even if they were liberally applied. Their main purpose (as you can read here) is to facilitate trafficked persons in assisting police with their inquiries. If and only if the person agrees to do so, they will be given temporary residence permission, but it’s clearly envisaged that eventually (i.e., when the investigation is complete) they’ll be repatriated.

That’s great if you’re one of the (very small percentage of) trafficking victims who was forcibly removed from your home country, and you want to return. It’s great if you left home voluntarily but have since decided that you want to return. It’s great if you harbour such (justifiable) ill will toward your traffickers that your paramount concern is to see them punished for their crimes. But if you just want to get on with your life and achieve the goals that you came to Ireland for in the first place? Not so much.

Since the MRCI deals only with victims of labour exploitation, it’s likely that a lot of them would have arrived in Ireland on a work permit. Although a work permit is valid in respect of one employer only, the stated Department of Jobs, Innovation and Enterprise policy is to allow a change of employer in cases of exploitation. (It’s questionable how well this policy is actually adhered to, but at least it’s an option on paper.) Unlike the Administrative Arrangements, a work permit offers a path to long-term residency and citizenship. Why, then, would a person who was subjected to forced labour – at least one who had a work permit to start with – want to pursue it as a trafficking case? There seems to be very little in it for them.

I could be entirely off base here, but even if this isn’t MRCI’s reason for not reporting forced labour cases as trafficking, it’s still a valid concern. The trafficking laws have little or no benefit for trafficking victims who entered the country on work permits – and by the same token, the DJIE policies which do benefit those victims (when they’re actually applied) are not an option for most people trafficked for sexual exploitation. Some researchers lament that victims of forced labour are much less likely to be considered “trafficked”, but it seems in Ireland they might be better off that way.

I said earlier that this is a report about reporting, so perhaps it’s fitting that one of the only things it strongly suggests is that Irish law discourages certain reporting. It’s hard to draw many other conclusions from the report. Trafficking itself is unmeasurable, but the very limited data provision here really doesn’t help us much in understanding what’s going on. Researchers and activists in this field should demand better information, rather than simply seizing on largely meaningless numbers which make easy headlines while actually telling us nothing.

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Posted in Migration and tagged forced labour, Human trafficking, Ireland. Bookmark the permalink.

Exporting the problem – Irish abortion, Swedish prostitution

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Wendy Lyon

During last week’s Irish parliamentary debate on a bill to allow life-saving abortions in Ireland (it failed), Clare Daly of the Socialist Party stated:

This debate is not about whether to allow abortion in Ireland. Irish abortion exists; it just does not take place in Ireland.

Daly was, of course, referring to the several thousands of Irish women each year who travel abroad to obtain a procedure that is illegal in their own country. As advocates of reform have regularly pointed out, the strict legal regime has not abolished the reality of abortion in Ireland; it has simply exported the problem. In the words of another supporter of the failed bill, Independent member John Halligan, it has simply led to “abortion tourism”.

I thought about this today as I was reading the Swedish government’s 2012 submission to UNAIDS, which among other things “addresses” what Sweden is doing in the way of HIV prevention and treatment for people who sell sex. I use the scare quotes because in truth, the report fails to address this issue in any but the most pathetically cursory fashion, as can be seen from the fact that the government didn’t even bother to collect data for it:

There is, however, a very interesting comment about the people who buy sex, on page 29:

Annual reports from Swedish social workers who meet buyers and sellers of sex indicate that the number of Swedish men who pay for or give other than a monetary form of compensation for sex is increasing. The increase seems to be due to purchase of sex when travelling to places where the sale of sexual services is common rather than purchase of sex within Sweden [21]. HIV and STIs are often endemic in these destinations.

A similar point is made on page 28, referring to “widespread sex tourism”, and on page 19, which says:

Among people born in Sweden, about 45 cases associated with heterosexual contact were reported per year in 2010-2011. A majority of these cases (65%) contracted the disease abroad, mainly in Thailand (60%).

I followed that footnote 21 from the first quote and found this report, a 2011 study by Niclas Olsson for Malmö City Social Resource Management, whose title Google-Translates as Mobility and commercial sex: A report on HIV/STI prevention by person and situation with a particular focus on Sweden, Denmark and Thailand. Here are a few of its more interesting findings:

There is a lot of Swedish sex tourism to Thailand, and it’s not just middle-aged men. A 2011 study is cited by Manieri and Svensson, Sex Tourist Risk Behaviour, An on-site survey among Swedish men buying sex in Thailand. I cannot find the original online. According to Olsson (page 19), the researchers collected questionnaires from 158 Swedish men who bought sex in Bangkok and Pattaya. They ranged in age from 20 to 70+ with a mean of 45; half of them had bought sex previously, and over a third planned to do so before their arrival in Thailand.

Olsson also interviewed a number of service providers, some of whom confirm that Swedish men of all ages are buying sex in Thailand. Jonny Harborg of the Triangle Youth Clinic in Malmö even describes it (page 31) as a father-son bonding experience for some:

Jonny also met with a small number of guys who travelled with their fathers, whose parents were divorced. They have bought various forms of sexual services together with their parent. Jonny says that the framing of sun, sand and holiday in Thailand, where father and son buy sex together is very special…

A significant minority fail to protect themselves and their sex partners.
In the Manieri and Svensson study, 70% said they always used a condom when buying sex, 6% never did – for a total of nearly one-third of Swedish punters whose condom use with Thai sex workers is inconsistent or nil (page 50). The Olsson report goes on to say that the 18-25 group in particular is increasingly travelling to Thailand and coming back with STIs. That’s, erm, not good.

There is a lot of Swedish sex tourism to Thailand, redux. Or at least a lot of wanna-be Swedish sex tourists. Page 46 refers to a Thai sex tourism web forum on which about 9600 people from Sweden are registered. Sweden’s population is just over double that of Ireland (south), so that would equate to around 4500-4600 people from the 26 Counties. I invite Irish readers to imagine the outraged NGO press releases, Seanad Independent Private Members’ Motions, and sensationalist TV3 “documentaries” if it was discovered there were 4500-4600 of us signed up to Thai sex tourism web forums.

Swedes are also buying sex in Denmark. On page 20, it is stated that men crossing the Öresund to punt account for “the largest mobility” within the regional sex trade. This is probably not surprising, however…

Swedes are also selling sex in Denmark, according to page 22. And there is repeated reference (pages 20, 38, 39 and 41) to Thai women resident in Sweden who “commute” to Denmark to work in brothels. There’s no indication that this movement is anything but voluntary, although one wonders why it hasn’t drawn the attention of those who equate any form of migrant sex work with trafficking. Finally,

The “traffic” isn’t all one way: clients come to Sweden, too. A sex worker interviewed for the report, identified as “Lovisa”, says on pages 45-46 that she has had clients “from, inter alia, Dubai, England, Germany, Italy and Denmark”. Page 23 cites the National Board of Health and Welfare as finding that in Sweden generally, and the Malmö region particularly, “there has been an increased internationalization and migration, as the sex trade traffic crosses national boundaries in several directions in a transnational market”. On page 36, Suzann Larsdotter and Jonas Johnsson of the RFSL say they have seen “an increase in international mobility for both buyers and sellers” in the LGBT community, and also refer to exchange students in Sweden who earn their income by selling sex. Clearly, not even the Swedish sex industry is immune to the forces of globalisation.

So what’s the point of all this, anyway? Well, first of all, it can’t be demonstrated that Swedish sex tourism has increased because of the sex purchase ban – if indeed it has increased at all, which we also don’t know (although Sweden’s UNAIDS submission appears to suggest that). Nor is that in itself a reason to reverse the ban. I certainly think there are troublesome aspects to a law that diverts sex buyers to the developing world, especially the objectionable distinction it makes between “our” women and “theirs”, but it’s futile to go down that road when we haven’t got the data to show the law does that in the first place.

The real significance of these reports, I think, is that they demonstrate the failure of the sex purchase ban in one of its primary aims – in fact, its most important aim, according to some of its supporters. It has not had the normative effect it was supposed to have, persuading Swedish men of the inherent wrongness of paying a woman for sex. Even the ones who grew up under the law don’t seem to have gotten that memo: the popularity of sex tourism among the younger age group seems to demonstrate this pretty conclusively.

I expect that the law’s supporters would react to this like supporters of Ireland’s abortion laws. “Just because we can’t stop people travelling to another country to do it doesn’t mean we should allow it in this country.” And perhaps it doesn’t. But it is time for supporters of the sex purchase ban to acknowledge that, as Clare Daly pointed out about Irish abortions, Swedish prostitution still exists. Even when it doesn’t take place in Sweden.

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Posted in Sex work and tagged sex tourism, Sweden. Bookmark the permalink.