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

[SnugFinch]

Hi. I'm aware that my views might not be the most popular, but I am posting here in good faith.

Many of you know that Ash Regan has been campaigning to get sex work legislation in place which follows the neo-abolitionist model, or Nordic Model. This so-called Nordic Model claims that it will punish buyers of sex work, while not criminalising sellers, and that this will benefit sex workers and stop sex trafficking.

However, this is untrue. By criminalising buyers, it ensures that the only people who will buy sex are criminals who don't care about breaking the law. And because sex workers have a smaller client pool, they have no choice but to put themselves at the mercy of these criminals, and can end up suffering violence as a result.

This so-called Nordic Model has been law in the island of Ireland for nearly a decade now, and it has made things worse for the women involved, and it has done nothing to stop sex trafficking, as the facts in this article (and the testimony of a former sex worker) prove.

https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2025/02/07/on-problems-with-the-nordic-model-of-prostitution/

Ash Regan's bill has been delayed for the moment, but it hasn't been defeated. There is a growing worry that what happened in Ireland could happen in Scotland. And it could extend to England and Wales as well.

Feminists should want to end violence against all women. So why is there support for the Nordic Model, which has proven to be so hazardous to female sex workers?

I'm curious as to what your thoughts are.

Indeed. Had the UK had the Nordic model in c.2003 Mr Mountbatten-Windsor would be in court. Alas, we did not and do not.

What about PPE? In health and social care, you are expected to use disposable gloves and disposable aprons to handle the bodily fluids and emissions of strangers, including, but not limited to, urine, vomit, snot and faeces. If a male has a wet dream during the night, you use gloves to handle the bedding change. You are supposed to use gloves to put moisturiser on someone else's dry skin on their arm.

What level of PPE is standard for 'workers' in the sex trade handling bodily fluids?

Do clients accept it?

Is there even such a thing as a level of PPE that would make 'sex work' compliant with the health and safety regs? Women (and some men) in prostitution are having much greater contact with bodily fluids than health and social care staff. They're expected to allow strange men to have bare skin to skin contact with their bodies. Then the sex acts culminate in men ejaculating seminal fluid into their bodies, whether that be vaginas, mouths and anuses. All of those orifices are extremely high risk for disease transmission because they are lined by mucous membrane, which present a lower barrier to pathogens than intact skin.

This is an incredibly dangerous job, and clients are known to refuse permission to women to use the ineffective level of PPE available (condoms) or to ask if they can pay more for her to not use it.

It's not OK for a man to pay to overcome a woman's "no". And that's what prostitution involves.

Leeds tried, and eventually scrapped, a "Managed Zone" in Holbeck, with street prostitution decriminalised overnight in an industrial estate. The prostitution spread onto nearby residential streets and continued during the day. Several women were grabbed from the street and raped, with their rapists acquitted after claiming "I thought she was a prostitute" in court. One victim has a learning disability. Schoolgirls in uniform were propositioned. Residents found used condoms and needles in their gardens and witnessed men fucking women and getting blowjobs in public. A prostituted woman from Poland was beaten to death within the Zone within a month of it opening.

But sure, decriminalisation is a really good idea. 🙄

If you really want to be sickened, look up "barepunting" and read what the men who pay to rape women bareback say about it. FiLiA quoted a few snippets when they wrote up Holbeck in 2020.

People think that being anti-prostitution is about limiting what women can do. It's not, it's about limiting what men can do to harm women.

It's a shame that Save Our Eyes let their website hosting lapse, because they documented so much of the abuse in Holbeck.

https://nordicmodelnow.org/2019/08/17/the-holbeck-red-light-zone-condoms-sex-offenders-and-cars-full-of-jeering-men/

On 15 June 2021, Leeds City Council announced that it is to scrap the Holbeck ‘managed approach’ zone. However, this article remains relevant because it shows what happens when pimping and kerb crawling are allowed to run rampant.

This is horrific. From your link.

Male violence and rape, and police inaction over these crimes, is also a problem for women and children not in prostitution who live near or enter the Holbeck zone. In 2015, ‘Sally – a young woman with learning disabilities, then aged 17 – was approached at a bus stop in Beeston on a weekday afternoon, bundled into a car, and raped in a nearby home. With DNA evidence, the attacker was quickly arrested and prosecuted in court. However, during a gruelling court case which saw Sally forced into a cross-examination, the defence lawyer argued that his client had simply mistaken Sally for a sex worker, and he walked free’.33

A man walked free after abducting and raping a vulnerable teenager with learning disabilities, because she was at a bus stop in the Holbeck area. So her physical proximity to the managed approach zone was taken as enough evidence of consent to override everything else? What the hell?

I know from personal experience that kerb crawlers feel entitled to hassle any woman who happens to be outside in a known red light district. But that is leagues beyond what I've experienced, and it just goes to show that the Holbeck project did not work.

(If anyone wants to know why I was outside in a red light district, it's because it's also a residential area, and I was walking home.)

If you live in Scotland, there's a template you can use here, to ask your MSP to support the bill:

https://nmnow.org/unbuyable/find_your_mp

What do you think would change your mind on this, if anything?

The rights I mean would be the type of rights enjoyed in Belgium. Official contracts, maternity leave, pensions, sick days - the same rights as any other worker.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ygn31ypdlo

Any other worker is entitled to appropriate PPE to protect them from infectious diseases.
Do you see purchasing sex as fundamentally similar to buying a pair of shoes?

Sex workers who are directly asked will tell you they do better under decriminalisation than they do under the Nordic Model.

https://openaccess.wgtn.ac.nz/articles/report/Stigma_Discrimination_and_Sex_Work_Laws_Insights_from_Aotearoa_New_Zealand_Scotland_the_Republic_of_Ireland/26778190?file=49574457

Trafficking happens in countries where the Nordic Model is in place. Ireland has big problems with trafficking, and it has had the Nordic Model for more than a decade. You're naive to think the Nordic Model will solve that problem.

If there was evidence that the Nordic Model genuinely made women safer, and reduced trafficking, that would persuade me.

But Ireland is a prime example of its failure to do both. The article I linked at the start of the thread details that, and has been conveniently ignored.

Have you ever read the research on the Belgian consequences of decriminilasation of prostitution? It doesn't make a nice read. Things don't improve when legalising sex work. Yes for some, yes in some situations, but as soon as the government tries to treat is as any other job, everything dissapears underground again. Still exploitation, still migrant women who are the victim.
The sentence 'legal sex work needs to be made more attractive' features more than once. Now I am sure the writers meant as opposed to illegal sex work, but the idea is there: make it as easy and attractive and normalised as possible for prostitution to be seen as a valid career choice. Is that really what we want for our daughters?

The only solution imo to women being treated as objects in society and second class citisens is to stop allowing men to buy them. I don't think most women realise the damage prostitution and porn does to the overall mistreatment of women as a sex class.

Did you know that prostitutes sometimes get pregnant on purpose because men pay more for sex with a pregnant women? But hey, at least she gets maternity leave

Well OP, your view is definitely not popular.

I live in Ireland and do not 'see ' prostitution. I know one man who was prosecuted for solicitation - a Garda sting operation - and it is he who is shamed and held to opprobrium even though it is 14 years ago.
It came up this week, his conviction. I was unaware that Ireland's laws were unusual. But the man I spoke with was contemptuous of solicitation. The woman was seen as a victim because so much criminality accompanies prostitution.

Perhaps that is the big difference. The client is the criminal, the prostitute is victim. The transaction is criminal.

You are utterly deluded. Your language “sex work” and “empowering women” shows you up for what you are. Either a hairy handed trucker or a simpering handmaiden of the patriarchy.

There are no circumstances or conditions in which prostitution can exist safely for women or men. Removing the buyers is the best approach to preventing harm.

Good morning,

I might come across as a shill here, but I don't care. I need to say this.

After I logged out last night, I bought and read Anna Rajmon's memoir Elis - Irish Call Girl on Kindle. I finished the book earlier this morning.

After reading what happened to Anna, I could throttle the OP for advocating this "work" as something which should be normalised. I'm not going to respond to what she has posted yet, because I'm still emotionally quite raw from reading the book.

Anyone who wants to understand what prostitution is really like should buy and read this book. Anna knows the reality of this world, and would never have entered it unless she had to. It was the need to support her family that put her there, not any "my body, my choice" rubbish.

It's to her credit that she can write about it so vividly and with a good dose of sarcasm, but she doesn't dress prostitution up as anything other than harmful or exploitative.

If you're pro-prostitution, you won't be after you read this.

If you're anti-prostitution, you'll realise you've been too mild after you read this.

But no matter which side you take, you should read this. You'll learn how this sleazy business really works, and what harm it does, mentally and physically.

It's on Amazon for £6.99 on Kindle, and it's worth much more.

www.amazon.co.uk/ELIS-Anna-Rajmon-ebook/dp/B0D74HK3D5

In Germany where sex workers have rights the same as any other worker, they are made to work whilst pregnant, as the maternity leave doesn’t kick in until they are quite far gone. Doctrines have actually challenged this and tried to get the law changed for them as they were concerned bout the impact of constant sex on a preganang body and the baby. Lao the infection the women were getting from constantly being forced to do anal, then vaginal.
It’s utterly revolting.

The only solution imo to women being treated as objects in society and second class citisens is to stop allowing men to buy them. I don't think most women realise the damage prostitution and porn does to the overall mistreatment of women as a sex class.

Exactly this. Prostituted women are not the only women affected and are hence not the stakeholders here.

In Germany, where they have legal megabrothels, I experienced and witnessed more street sexual harassment in two weeks than I do in the UK in two years. Including two men sitting on a bench outside a public toilet to catcall every women leaving and entering.

That is horrific.

And the fact that the man was allowed to be released with the defense "I thought she was a prostitute" is telling.

Why is it OK for a sex worker to be raped? Are they not entitled to the same rights and protections under the law?

No. They aren't. Decriminalisation helps, but context matters here. It's absurd to say that the man got away with rape because of decriminalisation, when the stigma and low social value given to sex workers is clearly the issue.

You're describing a fetish that women in sex work have to cater to because they are legally reduced to doing so in order to make ends meet, and twisting my point about maternity pay.

I agree with you that everyone should read Elis, but they should not neglect the context. What Anna suffered happened under the Nordic Model.