Movement for the Abolition of Prostitution

What is the Nordic Model?

The Nordic Model (sometimes known as the Sex Buyer Law, or the Swedish, Abolitionist, 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 those who are prostituted

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

2. Buying sex 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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Latest Posts

The Nordic Model Now! submission to the Home Affairs Select Committee’s Inquiry into Human Trafficking.

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A data scientist shows that the official studies into the results of NZ’s fully decriminalised prostitution system provide unequivocal evidence that it has been a total failure.

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Prostitution survivor, Sian, explains why she wholeheartedly welcomes the EU Parliament resolution of 14 September 2023 on the regulation of prostitution in the EU: its cross-border implications & impact on gender equality & women’s rights.

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Sian describes her experience of prostitution as a teenager and its link to child sexual abuse. She explains why the term ‘sex work’ obscures the violence and horror of the sex trade.

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A review of Brook Anderson’s novel, ‘Object of Desire’, which is set in 2031, four years after India fully decriminalises prostitution.

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Sex trade survivor Michelle Kelly explains why she supports the Nordic Model approach to prostitution law and policy rather than full decriminalisation.

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Prostitution Survivors’ Testimony

Prostitution Survivors’ Testimony

The toxic world of ‘sugar dating’

When I first set up an account on Seeking Arrangement (SA), I was 16 years old, broke, and bored. I was a virgin. Never in my wildest dreams did I anticipate that soon I would be knocking on the hotel room doors of total strangers to sell my body.

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.

Alice Glass

“It is hard to unravel ten years of prostitution into non fictional coherence. To put all the years of confusion and compromise and cognitive dissonance and bent consent onto a page. One year (this month, as it happens) after my last ever ‘appointment’ with a ‘client’, I am trying to retrace my steps through prostitution, with the clarity that comes from distance.

‘I remember I would often dream of something better, but deep down I always knew it was a dream’

By Tiarna

Trying to write this is difficult. I never really thought I would but Wahine Toa Rising and Aunty have supported me to be free of a life I never dreamed I could be free from.

Sick of all the ‘Happy Hooker’ myths?

Want people to know what prostitution is REALLY like?

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