Liked the op-ed piece. A woman in the western world may get into prostitution business, willingly, but mostly, through coercion & sex slavery (human trafficking) & stay in the business, thinking she has no other choice.
A business / industry only thrives for as long as there's demand & supply. Prostitution or sex work is such a lucrative business that there's always demand for it, & hence, there will always be supply, which in turn, hurts women, since it involves human trafficking.
If you curb the demand somehow, supply will dry up by itself, since a human trafficker will take his product (women) to markets where there's enough demand to make him/her enough money.
So, what Sweden did is commendable, but it won't solve the problem completely. It may, in fact, drive the problem underground in some places, where chances of sexual abuse is even more. Some may say that Swedish demand went to Denmark or any number of poorer Eastern European countries (Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia etc). In the end, women are abused a lot in this business, from East to West, & from North to South. And there is no consensus of which method works best to completely rid of this world of prostitution.
To completely end this business of prostitution & related human trafficking business, a society needs religion where people know that there are no loopholes to get out of their vices. That society also needs a lot of other things to do to keep women safe, & build a thriving & strong society, centered around family & its values.
On a side note, it's funny usually how people say that this is a modern world & we humans have evolved now. How is it modern? Prostitution is considered one of the oldest profession (or more correctly, business). So how is it that we humans of 21st century have become modern when one of the worst business of yore is still thriving today, at the expense of dignity, respect, & life of other half of the humankind (i.e. woman)?
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Here in Canada, most progressive people hold an enlightened view of prostitution. Since fighting it is futile, we ought to legalize & regulate it. Legalizing prostitution would destigmatize sex-trade workers & increase their safety.
Sweden went another way. In 1999, it passed a law to criminalize the buyers of sex, but not the sellers. Sex-trade workers were encouraged to report abusive clients to police, & given assistance to help them find other lines of work. (Or, in the case of migrant women who’d been trafficked, to return home.) The law is not unlike Canada’s new law, which has been widely derided as unworkable, unconstitutional, dangerous to women & hopelessly reactionary. But then nobody ever accused the Harper government of being progressive.
So how are things going in Sweden? Pretty well, it turns out. Last week, a thick report published by a government agency in Stockholm found that street prostitution has been cut by more than half since 1995. Other studies also indicate that the sex trade has shrunk substantially.
In Stockholm’s red-light district, “there’s hardly anyone there,” says political science professor Max Waltman, an expert in prostitution policy at the University of Stockholm who spoke to me by telephone. Nor is it true that the street trade has simply moved indoors. Prof. Waltman estimates that the total number of sex workers in the country has dropped from 3,000 in the mid-1990s to about 600 in recent years.
At first, public opinion over the new law was sharply divided. Its biggest support came from the greens, the feminists & others in the left-left wing. But today, it has overwhelming public support. Many Swedes view prostitution not as a choice or a moral offence, but a form of male violence against women. They compare it to serial rape & slavery. Last year, when Amnesty International said it planned to lobby for legalization, Swedish women’s rights organizations were outraged.
Nadine Bergquist is a volunteer with Rosenlundstodet, a small group of women who help get prostitutes off the streets. “We think it’s a great law, very necessary, crucial,” she told me. “The women who’ve left prostitution say that without this law, it would have been very much harder for them.” She dismisses the notion that the law stigmatizes them. “They were stigmatized already.”
Across the bridge from southern Sweden is Denmark, which chose to go the other way & decriminalize prostitution. The two countries form a sort of natural policy experiment. By 2007, according to Prof. Waltman, Denmark had about 15 times more prostitutes per capita than Sweden did – many of them migrant women trafficked from Romania & Nigeria. Now that Sweden is a hostile climate for traffickers, they tend to stick to more lucrative countries.
Iceland & Norway – two other progressive, feminist, northern countries – have adopted the Swedish model. But in Canada, the ideologies are flipped. Here, conservatives applaud the Swedish model, while progressives, academics, feminists & the media overwhelmingly ridicule it.
Prof. Waltman, who has been following Canada’s debate closely, thinks these people are seriously wrong. Decriminalization is a failed experiment, he argues. “When the German parliament decided at the end of the nineties to decriminalize, the idea was to make prostitution safer. Women would sign onto social security, & they would be destigmatized, & they would work in brothels & be safe.”
But no one signed up for social security, the sex trade was not destigmatized & brothels, he says, are not particularly safe. Worst of all, prostitution has exploded. “Most women are obviously not doing it by choice,” he says. “Most of them have been profoundly traumatized & want to get out. If you legalize it, it’s legalizing slavery, because they have no real choice.”
That’s the argument that sticks with me. I honestly don’t care if Terri-Jean Bedford operates her house of pain out of her nice suburban bungalow. Most sex workers aren’t her. Nor are they strapped co-eds working toward their masters’ degrees. They’re women at the bottom of the heap, too often aboriginal, who’ve been badly damaged & believe they have no other options.
As Ms. Bergquist says, “Anyone who believes there is such a thing as a happy prostitute should walk down the street with us one night & look these women in the eye. And then I’d like to see if they still believe that’s true.”
A business / industry only thrives for as long as there's demand & supply. Prostitution or sex work is such a lucrative business that there's always demand for it, & hence, there will always be supply, which in turn, hurts women, since it involves human trafficking.
If you curb the demand somehow, supply will dry up by itself, since a human trafficker will take his product (women) to markets where there's enough demand to make him/her enough money.
So, what Sweden did is commendable, but it won't solve the problem completely. It may, in fact, drive the problem underground in some places, where chances of sexual abuse is even more. Some may say that Swedish demand went to Denmark or any number of poorer Eastern European countries (Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia etc). In the end, women are abused a lot in this business, from East to West, & from North to South. And there is no consensus of which method works best to completely rid of this world of prostitution.
To completely end this business of prostitution & related human trafficking business, a society needs religion where people know that there are no loopholes to get out of their vices. That society also needs a lot of other things to do to keep women safe, & build a thriving & strong society, centered around family & its values.
On a side note, it's funny usually how people say that this is a modern world & we humans have evolved now. How is it modern? Prostitution is considered one of the oldest profession (or more correctly, business). So how is it that we humans of 21st century have become modern when one of the worst business of yore is still thriving today, at the expense of dignity, respect, & life of other half of the humankind (i.e. woman)?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here in Canada, most progressive people hold an enlightened view of prostitution. Since fighting it is futile, we ought to legalize & regulate it. Legalizing prostitution would destigmatize sex-trade workers & increase their safety.
Sweden went another way. In 1999, it passed a law to criminalize the buyers of sex, but not the sellers. Sex-trade workers were encouraged to report abusive clients to police, & given assistance to help them find other lines of work. (Or, in the case of migrant women who’d been trafficked, to return home.) The law is not unlike Canada’s new law, which has been widely derided as unworkable, unconstitutional, dangerous to women & hopelessly reactionary. But then nobody ever accused the Harper government of being progressive.
So how are things going in Sweden? Pretty well, it turns out. Last week, a thick report published by a government agency in Stockholm found that street prostitution has been cut by more than half since 1995. Other studies also indicate that the sex trade has shrunk substantially.
In Stockholm’s red-light district, “there’s hardly anyone there,” says political science professor Max Waltman, an expert in prostitution policy at the University of Stockholm who spoke to me by telephone. Nor is it true that the street trade has simply moved indoors. Prof. Waltman estimates that the total number of sex workers in the country has dropped from 3,000 in the mid-1990s to about 600 in recent years.
At first, public opinion over the new law was sharply divided. Its biggest support came from the greens, the feminists & others in the left-left wing. But today, it has overwhelming public support. Many Swedes view prostitution not as a choice or a moral offence, but a form of male violence against women. They compare it to serial rape & slavery. Last year, when Amnesty International said it planned to lobby for legalization, Swedish women’s rights organizations were outraged.
Nadine Bergquist is a volunteer with Rosenlundstodet, a small group of women who help get prostitutes off the streets. “We think it’s a great law, very necessary, crucial,” she told me. “The women who’ve left prostitution say that without this law, it would have been very much harder for them.” She dismisses the notion that the law stigmatizes them. “They were stigmatized already.”
Across the bridge from southern Sweden is Denmark, which chose to go the other way & decriminalize prostitution. The two countries form a sort of natural policy experiment. By 2007, according to Prof. Waltman, Denmark had about 15 times more prostitutes per capita than Sweden did – many of them migrant women trafficked from Romania & Nigeria. Now that Sweden is a hostile climate for traffickers, they tend to stick to more lucrative countries.
Iceland & Norway – two other progressive, feminist, northern countries – have adopted the Swedish model. But in Canada, the ideologies are flipped. Here, conservatives applaud the Swedish model, while progressives, academics, feminists & the media overwhelmingly ridicule it.
Prof. Waltman, who has been following Canada’s debate closely, thinks these people are seriously wrong. Decriminalization is a failed experiment, he argues. “When the German parliament decided at the end of the nineties to decriminalize, the idea was to make prostitution safer. Women would sign onto social security, & they would be destigmatized, & they would work in brothels & be safe.”
But no one signed up for social security, the sex trade was not destigmatized & brothels, he says, are not particularly safe. Worst of all, prostitution has exploded. “Most women are obviously not doing it by choice,” he says. “Most of them have been profoundly traumatized & want to get out. If you legalize it, it’s legalizing slavery, because they have no real choice.”
That’s the argument that sticks with me. I honestly don’t care if Terri-Jean Bedford operates her house of pain out of her nice suburban bungalow. Most sex workers aren’t her. Nor are they strapped co-eds working toward their masters’ degrees. They’re women at the bottom of the heap, too often aboriginal, who’ve been badly damaged & believe they have no other options.
As Ms. Bergquist says, “Anyone who believes there is such a thing as a happy prostitute should walk down the street with us one night & look these women in the eye. And then I’d like to see if they still believe that’s true.”
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