Movement for the Abolition of Prostitution

What is the Nordic Model?

The Nordic Model (sometimes known as the Sex Buyer Law, and the Swedish, Abolitionist, Survivor or Equality Model) is an approach to prostitution that has been adopted in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, Ireland and Israel. It has several elements:

1. Decriminalisation of selling sex acts

Prostitution is inherently violent. Women should not be criminalised for the exploitation and abuse they endure.

2. Buying sex acts becomes a criminal offence

Buying human beings for sex is harmful, exploitative and can never be safe. We need to reduce the demand that drives sex trafficking.

3. Support and exit services

High quality, non-judgemental services to support those in prostitution and help them build a new life outside it, including: access to safe affordable housing; training and further education; child care; legal, debt and benefit advice; emotional and psychological support.

A holistic approach

A public information campaign; training for police and CPS; tackling the inequality and poverty that drive people into prostitution; effective laws against pimping and sex trafficking, with penalties that reflect the enormous damage they cause. Read more >>

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Infographic explaining what decriminalising sex work means in practice, along with background information and full references.

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Jenna reflects on a recent interview with Russell Brand and the importance of telling the truth about the prostitution industry.

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Decriminalising “sex work” may sound sensible until you think more deeply about what it means in practice. This article explains why.

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Prostitution survivor, Jenna, responds to reports that Labour MP Samantha Niblett is campaigning to promote sex toys under the guise of sex education.

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Reflections on the ethical failure of telling kids to respect others while our culture soaks them in violent porn and glamorises the brutal prostitution system.

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The parallels, the failure of the authorities & how treating females as commodities that men can trade and abuse with impunity reveals connections with the wider sex trade.

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Prostitution Survivors’ Testimony

Prostitution Survivors’ Testimony

Rebecca Mott

I speak as a radical exited woman who cannot debate when I see and know of a constant genocide of the prostituted class being made normal. This is a genocide that is made invisible by the sex trade profiteers who will replace the dead or discarded prostituted by yet more vulnerable women and girls.

Body Shell Girl by Rose Hunter

I was in the sex industry for ten years, including brothel, escort, massage parlours and outcall massage, with the majority of my time spent in those last two. My experience was mostly in Canada, where I was living at the time.

Liliam Altuntas

I know what it means to hide your past… a past full of mistakes.

Sometimes not even your family want to talk to you. Nobody wants to talk to someone who does drugs, who steals, who constantly tells lies, to hear about the person I was…

Michelle Mara

Michelle Mara started in prostitution in New Zealand when the sex trade was illegal and she continued after it was fully decriminalised there in 2003.

In the 90s I worked at quite a few brothels. The police used to take our names off a register that the brothel kept.

Sick of all the ‘Happy Hooker’ myths?

Want people to know what prostitution is REALLY like?

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