Tag Archives: Sweden

Some thoughts on Department of Justice report on Sweden visit

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

I’ve been looking over the report published this week by the Irish Department of Justice, on the visit of its officials to Sweden last year to examine the sex purchase ban.

I was expecting the worst because, as Stephanie and I noted in this post, that visit involved meeting with a sum total of zero sex workers or representative organisations or allies. Every single person or group they met, at least in an official capacity, was in favour of the law.

Does the report reflect that omission? Well, yes and no. Sex workers’ views of the law are absent from the report, and consequently so is any mention of the law’s significant negative consequences. But that (rather large) complaint aside, it’s generally a measured, considered document with a healthy little dose of scepticism. This is mainly in terms of whether the law could be applied within the Irish legal and constitutional systems, but it also raises a few questions about the merits of the law itself.

The Irish Times has excerpted a lot of the Department’s key concerns here and I won’t repeat them. I did, however, want to single out a few of the report’s passages for attention:

Attempt is considered difficult to prove with the result that, in cases of street prostitution, the police deliberately wait until the sexual act has begun, and the offence has thus been committed in full, before intervening. (page 6)

This strikes me as a strange way to deal with an offence that is supposed to be as inherently damaging as the Swedes and their supporters portray commercial sex as. It’s not unusual, of course, for police to delay intervening in crimes-in-progress for just long enough to ensure the offender has done enough to make himself liable, but it’s hard to imagine that if they believed a man was about to assault a woman they would stand back and let it happen just to get their arrest in. If they did – and especially if they made a practice of doing so – I imagine there would be outrage from feminist groups. And in the ideology of those who support the Swedish law, a man who pays a woman for sex is assaulting her, so where is the outrage? Are advocates of the law simply not aware of this practice, or are they aware but accept the explanation for it, and if the latter then how do they square it with their view about the intrinsically harmful nature of paid sex?

It’s interesting also that the report specifies street prostitution. In the article I linked to yesterday, a man who bought sex indoors was arrested after leaving the brothel; the police listened through the letterbox to get the “proof” they needed for the arrest. This aural voyeurism has been reported before, in this case, which describes the police who listened in as being “treated to a symphony of grunts and moans”. So, no interruption at all there; they let the poor prostituted woman endure her paid rape (as the Melissa Farleys of this world describe it) for god only knows how long. Again, where is the outrage?

it might also be argued that policing operations to target the purchase of sex – which would be a minor offence – would divert law enforcement from operations targeting serious and organised crime, including human trafficking. (pages 9-10)

This is really a serious question. While there are shootings and burglaries and tiger kidnappings going on – and while our police are under a recruitment embargo and subject to the same swingeing cuts affecting all our public services – do we really want them spending their time hanging around outside people’s houses listening to them fuck?

While it was never an intended consequence of their legislation, Sweden’s 1999 ban on the purchase of sexual services was followed by complaints from Norway and its Baltic neighbours about displacement.

Ironically, this has also worked the other way around: in their most recent report on Trafficking in Human Beings for Sexual and Other Purposes, the Swedish police note “mainly in Gothenburg…a marked increase in the numbers of Nigerian women who are being exploited in prostitution, which is considered to be the effect of Norway’s new Purchase of Sexual Services Act which came into force”.

Think about that for a minute: Sweden’s sex purchase ban displaced sex workers to Norway, and then Norway adopted the ban and displaced them right back to Sweden. It is worth asking why, if Sweden is really so inhospitable to the sex industry, they weren’t displaced to a country where buying sex is legal – such as Denmark, which is only a few hours from Gothenburg on the ferry.

the Attorney General might be asked if the Law Reform Commission could be requested to examine the legal and constitutional implications of a ban on the purchase of sex. This could be done in the wider context of a review of our legislation on prostitution and include an international comparative analysis of different legal regimes to combat the phenomenon, not just in the Nordic region.

A visit to New Zealand, perhaps?

The report has two Appendices. The first, “Main Findings of Swedish Evaluation of the 1999 Ban on the Purchase of Sexual Services”, is drawn from the English-language summary of the 2010 Swedish government report. It’s a shame that the Irish officials didn’t read the entire Swedish report, because the English-language summary leaves some of the more revealing material out, such as the fact that the Swedish evaluators consider increased stigmatisation of sex workers to be a “positive effect” of the law.

Appendix 2 is a selection of criticisms of the Swedish government evaluation. These are said to be drawn from “the print media” but there is no further identification of the sources; I recognise some of the quotes from Laura Agustin’s critiques. Again, this is a shame, because the ordinary reader won’t be able to gauge the credibility of those doing the criticising. It would have been useful to point out, for example, that Sweden’s Discrimination Ombudsman, National Board of Health and Welfare, and Federation for LGBT Rights were among those who deemed the evaluation to be biased and methodologically unsound.

But the significance of the Irish report lies not in its power to persuade readers – after all, it wasn’t written for public consumption, at least as far as we know. What’s important is what it says about where the Justice Department’s head is on the issue. And it strikes me that the sheer number of the criticisms it includes – where it could have simply noted that such criticisms exist – suggests that the Department officials were trying to make a point. As I said, a healthy scepticism.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that sense will ultimately prevail. The government is, after all, run by politicians, and politicians are being subjected to an inordinate amount of pressure on this issue. (If the Attorney General decides the law would be unconstitutional in Ireland, how long do you suppose it will take before we start hearing calls for a referendum?) But suddenly the Irish debate doesn’t seem as completely one-sided as it has been up to now. The Irish Times, which has gained a reputation in recent years for refusing to publish the letters of sex worker allies, even ran an ~~editorial~~ opinion piece today opposing the law. That would have been unthinkable not so long ago.

No wonder so many of the law’s Seanad supporters opposed allowing time for a public debate on the issue. When you have a public debate – a real debate, that is – you have to let other voices in.

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“It’s impossible to run a brothel in Sweden.” Really?

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

Just a quickie here (ha ha). In a previous post I questioned the assertion by Swedish police officer Jonas Trolle, cited in this Irish Times article, that it is impossible now to run a brothel in Sweden.

Shortly after that claim was made, this article appeared in the Swedish English-language media about a man who was caught buying sex as…

Swedish police were carrying out surveillance against a suspected brothel in Bromma, a suburb of Stockholm, where they suspected that several Romanian women were working as prostitutes.

More evidence of the Swedish authorities’ willingness to stretch the truth in efforts to persuade other countries to adopt their sex purchase ban.

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Outreach to sex workers and their clients, not abolitionism, saves lives

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

I can’t really believe this isn’t so obvious as to go without saying, but yet another peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet this week shows that outreach to sex workers and their clients – including condom distribution, one-on-one safe sex counselling and efforts to reduce stigma – can make a dramatic contribution to HIV prevention. The study was conducted in a number of Indian states over a five-year period.

Sex work in India has a similar status to Ireland: it’s not illegal in and of itself, although many of the surrounding activities (solicitation, brothel-keeping etc) are. A campaign to criminalise clients was opposed by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and by the National AIDS Control Organisation, which operates under the Ministry’s aegis, for the precise reason that this would impede the fight against HIV/AIDS. In taking this position, the Indian authorities echo the views of bodies from the World Health Organisation to UNAIDS to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, as Stephanie and I noted in this post.

The logic behind this view isn’t difficult. When commercial sex is criminalised – whether for the buyer, seller or both – it hides. The persons involved shy away from social and medical services, due to fear of arrest, of blackmail, of loss of custody of their children, of being treated like deviants. The stigmatisation created by these laws is a powerful force, often overriding even the assurance that sex workers themselves won’t be prosecuted for their activities. This is reflected in a report published earlier this year by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (only in Swedish, unfortunately), which describes on pages 62-63 an interview with a small-town sex worker who admits she does not go for regular HIV testing because of this fear of being identified as a “prostitute” and therefore stigmatised. This can happen even where commercial sex is entirely legal, of course, but there is little dispute among those who work with or study sex workers that the stigma is much greater where it is criminalised.

But that’s not the only problem. Abolitionism is, by its nature, incompatible with harm reduction, and efforts to combat HIV/AIDS often conflict with moral opposition to the behaviours that put people into high-risk categories. This is the case whether we’re talking about sex workers and their clients, injecting drug users or men who have sex with men. But while most western countries, at least, have begun to come to grips with reality in relation to the last two categories, there is still often a stubborn refusal to accept the need to do the same for the first. In Ireland, the main NGO doing outreach to sex workers, Ruhama, offers sex workers cups of tea but not condoms; in Sweden, the Federation for LGBT Rights noted in a report last year (also only in Swedish), on pages 2 and 8, that HIV prevention programmes directed at sex workers and their clients have been blocked because of the state’s zero-tolerance approach to commercial sex. Whatever your personal views of the sex trade, this is fucking crazy.

The evidence that these programmes save lives is so clear that one conclusion is inevitable: to some people, lives are less of a priority than making a “statement” about the morality of the sex trade. They wouldn’t be unique in that view, of course. It’s the same attitude that leads conservative groups to oppose young people having access to condoms, or teenage girls getting the HPV vaccine. But it may go even further than that. Describing the reluctance to adopt measures that could reduce sex workers’ risk of violence, Hilary Kinnell in Violence and Sex Work in Britain theorises at 29-30 that sex work opponents see this violence as a “necessary deterrent”, a warning to people not to enter the sex trade because they might end up dead. If they stop ending up dead, there’s less of a disincentive to doing sex work. And so there’s less of an incentive for sex work opponents to try to prevent sex workers ending up dead.

Some would be outraged by this accusation, but Kinnell didn’t make it up out of nowhere. She cites from a 1977 Observer article in which Polly Toynbee alleges that this was precisely the justification given to her by a Home Office official as to why prostitution should remain “dangerous”. Kinnell writes that “no one would admit that policy is driven by such thinking today” – but this was before Sweden published its 2010 “evaluation” of its sex trade law, which stated that the increased stigma and other negative effects “must be viewed as positive from the perspective that the purpose of the law is indeed to combat prostitution”. This was before Stockholm Police Superintendent Jonas Trolle told the BBC that “It should be difficult to be a prostitute in our society – so even though we don’t put prostitutes in jail, we make life difficult for them.” These comments don’t state in so many words that they want sex workers to face risks to their health and their lives – but since the increased stigma is itself a risk to their life, as indeed are some of the other ways by which life is “made difficult” for them, that really is what it amounts to.

If abolitionists are genuinely motivated by regard for the well-being of sex workers, they need to explain how this can be reconciled with opposition to programmes that demonstrably improve their health and safety. It’s not enough to simply argue that they are trying to take them out of the high-risk category. People within this category have as much right to health promotion as people in any other. That’s not just my personal view; that’s international law.

And if – like their religious colleagues – they do believe that the threat of serious illness or death is an appropriate tool of social control, then at the very least they should be honest about it and stop dressing up their arguments in the language of concern.

Dodgy Stat Diary, Day 2

Posted on October 8, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

The independent Senators have a motion for debate next week to criminalise the purchase of sex, and it’s a Dodgy Stat-lover’s dream. Let’s take it one (loaded) bullet point at a time:

That Seanad Éireann:
• Recognises that the trafficking of women and girls for sexual exploitation is a modern form of slavery and a form of human rights abuse.

Hard to argue with that – though it’s not really that modern, nor are only women and girls affected.

• Notes that the Irish sex industry – which is worth €250 million a year (CAB, January 2011) – is very damaging for the girls and women involved in prostitution.

I can’t trace the source of this statistic. The most recent CAB document available seems to be its 2009 annual report, which says nothing about the value of the Irish sex industry. I note, however, that €250 million seems to be a popular estimate: Googling “Criminal Assets Bureau” “€250 million” I find that precise figure linked to the the private security industry, the Moriarty Tribunal, the IRA and even to CAB itself. Amazing, isn’t it, that such a wide diversity of matters can give rise to the exact same nine-figure estimate?

Just sayin’.

• Notes that internet audits consistently show that more than 1000 women are made available for paid sex on a daily basis all over Ireland and up to 97% of them are migrant women. (Kelleher 2009)

The cite here is to a report I have in front of me titled Globalisation, Sex Trafficking and Prostitution which was published by the Immigrant Council of Ireland and Ruhama, the two organisations leading the Turn Off the Red Light campaign (aimed at criminalising sex-purchase in Ireland). It’s a confusing mishmash of the actual statistics in that report, though those statistics are questionable enough anyway. The report alleges a “minimum of 800 women advertised on the internet in indoor prostitution in Ireland at any one time” (page 109), revealed by “internet searches of websites” (page 84) – but on the only website discussed in the report, Escort Ireland, they found between 387-468 women advertising at any one time (page 85). What other websites did they use? How do they know it wasn’t the same women advertising (for that matter, how do they know the same women weren’t placing multiple ads on Escort Ireland?). There is simply no explanation given for how “387-468” becomes “800” – and there is certainly no justification for the Seanad motion’s reference to consistent internet audits.

The 1,000 figure cited in the motion does appear in the report, on page 33, although it relates to “women in indoor prostitution” (not all women in the sex industry, and not only those who advertise online). Nothing in the report explains how they arrived at this figure. Page 15 cites its sources of information on indoor prostitution as the internet audit, “interviews with specialist frontline service providers” and “interviews with 12 women in prostitution”, so perhaps the extra 200 came out of these discussions, but without proper citing of that figure it’s impossible for the reader to know.

Finally, the claim that “up to 97% of them are migrant women” also comes from the chapter on indoor prostitution. It is not, as the Seanad motion claims, the figure for the sex industry generally. (Street-based sex workers are believed by both sides of this debate to be primarily Irish, as reflected on page 13 of the report.) And where did the 97% figure come from? According to page 86, that’s the percentage of women who advertised on Escort Ireland as non-Irish. On page 23 they allow that the percentage of Irish women over all forms of indoor prostitution could be up to 13%; presumably this is also derived from those non-EI internet searches and conversations with sex workers and service providers, but I can’t find any other explanation for that figure in the report.

Incidentally, I’m not disputing that there are at least 1,000 women selling sex in Ireland at any one time. In fact I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was higher. But that’s just my own guesswork – I’m not trying to pass it off as research data. If I was going to do proper research into the numbers involved in the sex industry (all grant offers considered!), you can bet I would be a bit more careful about my evidence than the drafters of this motion were.

I also don’t take issue with the claim that most sex workers in Ireland are migrants. Turn Off the Blue Light accepts this to be the case, and they’re better placed to know than I am. But it is nonsense to cite specific figures, even within a ten-point range. The sex trade is simply far too complex and hidden to throw out numbers based on data from one internet site and conversations with a few people associated with the industry.

On a final point about this report, I note that page 86 urges caution with the fact that 41.9% of Escort Ireland advertisers are listed as “EU 15 states” (and therefore, presumably, very unlikely to have been trafficked). It notes the possibility that they may actually be from further afield but think “women from Europe have more appeal to men who buy sex”. Meanwhile, on page 23, it refers to the “growing demand for migrant women” in the industry. Nowhere does it put two and two together and consider the possibility that some of those advertising as foreign nationals on Escort Ireland may really be Irish women hoping to profit from a desire for the exotic.

• There is clear evidence of children who have been trafficked in Ireland specifically for the purpose of prostitution. (Kelleher 2009; AHTU annual report 2010)

The cites here are from police and NGO projects in which children have been specifically identified as victims of trafficking for prostitution. The criteria for identification may sometimes be questionable, but this statement is expressed in general enough terms that I don’t think there’s really any reason to dispute it. But buying sex from children is already illegal; I don’t know why it’s deemed relevant in a motion calling for criminalisation of those who buy sex from adults.

• Notes evidence from Sweden and Norway which shows that criminal sanctions for the purchase of sex are a proven a deterrent to prostitution and consequently to trafficking and also to organised crime. (Mc Leod et al. 2008) (Claude 2010).

The only thing I can find that looks like it might be “Mc Leod 2008” is this piece which is titled “Challenging Men’s Demand for Prostitution in Scotland”. Great referencing, there. That report cites from such reliable data as a police officer asserting that Sweden has less prostitution than its neighbouring countries (something that was claimed to be the case long before the sex-purchase ban was brought in), and another report which cites data from the first two years after the law was brought in. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere on this blog, however, more recent data make those claims impossible to substantiate.

“Claude 2010” is this document, and the sole statistic it cites (page 11) in support of the claims made in the motion is a decrease in the number of Swedish men who admit to buying sex, in polls taken in 1996 and 2008 – that is, before and after it was criminalised. Does anybody really believe this is a reliable way to measure it?

Interestingly, the same report also admits (page 14) that “the problems related to prostitution and human trafficking still remain significant” in Sweden, and quotes a policeman to the effect that street sex workers are regularly raped and do not report it (page 15). On the latter page another Swedish policeman states that “Sometimes the work seems hopeless, as there is a constant stream of new women ending up as prostitutes in deplorable situations…I also believe that, sooner or later, what we do for the girls on the street will produce results.” (emphasis added). Isn’t that a tacit admission that what they’re doing isn’t producing results now? I’m actually rather stunned that this report is cited as if it supports the motion.

Finally, contrary to the motion’s implication, neither the MacLeod nor the Clarke report say anything about how the law has worked – or not – in Norway.

• Further notes that International Conventions repeatedly call for efficient measures to deter demand for prostitution, which is recognised as an efficient approach to reduce sex trafficking (Article 6, Council of Europe’s Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings 2005; Article 9(5), UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish the Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children 2000)

The actual terminology used in these treaties is that states shall “discourage the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation of persons, especially women and children, that leads to trafficking”. On the face of it, that may indeed look like it’s requiring states to deter demand for prostitution.

But this is why it’s important to read laws in their full context. Neither the CoE convention nor the Palermo Protocol is about sex trafficking specifically – both refer to the full range of human trafficking, including labour trafficking and organ removal. Articles 6 and 9.5 respectively do not single out sex trafficking from the other types, and thus must also be interpreted as referring to the full range of human trafficking. To read them as requiring states to “deter demand for prostitution” is as logical as reading them to require states to “deter demand for domestic work” or “deter demand for transplantable kidneys”. Exploitation and abuse are the targets of international law, not the exchange of sex for money between two freely consenting adults.

• Proposes that the Government develops effective and appropriate responses to deal with prostitution and trafficking for sexual exploitation. Therefore we call on the Government to introduce legislation criminalising the purchase of sex in Ireland in order to curb prostitution and trafficking for sexual exploitation.

Sigh.

Senators Katherine Zappone, Fiach MacConghail, Jillian van Turnhout, Martin McAleese, Marie Louise O’Donnell, Eamonn Coghlan

In case anyone is curious what bright sparks came up with this text. On your dime.

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Swedish police stats show more, not less, prostitution and trafficking

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

In the latest edition of “Reports The Swedish Government Hopes You Never See”, I’ve been looking over the wonderfully-titled Slutredovisning, prostitution och människohandel (Final Report, Prostitution and Trafficking) published by the Swedish police in February of this year. Although Sweden issues many of its reports in English, funnily enough this isn’t one of them.

The background to the report is that in September 2008, the Swedish government asked the National Police to

att förstärka insatserna mot prostitution och människohandel för sexuella ändamål (strengthen efforts against prostitution and sex trafficking)

and a police strategy was developed toward this end. That such a request was made is noteworthy in itself, since by 2008 the Swedes and their supporters were already proselytising about the law’s supposed success. If the government was having to ask the police to step up the battle, that suggests a certain level of dissatisfaction with what the law was actually achieving, despite their grandiose claims for it.

There are a few passages scattered throughout the report that I could make mischief with if I were so inclined. For example, page 20 states that police in Västra Götaland county (which includes Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city) saw, during the 2008-2010 period covered by the report,

en dramatisk ökning av rumänska kvinnor som såldes för sexuella ändamål i Sverige (a dramatic increase in Romanian women sold for sexual purposes in Sweden)

which of course also doesn’t fit entirely with how the Swedes have sold their law to the world. But what I was really interested to find was this chart on page 45, showing the actual police statistics from the report period:

The table’s title, in English, is “number of reported cases 2008-2010 and percentage change”. The text translates as follows:

Pimping and aggravated procuring
Human trafficking for sexual purposes, total
Human trafficking for sexual purposes with person over 18 years
Human trafficking for sexual purposes with person under 18 years
Human trafficking for other purposes, total
Human trafficking for other purposes with person over 18 years
Human trafficking for other purposes with person under 18 years
Purchase of sexual services
Purchase of sexual acts by children

Now, do you notice anything interesting about those figures? That’s right – they’ve all gone up since 2008. In some cases, they’ve gone up by an absolutely enormous amount. This is a law that deters prostitution and trafficking?

These are only reported cases, of course. The statistics can’t prove that there has been an actual increase in the number of cases. It could be simply that they’re now detecting more of them, thanks to this new “strengthened effort”. But that doesn’t really help the Swedes’ argument, either, because what it says is that prior to that effort – while they were going around the world telling anyone who’d listen that they were winning their war with the sex industry – in fact, they were only failing to notice it. In other words, criminalisation did not make sex work go away; it just drove it underground. Which is exactly what sex workers and their advocates have always claimed – and what the law’s supporters have always strenuously denied. These statistics have to be seen as rendering that denial wholly untenable.

And since the stats only measure reported cases, it isn’t outside the realms of possibility that the number actually is decreasing even while the police are detecting more. But the Swedish haven’t been arguing that it’s possible the numbers have decreased. Their claim is an assertion of fact. It would be a difficult claim to substantiate in the best of circumstances, given the clandestine nature of the sex industry and the additional layers of secrecy that criminalisation always brings. But when the only metric available says the exact opposite of what is claimed, the claim becomes more than “unsubstantiated”. It becomes false – and probably wilfully dishonest.

Thanks to Arman Maroufkhani for assistance with translations.

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Swedish authorities mislead Irish media about sex trade law

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

In ‘Sex in the New Europe’, anthropologist Don Kulick notes Sweden’s vision of itself as the role model for all of Europe when it comes to social policies. He writes (internal citations omitted):

By identifying particular issues as morally clear-cut ones, and by ‘taking a stand’ on those issues, Sweden can portray itself as a kind of moral beacon that others will want to follow…That Sweden could use its position in the EU to influence the policies of less enlightened member countries was a frequently marshaled argument during the referendum campaign for why Sweden should join the EU. Indeed, while the political right maintained that Swedes should vote to join the EU because membership would ‘Europeanize Sweden’ after too many years of Social Democratic rule, the Social Democratic counterappeal was the messianic vision to ‘Swedenize Europe’. Although sober voices warned that ‘[w]e should not fool ourselves into thinking that we will be so strong in the EU as to change 300 million other people’, the hope that other member states will follow Sweden’s lead on issues it holds important continues to circulate in the country: ‘Sweden has to be a role model’ (föregångsland ) as one article put it.

While I agree with some of the policies Sweden has tried to export, and disagree with others, I have no problem on principle with the attempt to influence other states. If you really think you’re doing the right thing, of course you should encourage others to follow your lead. But any marketing venture ought to abide by certain codes of conduct, a primary one being truth in advertising. And it’s pretty clear, from reading some Swedish materials that are not part of the propaganda effort for their ban on buying sex, that “truth” is a disposable commodity in this campaign.

This has been brought home again by interviews given in Ireland this week by visiting Swedish police authorities. Jonas Trolle, head of the crime surveillance unit in the Stockholm Police Department, was quoted in the Irish Times as stating that

If we talk of specific figures, the number of girls in street prostitution on a night in Stockholm would be five to 10. If we talk about indoor prostitution – found on the internet, about 80 to 100.

Trolle’s assertion that the police know approximately how many “girls” (ugh!) are involved in indoor prostitution – which he quite mistakenly assumes is only found on the internet – runs entirely counter to what the Swedish government told UNAIDS in its 2010 submission:

Estimates of the number of people involved in commercial sex in Sweden vary widely and are very hard to estimate since it is mostly hidden and initiated primarily through the Internet or telephone.

The Times also reports Trolle as making the extraordinary claim that “Trafficking of women and girls into Sweden has been almost eliminated” (note that this is not a direct quote). Yet in September of last year, a Swedish police report stated:

it is difficult to estimate how many people may have been trafficked into Sweden in 2009. The number of trafficking victims found in Sweden depends largely on the resources that the police put in to detect this type of crime. These activities vary from one police authority to another and from one year to another. Nor is it possible to identify, or even to locate, all the girls and women mentioned in tapped telephone calls or observed during police investigations.

Referring to Stockholm alone, the same report says:

The information received during 2009 relates mainly to girls and women from Estonia, Russia, Nigeria, Albania, Hungary, Thailand and Romania…The foreign women who are for sale on the Internet in Sweden are mainly available for sale in apartments and at hotels in Stockholm. By preference, the women are sent to Sweden by ferry from the Baltic States and Finland, but buses are also used as a means of transport. Some women are sent to Sweden by air….As regards the transportation of Nigerian women, they are commonly first exploited in prostitution in Italy or Spain and are then transported further by air to countries such as Sweden. An increased proportion of exploited foreign women have been noted, principally from Albania, Hungary, Romania and Thailand. Occasionally, women from Africa are also being discovered.

Trolle goes on to tell the Times (and this is a direct quote), “Today it is impossible to run a brothel in Sweden”. This is a statement with a built-in escape clause, since the meaning of “brothel” itself can vary widely – for example, in Canada any place regularly used for commercial sex is an illegal “bawdy house”, while under English common law at least two sex workers must use the premises. (Swedish law, of course, doesn’t need to define it, since commercial sex is illegal wherever it occurs.) But the report refers to women

exploited for sexual purposes by people paying for sex in places such as apartments, hotel rooms or Thai massage parlours.

Now whatever about the apartments and hotel rooms, would any abolitionist stand over a claim that a massage parlour being used for paid sex is not a brothel?

Trolle’s colleague Patric Cederlof, Sweden’s National Coordinator against Prostitution and Human Trafficking, repeated to RTÉ News at One the denial that sex work had simply gone underground, again completely contradicting what the Swedish government admitted to UNAIDS last year. His defence of this position was that “if the customers could find these persons, we could find them”. By that logic there must be no illegal drugs trade, no child pornography, no film piracy… after all, given the obscene amounts of money being spent to combat these industries, obviously the police must be capable of keeping up with the consumers, right?

All governments, of course, have a tendency to spin the facts to make their initiatives look successful. But Sweden has more riding on this one than most. As Kulick writes in another fascinating piece, ‘Four Hundred Thousand Swedish Perverts’, the sex-purchase ban is the ‘jewel in the crown of Swedish sex law’, the culmination of that country’s attempt to establish an ‘official sexuality’ from which all deviance is pathologised; this perfect Swedish sexuality can then join the list of the country’s shining examples for the rest of the world to emulate. In a sense, the curious thing isn’t that their officials are misleading other countries about what the law has actually achieved – it’s that they ever admit the truth at all. But clearly they aren’t expecting things like the annual police reports and UNAIDS submissions to be picked up in other jurisdictions – and with the deplorable willingness of foreign media to simply report their propaganda without examining it, it seems their calculations are correct.

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Sweden’s sex trade laws: not the answer

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

(Article by Stephanie Lord and Wendy Lyon)

There has been much debate recently around the introduction of the Swedish model of legislation to criminalise the purchase of sex. Championed by a group of well-meaning NGOs, and some with questionable origins, considerable column inches have been devoted to discussion of the benefits of criminalising the purchasers of sex workers’ services. For those who believe in women’s equality and oppose trafficking, it appears to be a safe enough endeavour to support. We are told by the “Turn Off the Red Light” campaign that all prostitution, regardless of consent, is a form of violence against women; that if demand for paid sex is eradicated, prostitution will end; that this is the best thing for women; that it has decreased prostitution in Sweden; that it reduces the numbers of women and girls trafficked and so on. It is unsurprising that people support this. Everybody is against trafficking, right?

But does it actually work? In short – no. In this debate, where you stand on the morality of a person commodifying their sexual services is irrelevant. If the goal of the Swedish legislative model is to eradicate prostitution and end the exploitation of women – it doesn’t work. To date, no evidence has been produced that the Swedish model has reduced the amount of prostitution. Not a single independent review has found this to be the case. Yes, the Swedish are correct when they say that street prostitution has decreased – but street prostitution in Sweden, as in every other country, is only a tiny percentage of total prostitution. As the Swedish Government’s 2010 Submission to UNAIDS stated, “Estimates of the number of people involved in commercial sex in Sweden vary widely and are very hard to estimate since it is mostly hidden and initiated primarily through the Internet or telephone. Although street prostitution does occur it is assumed to be only a fraction of total prostitution.”[1]

This is really not surprising, as criminalisation has never been successful in deterring prostitution in any country. Further to this, it hasn’t reduced trafficking to Sweden either. Consistent Swedish annual police reports confirm that sex trafficking is there and is even increasing. The law is seen as hindering traffickers from establishing operations in Sweden – but they are still easily able to operate from outside Sweden’s borders, which the police say makes it more difficult to apprehend traffickers.[2] It has also been reported[3] that clients are now less likely to report suspected trafficking cases since it may result in them being charged.

Proponents of the law believe that this model will work because many of them have looked to the Swedish government’s own evaluation of the law[4] – a bizarre approach, considering that most would never take it for granted that an Irish government evaluation of one of its own initiatives painted an accurate picture of reality. The Swedish government’s evaluation of the law has been widely criticised by many commentators – including Sweden’s Discrimination Ombudsman,[5] the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights,[6] and the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare[7] – for its bias, lack of research, unsupported conclusions, unclear methodology and exclusion of sex workers’ own voices. The evaluation said that police had no evidence of increases in off-street prostitution. However, it acknowledged that police do not normally investigate off-street prostitution unless it is linked to trafficking – so how do they know the extent of it?

We do know that in 2010 the number of prostitution reports increased five-fold over the previous year, but Swedish police say this was not due to an increase in prostitution but merely to greater resources being applied to tackle the issue.[8] This is absolute proof that there is a significant amount of sex work going on below the police radar.

More importantly, Swedish sex workers have reported significant adverse consequences as a result of the law – including that it has deterred some of the “ordinary” clients who only want regular sex, but has not deterred the dangerous ones.[9] In short, criminalising the purchase of sex in Sweden has meant for Swedish sex workers that the odds of any particular client turning out to be dangerous are much higher. According to the sex workers – as opposed to their self-appointed spokespersons – since the clients are more nervous about being caught, the decision about whether to accept them has to be made much more quickly and without adequate time to assess whether they are dangerous.[10] For them, the loss of “ordinary” clients now means they have to accept clients they would not otherwise accept, including those who demand sex without a condom.[11] By making direct contact between buyer and seller more difficult, the law is also said to have increased the power of intermediaries (or in common language, pimps).[12]

It has been widely recognised in the HIV/AIDS sector that sex workers who are not able to control their working conditions, most importantly condom negotiation, are at a higher risk of infection. This is the reason why virtually the entire global health sector supports the decriminalisation of sex work and granting sex workers occupational health and safety rights. The World Health Organization,[13] UNAIDS,[14] the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights,[15] the UN Secretary General,[16] the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health[17] – all of these have called for the removal of laws criminalising commercial sex between consenting adults, primarily because criminalisation is a recognised risk factor for HIV/AIDS.

It is a mistake to assume that criminalising only the clients removes this risk factor. In Sweden’s UNAIDS Submission, only 18.5% of sex workers reported using a condom with their most recent client.[18] The health and safety complaints raised by Swedish sex workers since implementation of the law are virtually identical to those raised by sex workers in jurisdictions where sex-sellers can also be prosecuted.

The Swedish evaluation acknowledged that sex workers feel stigmatised, hunted and stripped of capacity under the new law – but said this was a good thing since the aim of the law is to combat prostitution. [19] To sell this to the Irish public as something that will stop exploitation of women is a lie. It is, in fact, comparable to saying that drug addicts should have to use dirty needles because it might stop them injecting! Although, while we’re on the subject, this is similar to the approach Sweden takes to drug addiction – it has largely rejected harm reduction[20] in favour of penalisation and abstinence-based treatment – which doesn’t work.

Sex workers have been consistently denied a voice in the Swedish debate. So far, they have also been denied a voice in the Irish debate. Last year, the Irish Department of Justice went to Sweden to learn about its policies and did not meet with a single sex worker or representative organisation.[21] It is a major violation of their human rights to adopt a law that affects their lives without giving them a primary role in shaping the debate.

It is important to understand that the alternative to the Swedish or Irish models is not “legalisation” as found in places like the Netherlands, Nevada, and parts of Australia. Those schemes are aimed at controlling the public order aspects of prostitution, rather than safeguarding sex workers’ rights. A truly rights-based approach would look more like the model in New Zealand, in which most sex work is not “legalised” but decriminalised. New Zealand sex workers made a significant contribution to the scheme’s design, and while the law that was ultimately passed is not perfect, it does give sex workers more rights than any other jurisdiction in the world – including an absolute right to refuse a client or service, protection under occupational health and safety legislation, and the important safety mechanism of being allowed to work together, in pairs or small groups.[22] It is hardly surprising that New Zealand sex workers overwhelmingly respond positively to questions about their rights under the law.[23] The same cannot be said about the Swedish law. Not even the Swedish government makes such a claim.

Everybody wants to see an end to forced prostitution and trafficking. Sex workers themselves are very well placed to assist in this campaign, and their contribution should be welcomed and encouraged. The Swedish law does the opposite: it encourages them to avoid police and social services rather than engage with them. Coercion and abuse can never be addressed by making an industry more hidden and denying labour rights to the people working in it. Just as they would in any other sector, it is the exploiters who benefit when we decide that the sex trade is “different” and so basic standards of labour law should not apply.

[1] Government of Sweden, ‘UNGASS Country Progress Report 2010’ p.63

[2] National Criminal Police of Sweden, ‘Trafficking of Human Beings for Sexual and Other Purposes: Situation Report 9’ (2006) p.18

[3] Ministry of Justice and the Police of Norway, ‘Purchasing Sexual Services in Sweden and the Netherlands: Legal Regulation and Experiences’ (2004) p.19

[4] Ministry of Justice of Sweden, ‘Prohibition of the Purchases of Sexual Services: An Evaluation 1999-2008’

[5] Discrimination Ombudsman of Sweden, ‘Opinion on the Report ‘Prohibition of the Purchases of Sexual Services: An Evaluation 1999-2008’’

[6] Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights, ‘Prohibition of the Purchases of Sexual Services: An Evaluation 1999-2008’

[7] National Board of Health and Welfare of Sweden, ‘The Board’s Opinion on the Report ‘Prohibition of the Purchases of Sexual Services: An Evaluation 1999-2008’’

[8] The Local, ‘Big Increase in Prostitution Reports’ (2010)

[9] Ministry of Justice and the Police of Norway (n3), p.13

[10] Johannes Eriksson (Rose Alliance), ‘What’s Wrong with the Swedish Model’ (2006) p.4

[11] Ibid.

[12] National Board of Health and Welfare of Sweden, ‘Prostitution in Sweden 2007’ pp.47-48