The OP misrepresents what the Nordic model actually is.
The Nordic model does not claim to make prostitution “safe” for people in it. It never has. Nothing can. Prostitution is widely recognised, including by many survivors, as inherently harmful. The purpose of the model is to reduce demand, disrupt the market, remove criminal penalties from those sold, and shift social norms so that buying women is no longer treated as acceptable male behaviour. Judging it as if it were a workplace safety framework misunderstands its aim.
On the repeated claim that criminalising buyers makes women less safe: there is no robust evidence for this. What is usually cited are small qualitative studies with self-selecting samples. Those can tell us how some people feel, but they cannot establish population-level harm or causation. Both the European Court of Human Rights (2024) and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (2023) examined research and data provided as evidence for this claim and thoroughly rejected it because none of these papers could show any causation between the Nordic Model law on prostitution and the harms people in prostitution experience.
More importantly, the Nordic model is not designed as a simple enforcement tool. Its purpose is not to arrest as many men as possible. It has normative, declarative, preventative and deterrent aims. Its function is to reshape social expectations, reduce demand, and challenge the idea that buying sexual access to women is acceptable. These effects are not captured by arrest or conviction figures alone. They are reflected in declining demand and in fewer men willing to buy once the behaviour is no longer socially or legally endorsed. That kind of change is gradual and uneven, but it is the core purpose of the model, not a side-effect.
Women are not for sale. Equality of the sexes is not possible if men can freely buy access to the bodies of women and girls because he has money and power that they do not. Male sexual urges should not ever be provided infrastructure by any progressive society. No man deserves that and no woman or girl on this planet deserves that. That understanding is the ultimate aim of the Nordic Model.
The current harm reduction approach, where it exists, simply patches the women up and then sends them back to be abused and exploited. Meanwhile organised crime profits from exploiting vulnerable women and children. How on earth can that ever be thought a defensible, desirable practice in the 21st century?
On Ireland, the Bella Caledonia article, which yes, I did read, treats weak enforcement as proof of failure, but that is not how the authorities themselves interpret it. Across the island of Ireland it is estimated that around 100,000 men buy sex annually. Against that backdrop, arrest numbers in the low hundreds over several years do not show that the law “doesn’t work”; they show that it has not been enforced at scale. Both jurisdictions have acknowledged this explicitly. Neither police nor prosecution services in the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland have argued for repealing buyer criminalisation. Instead, they have pointed to lack of resources, enforcement difficulties, and the need to make the law easier to apply. In Northern Ireland in particular, capacity has been directed primarily at trafficking investigations, with little resource devoted to buyer offences. That is a question of prioritisation, not evidence that the approach itself should be abandoned.
And all the links in that article lead to research that cannot and does not show causation. I'd love an explanation as to how, when the door is closed and the punter is alone with the woman, the law that governs prostitution in their country, is going to make him more violent. The violence does not come from the law, it comes from the buyers. Where is the evidence that buyer violence increases under the Nordic Model and decreases when prostitution is commercialised like in Germany or New Zealand? There is none. Is it the good buyer myth again? Good guys don't buy sex. As a radical feminist I do not consider any man who buys access to a woman's body and thereby uses financial or other pressures to buy her consent as a good guy. Good guys understand that consent must be freely given, enthusiastic, informed and reversible. Freely given means no coercion, no control. Reversible means it can be withdrawn without penalties. That does not apply in prostitution. By default then, punters are not good guys. This is made visible on punter websites, although I don't generally recommend reading them because it is just vile how they comment on the women.
A lot of the debate, including in this thread, also keeps circling around whether some women choose prostitution freely. That question is a dead end for policy. What matters is the distribution of coercion and constraint across the system as a whole, not the most privileged minority within it.
Consistently, evidence shows something like this pattern. A very small minority, often estimated at around 2%, believe they can manage the risks and describe themselves as acting with full agency. A much larger group, roughly one third, are driven into prostitution by serious vulnerabilities such as poverty, addiction, homelessness, time in care, or childhood abuse, usually several of these combined. They may make decisions, but those decisions are severely constrained. And the largest group, often estimated at around 60%, are subject to direct coercion or control by pimps, partners, family members, organised crime or traffickers. They have no meaningful agency at all.
Law is not written for the most resilient 2%. It is written to protect the 98% whose involvement is shaped by vulnerability, pressure or outright coercion. Framing the entire system around a small, atypical minority does not expand women’s freedom; it entrenches a market that depends on the exploitation of the many.
It’s also worth addressing countries often held up here as “better” alternatives. Belgium, for example, is frequently praised as a humane commercial system because women are granted certain labour rights. What tends to be omitted is that the same framework allows a woman to refuse what a buyer demands only a limited number of times per month before she can be penalised by a pimp or brothel owner. Given the number of buyers most women see in non-independent settings, that translates in practice into having real say perhaps one day a month, with punishment attached to the rest. That is not meaningful consent or agency; it is regulated compliance.
Similar mythology surrounds New Zealand. Earlier in this thread it was claimed that, after decriminalisation, “the brothels and agencies collapsed” and that “only 45 brothels were left”. That claim is not supported by the evidence. Before decriminalisation, police estimated around 189 licensed commercial sex establishments nationwide. In the first full year after the law changed, 326 brothel licences were granted, with only 12 refusals. Between 2004 and 2012, around 914 licences were issued with a 98% approval rate. (Those are official numbers from the New Zealand parliamentary library as cited by Nordic Model Now.)
That does not indicate collapse; it indicates growth. In addition, New Zealand law allows small owner-operated premises to operate without a licence, which means the total number of commercial premises is unknown, not reduced. Assertions that agencies and brothels disappeared simply are not borne out by the available data.
Finally, on Anna Rajmon’s memoir: it is devastating precisely because it shows how inhumane prostitution itself is. As Dolly96 told us all, Anna was in prostitution both in Czechia, where there is no Nordic model, and in Ireland, where there is. Her account does not demonstrate that buyer criminalisation caused her harm. It demonstrates that prostitution, particularly when mediated by agencies and third parties, is brutal regardless of legal model. Using her experience to argue for buyer impunity is a strange conclusion to draw from her own words.
Disagreeing with the Nordic model is legitimate. But criticising it accurately matters. At the moment, much of the argument against it made by the OP and other pro-prostitution posters rests on claims it does not make, and on failures of enforcement being presented as failures of the law itself.