Unison voting on ditching the Nordic Model

[SapatSea]

Unison, the second biggest UK union, is due to vote at its national conference in June on a motion to abandon its 12-year policy of supporting the Nordic Model approach to the sex trade and to switch support to full decriminalisation – which would decriminalise pimps, brothel keepers, and sex buyers as well as those involved in prostitution.
Nordic Model now have produced a booklet laying out the issues at stake that you can download at:
nordicmodelnow.org/2022/04/05/decriminalisation-of-the-sex-trade-vs-the-nordic-model-what-you-need-to-know-booklet/

I've just read this on the ‘Decriminalisation of the sex trade vs. the Nordic Model: What you need to know’ booklet.

Significant decreases in the amount of prostitution taking place – during a period it was rapidly increasing in most other European countries.

The proportion of Swedish men who were active sex buyers was 1.3% in 1996. In 2008, the year of the next survey, it was 1.8%. Bear in mind that the law that criminalizes punters came in in 1999.

The proportion of Swedish women who had sold sex at some time in their lives increased between 1996 and 2008.

The proportion of Swedish men who had bought sex at some time in their lives decreased from around 13% in 1996 to around 8% in 2008. This is the figure they usually use. However, they don't tell you that this figure went up to more than 10% in 2011, the year of the next survey.

So the third of these stats is contradicted by the first two, and what's more it is what's called an prevalence statistic, whereas the first is an incidence statistic, the only kind that should be used to try to track changes.

So the evidence is that prostitution increased in Sweden after the new law, then decreased after the 2008 financial crisis. A similar drop occurred in non-Nordic model Denmark during the same period.

These statistics come from this study www.lansstyrelsen.se/download/18.35db062616a5352a22a1d7a5/1559733783690/Rapport%202015-18%20prostitution%20in%20Sweden%202014.pdf

Buying sex is illegal in Sweden. Also being a pimp or brother owner is also illegal.

We don’t encourage prostitution and it’s not a career to aspire to. We know some perverts will still buy it and the goal is to make it so uncomfortable for them that fear of consequences stops these perverts from buying sex.

We don’t want to harm the women selling sex by making them criminals. The idea is to stamp out the demand by arresting these filthy men who buy sex and punish pimps and bordell keepers.

"Buying sex is illegal in Sweden. Also being a pimp or brother owner is also illegal"

Also illegal to work in a brothel as mentioned above. And illegal to rent property to a sexworker (which can result in evictions). And Social Work can judge a sexworker unfit to care for her children because of her job.

"The idea is to stamp out the demand..."

No evidence the Nordic Model actually does reduce demand. It's not exactly difficult to find sexworkers in Sweden either, a quick Google search for "Stockholm escort" shows plenty of results.

[quote SapatSea]Unison, the second biggest UK union, is due to vote at its national conference in June on a motion to abandon its 12-year policy of supporting the Nordic Model approach to the sex trade and to switch support to full decriminalisation – which would decriminalise pimps, brothel keepers, and sex buyers as well as those involved in prostitution.
Nordic Model now have produced a booklet laying out the issues at stake that you can download at:
nordicmodelnow.org/2022/04/05/decriminalisation-of-the-sex-trade-vs-the-nordic-model-what-you-need-to-know-booklet/[/quote]
Does this have NEC support?

The LGBT+ contingent in Unison have had their eye on this for years.

Well I’m not googling for escorts here am I? All I’m saying is that no one encourages prostitution but of course someone women are still doing it.

Yes you can’t rent your property out with the intention of it being used as a bordell. That’s common sense as you will be punished for this.

And yes children services are very strict and a woman selling sex is going to likely be seen as someone not making good life choices and her children might be taken away. They are very strict on child welfare and this would be seen as high risk lifestyle and risk to the child being exposed to things they should not be.

Like I said, we do things to discourage women taking up this profession. No one is encouraging this and saying it’s a good choice and the men are in my opinion are filthy, disgusting Perverts and deserve to go to prison. But I’ve never tried to Google escorts in Stockholm because why would I? So I don’t know how easy it is to find them.

"Yes you can’t rent your property out with the intention of it being used as a [brothel]"

It's still illegal even if it wasn't intentional i.e. if the landlord was unaware their tenant is a sexworker. When/if the police find out a sexworker lives in a rented property then the landlord is told by police to evict the tenant or face charges.

And it's still illegal regardless if it's a brothel or not. (A brothel is 2 or more sexworkers working from the same premises).

"And yes children services are very strict and a woman selling sex is going to likely be seen as someone not making good life choices and her children might be taken away"

This and the above reason might (amongst other reasons) be why a lot of sexworkers and sexworker orgs don't support the Nordic Model and prefer instead to advocate for decriminalisation. People who have somewhere to live and children generally want to keep their home and children.

Christ, who would want to live in a society where it was perfectly legitimate for women to be bought, sold and reviewed like they are something you purchased off of Amazon. Fucking grim.

MargaritaPie is an unerringly regular poster on any thread remotely about prostitution, pushing decriminalisation and lauding the sex trade as terribly empowering and fantastic for women and girls. What kind of vested interest Marg has in this, we can only speculate.

However, we do know that s/he never ever talks about or focuses on the punters — the men who buy women and girls — except, of course, often to note on threads that Punternet is an excellent website.

Those here that advocate the Nordic Model, how do you feel about OnlyFans?

I keep coming across Z-listers like Kerry Katona, Lottie Moss, Megan Barton-Hanson, etc going on about how much money they make.

Stories like this certainly won't help young girls...

www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10722357/Sarah-Jayne-Dunn-rakes-cash-OnlyFans-snaps-does-NOT-need-work.html

@Lynnthesearesexnotgenderpeople

Christ, who would want to live in a society where it was perfectly legitimate for women to be bought, sold and reviewed like they are something you purchased off of Amazon. Fucking grim.

Women are not bought, they provide a service that is bought, just like millions of other women. Modern day slavery does exist, most of the victims are men, and most of the female victims are not involved in prostitution. So if you want to talk about slavery you should talk about them too, and not just this Victorian idea that any kind of sexual activity for money is women or women's bodies being bought and sold.

A lot of prostitution in Britain today, perhaps most of it, is massage with hand relief. Perhaps you want to ban that too because it's all too disgusting. At what point in this service does the woman's body get bought? She uses her hands for massage then uses her hands to bring her client to orgasm.

And make up your mind whether you believe in decriminalisation of prostitutes. Because that's a key element in the Nordic model. Shifting the burden of criminality from prostitutes to their clients, from women to men.

Don't say that you believe the women should not be punished but then say well of course they can't be allowed to work together even for safety. And they have to be evicted from their homes because of course landlords can't be seen to be profiting and of course they have to have their children taken away from them.

It's not illegal for a woman to be a prostitute. It is illegal for two women to work together for safety. That is the main method of punishing them, so if that continues then there is no way that women have been decriminalised. When the Nordic model was introduced in Ireland the then justice minister Frances Fitzgerald doubled the penalties for brothel keeping.

This isn't an issue of what men are allowed or not allowed to do. They will do it anyway just like 100 years ago people were drinking alcohol despite prohibition and people take drugs today despite the war on drugs. I know the Swedish government say they have reduced it but they are liars like so many governments talking about the effectiveness of their policies. This is an issue of women's safety.

Always good to remember that two countries that have decriminalized prostitution (the Netherlands and Germany) have the highest rate of human trafficking of women and girls to work in the sex industry in Europe.

The consequence of normalizing the use of sex workers by men combined with good education and work opportunities outside of sex work for women means demand quickly outstrips supply.

@sanluca

Always good to remember that two countries that have decriminalized prostitution (the Netherlands and Germany) have the highest rate of human trafficking of women and girls to work in the sex industry in Europe.

The consequence of normalizing the use of sex workers by men combined with good education and work opportunities outside of sex work for women means demand quickly outstrips supply.

Wrong.

Netherlands and Germany have legalisation, not decriminalisation.

While you split hairs on the exact legal position (just how many sex workers can dance on the head of a pin, anyway, @MargaritaPie?) I will just copy this across from another thread, with thanks to @EmbarassingHadrosaurus:

Legalized Prostitution In Germany Looks Like A Living Nightmare

When German anti-prostitution advocates talk about the situation of prostitution in Germany, we hear the same responses, over and over: “You’ve got to be kidding!” or “How is this possible?” When we do presentations in other countries, people in the audience will often start to cry or ask for a break after 15 minutes to get some fresh air. The same presentations in Germany cause outrage as well, but we’ve noticed that people have become so accustomed to the situation, their emotional response is subdued.
…
Pro Familia is an organization that advises schools in their sex education materials. Among the material they recommended for teenagers is a book which loosely translates to “Sexual Pedagogy of Diversity”. This text includes suggestions and material for projects in which students are asked to name sex positions and to “modernize a brothel.” In small groups they are to discuss what “services” these “pleasure houses” should offer. Those who protested this kind of content being introduced into curriculum were accused of being “reactionary,” “conservative,” and “prudish.”

fightthenewdrug.org/germanys-legalized-prostitution-industry-looks-like-a-real-life-horror-movie/

Legalisation and decriminalisation are different systems. Here are 2 paragraphs from The New Statesman.

"Some clarification: under legalisation, sex work is controlled by the government and is legal only under certain state-specified conditions. Decriminalisation involves the removal of all prostitution-specific laws, although sex workers and sex work businesses must still operate within the laws of the land, as must any businesses."

"But here’s the thing: these are not the models that human rights and sex worker-led organisations across the world are advocating. The only country to have fully decriminalised sex work is New Zealand. According to research, both street-based and indoor sex workers there report better relationships with the police and say they feel safer. Indoor workers are protected by employment laws and can take employers to court. Contrary to fears, decriminalisation has not led to overall growth of the industry and trafficking has not increased."

www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/10/difference-between-decriminalisation-and-legalisation-sex-work

@nightwakingmoon, noone (or very few at least) advocate for legalisation.

A large number of human rights, health, anti-STD, anti-trafficking, sex worker orgs etc advocate for decriminalisation.

"The only country to have fully decriminalised sex work is New Zealand"

And parts of Australia and more recently, Belgium.

I have been reading the "Decrim-vs-the-NM-booklet-with-references.pdf" booklet. The most serious of the issues that it discusses is the issue of the murder of prostitutes. On page 21 in the section WHAT DOES THE HOMICIDE DATA TELL US? they state that there have been 30 murders between 2000 and 2020 in the Netherlands.

Not long ago the Nordic Model Now site was telling us that 127 prostitutes have been murdered in the Netherlands since legalisation there. Now they are telling us that there have been 30. The facts are that around 127 prostitutes were murdered between 1985 and 2012. Most of them were murdered before 2000, not after.

86 were murdered before legalisation, which means that around 30 were murdered after. The murder rate before legalisation was about 6 per year. The murder rate after legalisation is considerably less. According to the site they refer us to (www.sexindustry-kills.de/doku.php?id=prostitutionmurders:nl) between 2000 and 2009 there were 23 murders, which works out about 2.5 per year. Between 2010 and today there were 7 murders, which works out about 0.6 per year.

So the murder rate for prostitutes in the Netherlands dropped from around 6 per year before legalisation to 2.5 then dropped again to about 0.6. It looks as though legalisation has cut the murder rate enormously. In Sweden there has been two murders since 2000. Yet in the whole of the 1990s there were none. In the 1980s it seems that there were two. So the Nordic Model has not reduced murder rates in Sweden.

Why is Nordic Model Now distorting the facts about women's safety? I think that is disgraceful. Their campaigning is likely to lead to result in more deaths of women.

I missed this thread back in April and tbh I don’t enough about the Nordic Model, however I think if TRAs want unions to drop support of it then it must be something worth supporting.

Anyway, I actually work for Unison and I found out today that they did indeed vote to drop support of Nordic Model. There was some strong opposition and a debate(!) but the motion was passed at conference last month.

Not by the members, not even by conference as a whole but by the LGBT+ caucus only. So a minuscule percentage of Unison’s 1.4 million members voted to drop support of Nordic Model. So much for democracy eh?
Unison is not a union for women.

www.unison.org.uk/black-members-news/2022/06/the-nordic-model/

Unison, the largest trade union in the UK, has formally dropped support of the Nordic Model. They give reasons for this on their link above, this includes acknowledgement the Nordic Model puts sexworkers at greater risk of danger. They also acknowledge the long and growing list of human rights, health, anti-trafficking, sexworker orgs etc who advocate for full decriminalisation.

In 2010 the National Women’s Conference voted to support the Nordic model – in 2018 this motion to continue to support the Nordic model was lost.

Please forgive my ignorance but what is the difference between legalisation and decriminalisation?

I actually live in Germany near one of the biggest red light areas in the country and I can categorically say I do not support the German system. Human trafficking is out of control, women and children cannot wander in the city safely. Sex work is not work. If it is you wouldn't have to coerce/trap/threaten women into it.

Just the other day a woman was witnessed in the local Aldi carpark being forced into a car. It was all over the local news especially as when the police caught up with her it was discovered that she was a trafficked woman who had escaped and was being picked up by her pimps. She was not the only poor woman.

There are billboards advertising all the local brothels here. It's disgusting using women this way it just is. I would far rather we provide health care etc to women but also do everything we can to prevent girls from going into this industry and doing everything we can to get them out.

prostitution.procon.org/questions/what-is-the-difference-between-the-decriminalization-and-legalization-of-prostitution/

“Legalization would mean the regulation of prostitution with laws regarding where, when, and how prostitution could take place. Decriminalization eliminates all laws and prohibits the state and law-enforcement officials from intervening in any prostitution-related activities or transactions, unless other laws apply.”

So under decrim sexworker have more control with less interference by police and the Government. This year Belgium became the first ever European country to decriminalise prostitution. NZ and parts of Australia also have decrim.

Germany has legalisation. It's situation is particularly problematic due to its large dense population and its central location in Europe makes it somewhat of a hub for immigration. They have received criticism for not doing enough to tackle trafficking but are starting to make progress in recent years.

borgenproject.org/human-trafficking-in-germany/

"It was all over the local news"

Link?

Large dense population is problematic is it? You know Germany’s population is less dense than the UKs? I also wonder about how the many different ethnicities and cultures here impact trafficking, if being a geographical hub is known to.

The old right-wing rubbish about women having freedom of choicey-choice should have been dispensed with by now as what us euphemistically called “sex work” is said to have expanded over austerity. Austerity is known to have pushed women out of regular employment. I work with challenging youngsters and have met some of the youngsters taken off mothers involved in prostitution. Many end up on the same path. If you think youngsters born into such deprived circumstances have the same freedom of choice as those born into the aristocracy then you are having a laugh.

Children are considered potentially at risk where prostitution is involved because they are potentially at risk. Yes, it is upsetting to their mums, but anyone suggesting that the risk to the child shouldn't be looked at is forgetting that child protection is about the child first and foremost. When kids go into care it's usually horrible for the parents, and we should empathize, but that does not mean it shouldn't happen.

Social workers come across drug addicts who are often sex workers. They get the impression that this is what sex workers are like. Drug-addicted sex workers are a small minority though. Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon estimated them to be 15% of the total number of sex workers.

It may often be sensible to think of removing the children of drug addicts but I think it would be wrong to think of removing the children of a woman just because she is a sex worker. Also the way to help drug addicts is to offer them well funded rehab, not handing them ASBOs.

You might think that this is available to women in Nordic Model countries but that seems to be rarely the case. In the official report into the Nordic Model in the Irish Republic Dr Geoffrey Shannon has this to say.

"Civic society organisations are critical of the insufficient
resources provided by the Irish State for comprehensive
exit supports for women affected by prostitution and sex
trafficking."