@CharlieParley 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.
And where is the evidence that the model has achieved any of this?
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.
Can you please elaborate? I don't follow. Courts opine on whether something is legal, constitutional, etc. They do NOT opine on whether a certain policy is effective, nor on whether policy A is better than policy B.
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.
Are you talking about Northern Ireland alone, or also Norway and Sweden?
A policy should be assessed on whether it has been working, not on whether it would work in some hypothetical, far-fetched scenario.
Norway and Sweden are among the richest, least unequal countries on the planet. Can they afford to enforce this Nordic model properly, yes or no?
If yes, where is the evidence that it has worked, that demand has dropped, etc.?
If no, then it means the model is a failure, because it would require a level of investment and resources which not even come of the richest countries on the planet can afford.
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.
It depends on how you frame it. You should remember that I did not say that all women choose it freely, and I specifically said that there is a good argument to be made against prostitution if the women choosing to do it freely are very few and unrepresentative.
However, at the same time it is also true that some posters here feel triggered, throw temper tantrums and absolutely lose their shit at the mere suggestion that some women may be doing it freely and/or out of greed.
That's what blind ideological fury does: it blinds people to self-evident banalities.
When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When your only interpretation is that women are always victims, you cannot admit that some women, no matter how few, may actually choose to do it freely.
I have been attacked, insulted, called a trafficker, a pimp and worse for simply suggesting that the women in the Netflix documentary, or the girl in the Spitzer case, who was charging $4,000, were doing it freely not because they lacked alternatives, but because they preferred the easy money to a minimum wage job.
When I then dared point out that men in the same minimum wage jobs do not have an option to charge $$$$$ for OF content or sex work, many posters los their shit. But facts remain true even if you don't like them.