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.

How can women be 'Empowered' to be raped for money?

The Nordic Model was supposed to decrease demand. We know that it has not done this in Ireland. Northern Ireland has had the Nordic Model since 2015. The Irish Republic has had it since 2017. There have been reviews of these laws, they do not show that demand has decreased.

In Sweden there was a review of their Nordic Model law (SOU 2010:49). It claimed that street prostitution decreased by half. Yet a 1995 report by the same state organization (SOU 1995:15) stated that in 1995 street prostitution was already decreasing (the Nordic Model started in Sweden in 1999). A 1981 study by the same organization (SOU 1981:71) stated that street prostitution declined by 40% between the mid 1970s and 1981.

So they can't claim that the Nordic Model reduced street prostitution, because it was already declining, as it was doing in many parts of the world. Also, street prostitutes have only ever been a small fraction of the total number of prostitutes.

You may have read that the proportion of Swedish men who pay for sex decreased from 12.7% in 1996 to 7.6% in 2008 but this is false. I don't understand why anyone would want something that doesn't work. If it doesn't reduce demand then it will harm the women involved in it.

@Dolly96

"As the OP is fond of sticking with Ireland as her example, she should know that two former sex workers - Rachel Moran and Mia Döring - published excellent memoirs that give a grim and accurate picture of what prostitution is like. The OP didn't listen to them."

Have you actually read Rachel Moran's book Paid For? I have. It doesn't say the same thing as Anna Rajmon's book. That's the problem with accounts of prostitution, they say different things. There are different realities of prostitution and these realities will alter depending on what laws are enacted.

Rachel Moran's account of prostitution in Ireland in the 1990s is very interesting. She didn't have penetrative sex for the first two years in prostitution. She just did oral sex - always with a condom - and handjobs.

She only did penetrative sex after 1993 when there was a change in the law that made life more difficult for prostituted and restricted their choices. It was never anal sex. Even then it was sporadic because she preferred and usually got work as a dominatrix.

This was long before the Nordic Model came to Ireland in 2017. So it looks as if not only has the Nordic Model not decreased demand in the Irish Republic, it has also brought about a big change for the worse in the conditions of prostitutes.

Until punters are actually prosecuted en masse there is no deterrent. I've just seen a figure for precisely 1 prosecution for "sex buying" in NI last year.

Men need to fear being caught for the Nordic Model to work. If the police do nothing, it's pointless lip service.

If you're a pacifist you will never be made to join the army. Even if that is the main employer in the town where you live. If you are an animal lover you will never be made to work in an abattoir. If you are afraid of heights you will never be made to work on scaffolding. If you are a Moslem you will never be made to work in a brewery or a bar.

My own experience of unemployment is that I told them I wanted office work even though I had limited experience of that. They never tried to make me work in a factory. I was always afraid they might insist on me taking a job in a call centre but that never happened.

This is what they always say, that it's a matter of enforcement. This is what the review published earlier this year in the Republic says

"An Garda Síochána provided prosecution and conviction data, showing that from January 2017 to August 2024, the ODPP (Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions) directed 161 prosecutions for the offence of "Payment, etc., for Sexual Activity with a Prostitute." The Garda Pulse system also indicates there have been 15 convictions under s.7A up to July 2024."

@JennyShaw

"Have you actually read Rachel Moran's book Paid For? I have. It doesn't say the same thing as Anna Rajmon's book. That's the problem with accounts of prostitution, they say different things. There are different realities of prostitution and these realities will alter depending on what laws are enacted."

Yes, I did read Rachel Moran's Paid For.

And, I never said that it said the same thing as Anna Rajmon's Elis - Irish Call Girl. Of course there will be differences, as they are two different women.

While their specific experiences are different, though, their general view of prostitution as negative is similar.

Another difference is that Rachel Moran does advocate for the Nordic Model. Anna Rajmon doesn't have a policy agenda, she simply shared her story and said she did so to warn young women not to follow the same path.

Both women come to the same conclusion, that prostitution is not a world any woman should enter. And they both know it. That's the reality.

In Paid For she gives her reasons why she campaigned for the Nordic Model in Ireland. She wrote that it would be nothing like the 1993 change in the law that harmed women. She wrote that it has been proven that the Nordic Model has reduced demand in Sweden. She got it wrong on both counts.

She went on Woman's Hour and said that 127 prostitutes had been murdered in the Netherlands in the same period that 1 prostitute was murdered in Sweden. She got this wrong on both counts. It's a false statistic and it came from Northern Ireland religious bigot Jim Wells.

There weren't any prostitutes murdered in Sweden in the 1990s. You have to go back to the early 1980s before you find a murdered prostitute. So for them to claim that the Nordic Model in Sweden stopped murders of women from 1999 onwards is wrong.

What makes you think that those figures don't show a shortfall in enforcement? There will have been way more than 161 punters paying to rape in that timeframe.

This needs repeating ^^ Not sure decriminalisation is going well in Germany for the trafficked women. But let’s think this out…how will it go?

Decriminalisation on Friday. Monday you have a business plan, get investors, draw up a marketing campaign (clean fresh girls, come and get em no risk of being charged), rent a few large buildings, buy in some beds etc and build up your supply chain. You just know that you’ll have loads of customers so that’s no problem. Now what else do you need? Oh yes. Women. Lots of lots of women. Because this is just phase one. Phase two involves expansion and possibly a franchise. Prostitutes R Us. Has a nice ring to it. What else do I need? Oh yes, many many more women. Preferably really young ones because that’s what our customers prefer. Ah so what if they’re under aged. Lots of other workplaces have U18’s. If necessary, we’ll campaign to make that legal too. Rubs hands.

Yes OP I can see why you would support decriminalisation. A real nice money earner.

OMG the penny just dropped for me.

I'd always thought that trafficking was mainly about scamming the trafficked people out of the money they pay upfront for the forged passport, place on the deathtrap dinghy, etc, with a side-order of not having to pay National Minimum Wage to them when they get here. I'd thought that the demand was driven by the trafficking victims themselves wanting to come here and not realising that the people selling them a forged passport or help to be smuggled in would enslave them on arrival. It's not like there's a gap in the market for even more suspiciously-cheap nail bars and hand carwashes. I couldn't see how there would be a huge demand from criminals to import people to be enslaved workers here.

I'd thought that trafficking of prostituted women was basically the same, but with the shitty job or forced labour being replaced with having multiple men rape her every day.

Reading your post made me realise that I was wrong, at least about prostituted women, and possibly about other classes of trafficked people as well.

Trafficking of prostituted women is because there are already too many punters and not enough women willing to open their legs and mouths for them. (That this is the case tells you that women intuitively don't find prostitution empowering, which is supported by the need for pimps to groom girls and young women into taking part. If it was a desirable career, more women would do it.) The ability to scam her out of her savings for a fake passport is the side-order; the main dish is what her pimp can rent her out for once she is here.

Decrim would logically increase trafficking by increasing demand, which explains why the German megabrothels are full of Romanian women.

OP still hasn't addressed the PPE question.

If sex work is work and was decriminalised then it would be subject to the same regulations as all other work.

Who is going to conduct the risk assessment? Who will provide insurance?

I don't think the Hell's Angels and the other criminal groups involved in running the German brothels worry too much about things like that. And it would be the same here.

The 81 have chapters in every country in Europe bar Scotland, because the Blue Angels MCC have kept them out so far. You know what would give the 81 a motive to try harder? Decriminalising prostitution.

There is no way to bring prostitution into conformity with Health & Safety at Work regs. None.

Now ask yourself why these "sex workers" of yours don't merit the same protections at "work" as anyone else.

BTW, most of the "sex workers" campaigning against the Nordic Model are pimps, camgirls & dominatrixes, not the desperate women giving blowies to unwashed & often violent creeps in order to keep a roof over their kids' heads or feed a habit their pimp carefully cultivated in them.

Edited for typo

@selffellatingouroborosofhate Jürgen Rudloff, the owner of Germany's largest chain of megabrothel, was banged up a few years back for wholeslae trafficking of women to service his punters. Until his arrest, he was taken at face value by the chattering class & was a regular on the media circuit extolling the "virtues" of legalised prostitution.

If you don't know of her already, https://ellyarrow.wordpress.com is good on the utter failure of German legalisation to help or protect women (try her Twix if you use it).

At the moment, maybe. But it would only take a hardening of political and public attitudes towards people on benefits for that sort of thing to change.

Yes, especially with how single mothers are already demonised as workshy and sexually immoral. The "reasoning" would be something like "if she didn't want to open her legs in a brothel, she should have kept them shut instead of conceiving her kids", ignoring that widows and women who leave abusive husbands were married to their kids' father at the time of conception.

Maybe OP, just concentrate on UK instead of a country you've never probably been to.

Wasn't there something in the news recently about only fans and the job centre?

There is 'abuse' because men who want access to vulnerable women's bodies come on FWR and pretend to care about women's safety. They just care about their right to women's bodies.

Essentially I object to rapists justifying decriminalising rape so they can do more of it. Stop pretending to care about women if you're happy to have unwanted sex with vulnerable women.

Personally, the nordic model is a compromise based solely on women's safety. If it were me, I'd treat men who have sex they've bought as rapists and throw away the key. Stop arguing against the Nordic model as if it's not a compromise.

OP, stop it with the 'sex work'. Prostitution, please.

Unless you can wholeheartedly say that you would recommend selling access to her body for money as viable employment to your daughter, and would think your sister or mum thrifty and clever for picking up some extra kerbside shifts in the run-up to Christmas in order to supplement their civil service admin role salary, you can stuff your 'sex work' and non-critique of the Nordic Model (what's with the repeated 'so-called' anyway -it is literally called 'the Nordic Model').

You can claim the Nordic Model doesn't decrease demand but how does decriminalising it achieve that? What form of legalising prostitution will ensure women don't get exploited, raped or abused by men who pay for the opportunity?

If the number of Johns diminishes to the extent that OP anticipates then there won’t be any money in prostitution which means trafficking will be less profitable for organised crime gangs and thus the most vulnerable group of women currently engaged in sex work will also diminish.

The less vulnerable, eg the independent escort types who claim to chose ‘sex work’ of their own volition will just have to choose another type of work instead.

50 men buy sex all the time.
48 of them are criminals operating in sex slavery mode.
Nordic model comes into law.
2 men are criminalised for buying sex.
Now 48 men buy sex.
And only the slavery mode of operation remains making it highly visible.

Now the criminality of the other 48 Needs to be tackled before they convert others to their ways of life. .

The nordic model isn't the thing at fault here.

Leaving things as they are just means the 48 convert more people to sex slavery and the other 2 help perpetuate the myth that the 48 are a minority. And the problem never goes away.