Pushing back against the so-called Nordic Model of sex work

I would not want my daughter to be a prostitute in a Nordic Model country. If she was working in an SOOB (Small Owner-Operated Brothel) as they have them in New Zealand that would be a different matter.

If my daughter said she was getting a job as a waitress, I would think that could be a good way to earn some money while she's in her 20s and setting herself up for the rest of her life. If she was still a waitress in her 40s that might be a worry.

There are some people though who are so temperamentally suited to working in a restaurant that it works out well for them. Imagine a waiter or waitress who greets regular customers by name and asks about their families. Very few people are like that. For most women waitressing and prostitution are not good career choices.

There's an interesting documentary by Stacey Dooley. She went to Nevada and talked to the women working in one of the brothels. She spoke in depth to one woman and asked her why she was doing it.

She said that she and her husband both had low paid jobs. She suggested to him that they could get some capital then go into real estate. So she was doing it for a while till she had enough money to set herself up for the rest of her life.

Some people will say that's not the reality of prostitution. There isn't one reality of prostitution, and her reality is more common than you might think. Some prostitutes are drug addicts. Some are coerced. Some are destitute when they begin prostitution, without a job or a home, although they may not stay destitute for long.

Some people will say that prostitution is the most dangerous way to get money. If you are a drug addict death by violence is common. If you are involved in street based prostitution, as many addicts are, you are more likely to die. There are sectors of prostitution though where nobody dies.

How often, in reality, does the "someone else in the flat" not include a pimp? Decrim doesn't stop Pimpy McPimpface from renting a flat and putting four trafficked Romanian women in it. He stands on the door pretending that they hired him as security.

I agree that allowing prostituted women to work only with other prostituted women would improve their safety. My question is how to allow that without allowing pimps to carry on pimping?

What message do your sons receive from you about The purchase of sex?
Have you ever asked them what message they have heard?

Fundamentally, purchasing sex is so … well just wrong… that it is astonishing you are morally ok with it.

Punters would not be the primary benefactor of my activism. Prostitutes would be the primary benefactors. It would be legal for them to have someone else in the flat with them even if that someone was paid or was answering the phone.

It would not be illegal for a cab driver to regularly drive prostitutes. It would not be illegal for a landlord to rent a flat where prostitution occurs. Evictions would be less frequent. If a woman uses some of her profits to improve her working conditions that can never be regarded as 'money laundering' (this does happen).

Two or three women can work together, making the rules for themselves and keeping the profits for themselves. In New Zealand there are many SOOBs (Small Owner-Operated Brothels) where this happens.

The pimps don't like it because the women don't need them anymore. Many punters don't like it because they prefer to negotiate with a pimp rather than a woman. They're more likely to get what they want that way.

And of course, do you tell your sons that prostituted women (and men) are Doing It For Themselves.

Why do you make sure that the people who have the most to gain are the men who use prostituted women and girls? I would have thought that having John’s as the primary benefactor of your activism would give you pause for thought, but apparently not.

People often say would you want your daughter to be a prostitute.

And what's your answer?

Would you encourage your daughter to view prostitution as a potential career choice?

This.

Military service is comparable. Street prostitutes have comparable PTSD to Vietnam vets. Not veterans, Vietnam veterans.

Someone said in an earlier post that "It is inherently unsafe for women to, multiple times per day, go into a private space with an unknown man who has paid money to have sex with her."

That was me. A shared working flat still leaves unaddressed the following issues:

• Exposure to the punter's bodily fluids, with the associated disease risk.
• Risk of pregnancy.
• Psychological damage from repeatedly having sex with a string of men you don't want sex with. Prostituted women have described dissociation during their work. I can think of only military service that carries a comparable mental health risk.
• That decriminalising punting gives a green light to all men to treat women like purchaseable and hireable commodities.
• That decriminalising pimping gives a green light to traffickers and pimps and makes legal action against them harder.

I think you would also need somebody in an 'intimacy co-ordinator' role to ensure that all practices were agreed in advance, and obviously security to protect against any violation of the contract.

The hygiene and safety measures might be a turn on for some clients, but I think the market would be severely restricted.

And what is happening to the people who don't want to agree to these terms? Are they criminals?

What????

Do you think children should be empowered to go up chimneys?

Should people be empowered to work with asbestos?

It is inherently unsafe to sell sex.

I know this is probably a really obvious point, but if men were the prostitutes, society wouldn't just shrug it's shoulders about their plight, as if 'well, that IS basically why women exist, to satisfy men' and 'men have to have sex'.

There would be plenty of funding to deal with addiction, abuse, exit strategies, etc.

Its only tolerated by society because 99.9% of prostitutes are women 😪

Quite - but I think that given the OP is arguing for decrim, the comparator shouldn't be 'how would illegal gangs run it', it should be 'how would this work if sex work really was treated like any other job'.

As soon as you consider issues like this, the whole insistence that 'sex work is work' unravels.

I love your username, BTW!

I asked you if you had read Paid For. I know that a lot of people who mention it haven't read it. It doesn't say what people think it says. It doesn't fit into their narrative of women in prostitution having no choice about what happens to them.

Elis: Irish Call Girl is also about prostitution in Ireland. It is not saying the same thing as Paid For. This is worth pointing out. There isn't one reality of prostitution but also that reality can change with time. Rachel Moran's reality changed for the worse when a new law came in in Ireland in 1993. She was very critical of that law and the suffering that it brought about for women. As well she should be, before 1993 she was able to avoid any form of penetrative sex as a prostitute.

Lots of people think that Rachel Moran is some kind of hero. I have pointed out many of her faults. How she takes false statistics from social conservatives, doesn't bother to check them, then gets to put them in the media and thereby influence policy decisions.

I'll give you another example of that. Do you remember in Paid For where she states that 38% of Irish prostitutes have attempted suicide and 25% have been diagnosed with depression? This is false. The false statistic came from Ruhama who took the work of a researcher and changed it to suit their narrative. The research was of a small group of Dublin drug addicts.

Ruhama campaigned for the Nordic Model in Ireland. Ruhama was founded by two order of nuns, both of which had run Magdalene Laundries in the past. They claim that they only want to help women, but as with Jim Wells they have their own agenda.

When you linked to the Dutch news report, I explained to you why the statistic is false. Most of the 127 women in the report died before legalization not after. Jim Wells was saying in the Northern Ireland Assembly that 127 prostitutes had been murdered in the Netherlands since 2000 when only one prostitute had been murdered in Sweden in the same time period.

Laura Lee researched this statistic and realised that it is false. This is something that Rachel Moran should have done but apparently couldn't be bothered to do. So Rachel Moran gets interviewed on Woman's Hour to repeat Jim Well's false statistic and all Laura Lee got was a letter published in the Belfast Telegraph.

So it does annoy me when people say that Rachel Moran is such a wonderful person that we should all be listening to. You accused the OP of not listening to Rachel Moran and Mia Döring. You were the one who brought Rachel Moran up, not me, so I don't understand your point about me shifting the goalposts. I was responding to what you wrote and I made some important points.

We need to stop arresting women for working together as prostitutes, this is something that never happens in Nordic Model Countries despite what they say but has happened in New Zealand. If women can't work together they either work alone or for a pimp. Someone said in an earlier post that "It is inherently unsafe for women to, multiple times per day, go into a private space with an unknown man who has paid money to have sex with her." Quite right. That's why a prostitute likes to have a friend or colleague in the flat with her. Never alone with a man. That's true of estate agents, health care workers and social workers.

And i don't want that either. But my point is that the alternative to the Nordic model isn't full legalisation. It's full criminalisation. Punters don't like the Nordoc model for their own purposes but they pretend it's for the women. Their fig leaf is women's safety.

I'm happy with the Nordic model. I'm happy with full criminalisation as long as it's only enforced against punters and pimps.

And on the brothel issue. Brothels are very complicated in terms of safety for the prostitutes, safety for the neighbours and pimps pretending it's just qomen working togetherwhen it's actually not that at all. No system handles this well, least of all decrim.

That's interesting, Elishiva. Thank you for sharing this.

Mea culpa. When I said there's a lot to be said for this, I mean criminalise the pimps and buyers, but ensure the women get the legal, social, and economic help they need. You're right, the women shouldn't be criminalised.

I actually agree with you about the women not being permitted to work out of the same flat. This is what Anna Rajmon told the Irish Examiner regarding this.

“I was familiar with the law, and I often argued with the agency. The agency had established protocols for how to handle these situations. They were convinced that as long as there were no drugs involved, no one could arrest us. Perhaps we accepted that as a good enough excuse because we didn’t want to be alone.

You may think it’s ridiculous, but we feared clients more than prison. It had benefits not to be alone.”

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/spotlight/arid-41447593.html

“The new Ipswich prostitution strategy had five main objectives:

• Identifying the Problem: gaining an understanding of the key issues, the extent of the problem, the impact on the local community and the motives behind those involved in prostitution. This helped to focus, prioritise and allocate resources and finances where they were needed most and ensure that the situation was continually monitored.
• Developing Routes Out: by offering multi-agency case conferences for each individual involved in street prostitution and ensuring that drug treatment programmes, health services, accommodation, and other supportive interventions were available to those individuals who wanted to leave street prostitution.
• Tackling Demand: responding to community concerns by deterring those who create the demand and removing the opportunity for street prostitution to take place. By utilising and exploiting all available technology, for example Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) and Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), to provide the police and their partners with the intelligence to support their aims.
• Prevention: Awareness raising and early intervention measures to stop individuals, particularly children and young people, from becoming involved in prostitution.
• Community Intelligence: to respond appropriately to the needs of the communities affected, by keeping them informed of our activities. By listening to their concerns we ensured the environment was kept clean, safe and designed in such a way to deter and prevent street prostitution.”

I will never support the criminalisation of prostituted women.

I accept that treading a line between stopping women from working together to reduce the risk they face and de facto legalising brothel-keeping is hard. My one criticism of the Nordic Model as commonly implemented is that it stops women from working together out of the same flat.

https://nordicmodelnow.org/2025/09/20/how-long-before-uk-jobcentres-move-from-encouraging-unemployed-women-into-onlyfans-to-mandating-it/

https://nordicmodelnow.org/2025/11/03/is-the-dwp-morphing-into-a-pimp/

This has been raised by Nordic Model Now, and there was a thread on here about it.

And in fact which the Government needs to be reminded nearly a decade ago, thanks as much to lobbying by Job Centre staff, it became Government policy NOT to have sex work, sexplotation work advertised, let alone presented to women as a positive career.

However in that period of time Only Fans etc., has become more "acceptable" and suppose this means that now among job centre staff there are some who know think this is not a problem.

No time to check but think there is a campaign or letter writing to government initiative. Check out NMN web site.

https://nordicmodelnow.org/2022/04/05/decriminalisation-of-the-sex-trade-vs-the-nordic-model-what-you-need-to-know-booklet/

There's a lot to be said for this, especially the massive investment in women's services. Make sure they have the support they need so they won't have to resort to prostitution.

If you have a viable alternative to the Nordic Model, present it. But it is obvious at this point that decriminalisation isn't the answer.

The alternative is proper criminalisation. With a massive investment in women's services, including peer support to leave, housing support, MH support, addiction support and DV services. Huge investment in stopping CSA (because a lot of women in prostitution are abused as children).

Name and shame punters and especially traffickers and pimps. Make it socially suicidal to use a woman in this way. Teach everyone that consent can't be bought. A huge police push to arrest punters and pimps.

We can't have punters try to make the debate 'Nordic or decrim'. The Nordic model is already a compromise based on women's safety. If they argue that it doesn't make them safer, then it's back to full criminalisation with severe punishments for the men who sell women and buy them.

You've been shifting the goalposts quite a bit here.

First, you try to imply I didn't read Rachel Moran's Paid For. This was untrue.

Then, you try to say that I claimed Paid For and Anna Rajmon's Elis - Irish Call were the same thing. This was also untrue.

Then you shifted, claiming that the statistic Rachel Moran cited was something Jim Wells made up.

When I provided a news report from the Dutch News service citing the statistic in 2013 (the same year Paid For was published) you shifted again, going on about the late Laura Lee exposing Jim Wells and how you'd prefer her to be your daughter instead of Rachel Moran.

If you have a consistent point to make, do that instead of throwing everything at the wall and hoping something will stick.

If you have a viable alternative to the Nordic Model, present it. But it is obvious at this point that decriminalisation isn't the answer.

It will always be difficult to detect punters, even more difficult to arrest them and prosecute them, and even more difficult to get a conviction. You can't say the police haven't been busy though.

In fact, they have been very busy arresting women too. Consider this from the University College Cork School of Law.

"Even though the Swedish model was supposed to decriminalise the sex worker, the 2017 Act not only failed to decriminalise brothel-keeping but also increased the punishment for this offence. Moreover, the punishment for two or more sex workers working together for safety is far worse than the consequences of purchasing sexual services as this does not lead to a prison sentence and the fines are not as high. The importance of sex workers being legally permitted to work together and the damaging consequences the criminalisation of brothel-keeping has on sex workers will be demonstrated in Section C."

and this

"There is no official statistics on how many sex workers have been prosecuted for brothel-keeping. However, according to the latest statistics on the CSO, in 2019 there were 113 sex work offences. Therefore, considering this statistic with the fact that between 2017 and 2020 only four buyers have been prosecuted, this demonstrates that the 2017 Act mainly targets sex workers."

The reason why there are so many rapes of prostitutes in modern Ireland is because women are not allowed to work together for safety. This has got worse since 2017 when the Nordic Model came in. They claimed to decriminalize the women, but they have done the opposite. It was never a crime to be a prostitute but it was a crime for women to work together. The Nordic Model didn't change that.

That's the biggest difference that decriminalization makes. In New Zealand they don't arrest women for working together. Women can work together, make the rules for themselves and keep the profits for themselves. Pimps don't like it because they start to lose control of the women. That's not how it works in Germany, everyone agrees that the German system - which is not decriminalization - does not work.