By Esther
This article is based on a talk that Esther gave to a Public Policy Exchange webinar entitled The Future of Sex Work in the UK on 27 March 2025.
“Sex worker” and “sex work” are umbrella terms that include people involved in all parts of the sex industry – from stripping and webcamming to porn and prostitution. They sanitise and obscure the specific harms of prostitution and conceal the power dynamics between women who sell sex, sex buyers, and those who profit from the prostitution of others. “Sex worker” has also been used by pimps and brothel owners to describe themselves.
Whether legalisation, full decriminalisation or the permitted prostitution system we have in England and Wales are regarded as successes or failures depends on whether you take the standpoint of the sex buyer (the vast majority of whom are men), someone profiting from the prostitution of others (most of whom, again, are men), or someone involved in prostitution (most of whom are women).
Here are some random quotes from one of the UK’s sex buyer forums. They are not hidden on the dark web. They are openly available, don’t require setting up a user ID and logging in, and there’s no age verification preventing 12-year-old boys from accessing them.
“It truly is like living in a fantasy world. Walking through a parlour door and getting to pick from a range of girls to suck my cock and be fucked by me. All my teenage fantasies right there.”
“The body and legs is kind of on the flat style, but with a perfect ass and shaven. The only problem is she users her long legs to prevent deep penetration, but I manage to proceed (it seems she is a bit sensitive down there) but if you go slowly, she complies.”
“I not rush you she says, it’s just that I don’t like certain things doing to me. No doubt I will be back at [brothel] as I love the Thai ladies. Might send [brothel manager] a message to let them know how dissatisfied I was.”
“XXXX invited me to her bedroom when I noticed that she looks like under the effect of chemicals. When interacting with her I couldn’t tell if she was just high or simply distant. It is upsetting. She would have great potential!
These and similar quotes suggest that paying a woman for sex acts is peak entitlement of the “manosphere”. What a prize awaits a 12-year-old boy when he attains adulthood! Even state agents will assist facilitators of his misogynistic, porn-derived demands.
People often refer to Andrew Tate as if he were the “Mitochondrial Eve” of pimps rather than a particularly indiscreet one. What he is promoting is not new. It is the age old values and practices of pimps and punters. That’s why the Government targeting online “influencers” is not enough. It has no prospect of significantly reducing misogyny and violence against women and girls if it fails to also address demand from sex buyers and to crack down on pimping.
Consumer protection laws vs. employment laws
Consumer protection laws let you choose to buy or sell goods of a particular description or country or place of origin, such as a 15-year-old Islay single malt or Gorgonzola cheese, and to agree a price based on this description.
But the same does not apply to services, where recruitment practices, terms, conditions or pay rates that discriminate against a person based on race and ethnicity or the other protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010 are generally unlawful and violate principles of equality and human dignity.
These practices are standard in the sex trade. Because the sex buyer is king. If prostitution were legalised or fully decriminalised in the UK, such practices would likely extend beyond the sex trade. Unions such as ASLEF that campaign for full decriminalisation never seem to address this simple fact. How could a union that supports these practices in the sex industry deny them in other industries? What would that mean for other workers?
Health and Safety
UK employment laws, regulations and practices require employers to protect the health and safety of employees.
A common argument for regulating prostitution is to bring it under health and safety legislation so that it is safer for the women. However, this approach fails to consider the extensive harms that these women face and that the punters themselves are the key source of harm.
In any other occupation where there is a risk of exposure to other people’s body fluids, workers are required to wear masks, gloves, goggles, and protective clothing. Condoms do not come close to reducing the risks for those in prostitution to a level comparable with those faced by workers in, say dentistry or nursing, because condoms slip and break, and punters often refuse to wear them.
Condoms don’t protect the person in prostitution from the punter’s saliva, sweat and other body fluids; from damage to orifices and internal organs caused by friction and prolonged and repeated heavy pounding from multiple buyers, day after day; or from their deliberate violence.
It is perhaps not surprising therefore that women involved in prostitution have a mortality rate 12 times higher than women in the general population.
What happens when demand increases?
Austerity budgets imposed since 2010, the impact of more recent increases in the cost of living and ongoing public spending cuts have contributed to a large increase in the number of women becoming involved in prostitution out of financial desperation. As the Women’s Budget Group has shown, every budget since 2010 has benefitted men at the expense of women.
Pimps, brothel keepers and others facilitating the sex industry have been significant beneficiaries of this – particularly the ones making the largest profits, including the big commercial sex websites. Their economic interests are not the same as those of women involved in prostitution.
These big third-party profiteers benefit from a high turnover of women and a supply of women large enough to keep prices low for buyers. This creates competition and leads to women having little choice but to override the boundaries they had when they entered the sex industry and to engage in more dangerous and extreme acts to maintain the same income.
Sex trafficking is the most profitable form of human trafficking and traffickers are incentivised to undercut prices by increasing the number of women they coerce or force into prostitution. Any permitted approach to prostitution is more attractive to traffickers than a system that addresses demand from sex buyers.
Women’s entry into prostitution
Multiple studies show that many women started in prostitution when they were children – usually as a result of grooming or financial desperation. But regardless of what abuse and catastrophes led her there, from one minute past midnight on the day of her eighteenth birthday, she is considered to have made a “choice” to enter prostitution and is typically directed to low-cost “harm reduction” services rather than services that provide pathways to exit and genuine alternative ways of making a living.
From the same time on the same day of his life, the young man groomed by the “manosphere” will be free to pay girls and young women to re-enact scenes from porn without public scrutiny, criticism or sanction.
Challenges faced by prostituted women and girls
Multiple studies show that the majority of women and girls involved in prostitution face multiple challenges. For example, two studies of women involved in prostitution (Breaking down the barriers and Prostitution & Trafficking in Nine Countries) found that:
- 50% were dependent on substances or alcohol.
- 50% were coerced into continuing.
- 52% had debts that made it hard to leave.
- 67% had a criminal record.
- 58% met the criteria for PTSD.
- 89% wanted to leave but didn’t know how to.
Lack of autonomy in their involvement in prostitution and a lack of autonomous and free sexual self-determination during interactions with buyers are a fact of life for most prostituted women.
What buyers pay for is sex on the buyer’s terms. He pays to be in control and to not have to think about her needs and pleasure. This can’t be reconciled with the requirement that sexual activity must be based on free consent. It undermines the principle of consent itself. As these studies show, almost 90% of women involved in prostitution want to leave but don’t know how.
Stigma
Key facts:
- It is buyers and those who profit from the sexual exploitation of others who are most invested in maintaining the stigmatisation of prostituted women.
- It is considered “natural” for male sex buyers, most of whom are married or in relationships, to want to keep their identities private.
- But it is considered “positive” and “progressive” for prostituted women to provide ID or have their involvement in prostitution registered by the state.
Why would it be any less “natural” for women involved in prostitution to want to avoid having their involvement recorded by the state?
Estimates of the number of women involved in prostitution in Germany range from 90,000 to 400,000. However, only around 28,000 of them are registered in brothels with their name recorded by the state. A tiny proportion have taken up employment contracts although these have been available to registered women there for many years. Belgium wasn’t the first state to offer employment contracts.
The number of unregistered women involved in other legalised or decriminalised systems is also large. This suggests that in any “official” legalised system, there is always a sizeable “underground” that operates outside the official system.
Full decriminalisation or legalisation would similarly lead to an increase in the size of the “underground” in the UK. The massive increase in demand that would follow would result in huge increases in the number of women being drawn into prostitution here, with many being in precarious situations which would necessitate being “off the books” or “underground” – for example, because she is in receipt of Universal Credit and at risk of prosecution for benefit fraud, or because she is a migrant without the right to work and therefore at risk of deportation. It isn’t the Nordic Model that creates these risks and pushes women into working “underground”.
The police claim that lack of resources means they are not able to enforce prostitution offences other than those that target women involved in street prostitution – some of the most marginalised and disadvantaged women in the UK. But this is a political and ideological position, as is the decision to prosecute benefit fraud more systematically than tax evasion.
Research has shown that what would deter buyers most, and therefore reduce demand most, is any kind of publicity.
Increasing gender equality as a result of women fighting for and gaining rights to own property, and to access contraception, abortion and divorce, mean that buyers have much more to lose through being identified, or by publicising their attendance at brothels, than was the case in previous centuries.
Very few current sex buyers draw attention to their sex buying status. Men do not mention it on their online dating profiles. They know this would increase the likelihood that most women would choose someone else.
A YouGov poll carried out in the UK in January 2024 showed widespread public support for it being legal to pay another person for sex acts, although there was less support for this from women. While the research also showed support for the view that “sex work” shouldn’t be stigmatised, most people would be upset if their child became involved in prostitution. Few people would be willing to date or enter a relationship with someone currently or previously involved in prostitution, and more people would be unwilling than willing to be friends with someone currently or previously involved in prostitution.
The views of the UK public when these questions are directed at them personally, rather than as an abstract proposition, have not changed significantly over time.
However, the polling companies never seem to inquire about public attitudes towards sex buyers, even though it’s demand from them that fuels the sex trade. They don’t ask whether members of the public would object to dating or being in a relationship with a current or past sex buyer, or being friends with one, or whether they would be upset if one of their children or family members was a sex buyer.
The confirmation bias displayed by the choice of survey questions is revealing. It lets sex buyers off the hook. As Gisèle Pelicot said “Shame must change sides.”
Legalisation vs. full decriminalisation
Under legalisation, prostitution is permitted only on specific terms set out by the state, whereas under full decriminalisation, all aspects of the sex trade, including pimping and brothel keeping are decriminalised.
In theory, legalisation is very different from full decriminalisation, but in practice there are many similarities, including that both result in a massive expansion of the sex industry and consequent proliferation of its harms to cater for the huge increase in demand from buyers.
When there is an increase in demand, the supply of available women needs to increase. Pimps and traffickers then move in to facilitate that increase in supply because not enough women come forward voluntarily. Women who have real options seldom choose a life in prostitution unless they have already been groomed into it by the culture around them or by individual perpetrators.
Both legalisation and full decriminalisation increase the profits of third parties who can drive prices down and increase and maintain market share by oversupplying the market. These third parties then come to dominate the industry at the expense of women involved in prostitution.
None of this increases what women involved in prostitution can earn. Buyers pay much higher prices in Sweden, for example, the first country to introduce the Nordic Model, than in European countries where the sex trade is condoned.
Many German women involved in prostitution when it was liberalised in 2002 were not prepared to accept the lower fees brothel owners seeking to dominate the new market insisted they charge buyers. As a result most women involved in prostitution in Germany now are migrants. In Germany about one million men buy sex every single day and the much lower prices have not reduced the flow of German sex tourists to countries where they are even lower.
Laws against trafficking are much harder to enforce in a permitted system. Resources are diverted elsewhere. Most trafficking goes under the radar. If there’s no support to exit prostitution there’s less risk to sex traffickers of losing access to the income of the women they are trafficking.
The risk to the women involved does not decrease under any permitted system. Illegal prostitution continues. Coercion remains high, often coming from pimps and brothel keepers themselves.
In July 2024 the European Court of Human Rights unanimously held that France’s introduction of the Nordic Model approach in 2016 did not violate Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to a private and family life. The judgment noted that the negative effects of the law described by the applicants relating to the dangers and harms they experienced under the Nordic Model already existed and had been observed before the 2016 law was enacted, probably because prostitution is inherently violent.
So, what is the Nordic Model approach?
The Nordic Model, also known as the Equality Model, was first introduced in Sweden in 1999 and has since been adopted by several other countries. It recognises prostitution as part of the structural oppression of women and other marginalised groups, and as both a cause and a consequence of the persistent inequality between the sexes.
The Nordic Model approach has five elements, all of which need to be implemented:
- It decriminalises selling sex.
- It provides services and genuine routes out of the industry.
- It makes buying sex a criminal offence.
- It includes strong laws against trafficking, pimping and brothel keeping.
- It requires a raft of holistic measures, including a public information campaign, education in schools, and training for the police.
Not all the countries that have introduced the Nordic Model have fully implemented the model or provided sufficient funding and other resources to do so.
What happened in Sweden?
Results in Sweden include:
- A decrease in the size of the industry.
- No evidence it has gone ‘underground’.
- Hostile destination for international traffickers.
- A change in the culture and men’s behaviour.
- Widespread public support.
Numbers involved in prostitution
This chart uses publicly available data[*] to show the percentage of the population involved in prostitution in six countries: Germany and the Netherlands with legalisation, New Zealand with full decriminalisation, and Sweden, Norway and France that have the Nordic Model. This shows that a much smaller proportion of the population is involved in prostitution under the Nodic Model than under legalisation or full decriminalisation. This suggests that the Nordic Model is effective in reducing the size of the industry, or at least in preventing its growth.
What the homicide data shows
This chart shows the number of women involved in prostitution murdered by pimps and punters. It is expressed as an average annual rate per 100,000 female citizens during the years in which the legislative framework has been in place.
This clearly shows that the homicide of women involved in prostitution is significantly higher in New Zealand, Germany and the Netherlands than in Sweden, Norway or France.
This suggests that the claim that the Nordic Model is more dangerous for women involved in prostitution is false.
However, we’re not claiming that the Nordic Model is ‘safer’ for women because we do not believe that anything can make prostitution safe. Instead, it aims to reduce the amount of prostitution that takes place, and the numbers of people involved.
This data suggests that when implemented well, the Nordic Model is successful in this.
References
[*] Population data taken from https://www.worldometers.info. Numbers in prostitution as below.
| Country | # People in prostitution | Total population | % pop in prostitution | Sex trade |
| Germany | 400,000 | 84,242,771 | 0.47% | Legalised |
| The Netherlands | 25,000 | 17,199,668 | 0.15% | Legalised |
| New Zealand | 8,000 | 4,888,873 | 0.18% | Decriminalised |
| Sweden | 2,500 | 10,207,834 | 0.03% | Nordic Model |
| Norway | 3,000 | 5,494,575 | 0.05% | Nordic Model |
| France | 20,000 | 65,520,393 | 0.03% | Nordic Model |