by NMN
Bookmark

The Nordic Model as progressive and holistic solution to intractable social problems

By Amanda Quick

Today and throughout history, prostitution has been marked by extensive violence, exploitation, coercion and trafficking. Advocates argue that much of this harm stems from criminalisation and stigma rather than from sex work itself. As someone who has firsthand experience of prostitution, I know that these advocates are misguided. Prostitution is inherently harmful.

It was my determination to explain this that led me to agree to give oral evidence to the Criminal Justice Committee in the Scottish Parliament in October as they were scrutinising Ash Regan’s ‘Unbuyable’ bill, which if passed would bring the Nordic Model to Scotland.

In this article I explain why I vehemently support the Nordic Model, how it was for me giving evidence to the committee, and more about what prostitution is really like and how it impacts the women directly involved, but also the men buying and their wives and partners, and the kids growing up around them.

Why I support the Nordic Model: Part 1

Prostitution generates a power imbalance between buyers (who are almost exclusively male) and sellers (who are mostly female). When society accepts men’s right to pay to use and abuse women sexually, it reinforces and entrenches the existing power hierarchies between men and women, rich and poor, old and young, and between other groups based on ethnicity and ability, for example. It also normalises directing violence at women and other marginalised groups.

The Nordic Model aims to make it clear that society does not accept this and is determined to change these harmful and outdated dynamics.

The Nordic Model aims to reduce harm to the individuals concerned by decriminalising selling sex, so those involved can seek assistance from the police without fear of arrest. This and the expunging of any previous criminal records for soliciting makes it easier for them to access alternative work. In recognition that most women selling sex desperately want out of the industry but often effectively become trapped within it, the Nordic Model provides high quality services that include practical assistance to leave the industry.

The Nordic Model also criminalises buying sex and/or paraphilic acts which cause harm to the seller, with the aim of changing the culture and reducing the violence that has become endemic.

I am desperately concerned about the connections between prostitution and the increasing, broadening violence against women, and others – men, young people and children alike. My deep concern about this accelerating trend and its impact on kids and young people in particular compels me to speak out about my past and the trauma it involved.

I am not alone in experiencing prostitution as harmful

I have no financial gain to show for the prostitution I eventually escaped. It’s true it put food on the table at the time and it paid for drugs and more drugs to blank out the pain of what I was doing. I know I wasn’t alone in this. Research has found that this is common. One study found that 80.6% of women involved in prostitution experienced increased drug use when they started selling sex.

“… you’ll get into a routine of having to have drugs to see clients and it’s a downward spiral. It’s like you do coke in order to escort, and if you’re escorting all the time, you’re doing coke all the time.” – Cassie, from Inside Outside

The Scottish organisation, CSE Aware, reports that a study found that 41% of women with experience of the sex industry had had suicidal ideation or attempted suicide, while 26% had harmed themselves. Stealthing (the surreptitious removal of condoms) is common and so are men refusing to wear one at all. The question of consent and safety are never far away.

Most women in prostitution are there due to economic desperation, not free choice. The industry disproportionately affects already marginalised women, poor women, women of colour, indigenous women, and some men, particularly young men.

Does a woman who is using drugs or who is suicidal have the capacity to consent to sex with a stranger? Does she have the capacity to keep herself safe behind a closed door?

On giving evidence

My concern for today’s children and young people compels me to speak out about my past and the trauma it involved. But doing so comes with an emotional cost.

In Edinburgh I spoke to the Criminal Justice Committee. I was driven to do this because of my concern for children and young people and my determination to counteract the trend of selfishness that now seems dominant in our society, in the hope that I am no longer complicit in the darkness, infidelity, secrets and lies. I will no longer be a bystander to the large number of women, who are either selling sex or sat at home whilst their partner or husband is orgasming in another woman, who in turn is where she is because she has little choice or alternative.

What else can I do besides speak of my own experience, to tell the truth about what really happens behind the mysterious, classist, and glamourised facades that are presented by those in whose best interest it is to keep the sex trade as the “oldest profession in town”?

I had no idea what the committee would ask me before I got there. One of the things they asked was whether criminalising men causes harm and increased violence. Giving a succinct answer in a few minutes, without messing it up, felt impossible. In the intensity of the moment, I found myself feeling sad, confused and scared. I want the best for children and women. But I also want the right thing for the men who buy and the women who sell. That is a part of me, which speaks with an understanding that prostitution is not a good idea.

I revealed an important tension when I said the Nordic Model cannot keep woman safe because nothing can make prostitution safe. Prostitution itself is something many people need to “escape” from, which contradicts the idea of sex work as legitimate work.

Work experience in a brothel?

I discussed the idea of a 16-year-old doing “work experience” in a brothel. What would that involve? You could talk through the acts that you’d be required to perform and to tolerate being done to you, consent, how to watch out for stealthing, and how to navigate a “client” who wants something that you refused but continues to try his “luck”. Anal possibly.

Maybe we could raise the age of the hypothetical work experience young person to 18. But either way, if we consider “sex work” to be just regular work, someone should be having conversations with young people about the ethical dilemmas of buying sex.

Would the 16 or 18-year-old want to have sex with one stranger per day or six? Would you need a “manager” pimp, male or female, who will take at least 30% of what you are paid?

Would someone teach about contracting herpes, which cannot be prevented through using a condom, not forgetting those that stealth.

How do you send a 16 or 18-year-old young man to buy sex? Do you say it’s OK if you are single or gain your partner’s consent? Or do you explain that you should keep secrets from your boyfriend or girlfriend?

Is buying sex part of pre-marital or relational discussions?

Do I sound mad or as if I am taking things out of context? If I sound mad, that’s because it is. That’s because normalising sex work as everyday work is madness.

One cannot simultaneously argue that sex work is legitimate labour, deserving of rights – and ‘safety’ policies that work to keep people in dangerous situations. These premises contradict each other. It’s an oxymoron.

Why I support the Nordic Model: Part 2

Research shows that sex buyers tend to hold more hostile attitudes toward women generally. My experience supports this. I also know that buying sex increases when it is normalised, with the corollary that violence against women is also normalised. The current cultural normalisation of the sex industry is leading to a point where men increasingly have no hope of forming or sustaining healthy relationships.

When we treat buying sexual access to marginalised women and young people as ordinary commerce, it sends out messages that women are commodities for the taking, that consent is purchasable, and that men’s sexual entitlement trumps all. We desperately need an antidote to this – a huge cultural shift – and this is the aim of criminalising the sex buyer.

Like laws against drink driving and murder, the Nordic Model aims to make the socially harmful behaviour of paying to use and abuse other usually less fortunate human beings legally and morally unacceptable. A step to help people understand that the “boys will be boys” narrative is harmful and unacceptable.

The drink driving laws work in a parallel way. Not just through legal consequences, but by making the behaviour socially taboo, shifting the conversation away from personal choice to public harm. Framing and creating a clear moral consensus over time. The law itself serves as a teaching tool and the same thing would apply if we criminalised sex buying. The logic suggests that if buying sex is legal, society signals it’s acceptable. Criminalisation declares it is not.

Long-lasting harms

“You’re constantly in fight or flight. . . Loads of people get killed in this [sex] industry and you know that but you take that risk because of the money, but you still know in the back of your mind all the time that if somebody walks through your door, they could potentially be the person that’s going to murder you.” – Woman involved in selling sex, quoted in a CSE Aware report on Trauma-Informed Support.

Multiple studies[*] show that women who sell sex experience high rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and violence and harm, at levels comparable to combat veterans. Most women enter prostitution due to economic desperation, childhood sexual trauma, and/or coercion. Choice in conditions of poverty or abuse isn’t really a choice. We need to understand that there’s a very small percentage who may genuinely choose prostitution and a much larger population who have little or no choice and who are harmed by it. Those harmed are typically silenced.

Policy debates often conflate these groups, as I saw in Scotland. I want to strengthen the argument that prostitution is harmful and something most want to escape.

I thought it was important to mention what the research shows, alongside my lived experience. The evidence on psychological harm is stark, not only extremely high rates of PTSD, but also dissociation, depression and anxiety. Also physical ill health, such as fibromyalgia, ME, gynaecological problems, and many other immunosuppressive illnesses.

The violence isn’t occasional, it’s an “occupational” hazard. A guarantee. It’s systematic and I’m pointing to something much darker than individual acts of “sex”.

Social harms

Commodifying sexual access to (mostly) women shapes broader social attitudes about women’s bodies, consent and humanity. The harm isn’t just what happens to individual women in prostitution, it’s what normalising the purchase of sexual access does to our collective understanding of whether women’s bodies can or should be bought; what men are entitled to; whether consent can be commodified; the boundaries between persons and property. This reinforces a system built on gendered inequality and violence.

The individual transaction can’t be separated from the structural context. The liberal idea that sex work is like any other work is fatally flawed. Prostitution is categorically different from regular work because it involves intimate access to the body and operates within broader patterns of male violence and entitlement towards women.

The Nordic Model isn’t just about criminalising men, it’s about refusing to legitimise a practise that fundamentally undermines all women’s equal personhood. In this perspective, the Nordic Model is part of a broader challenge to men’s sense of entitlement.

Conclusion

I articulate several interconnected harms. The compounding violation of men purchasing orgasm and sexual gratification. A violation of the broader harm to women in relationships, the normalisation that men’s sexual satisfaction trumps women’s rights to safety and dignity undermines fidelity, trust and equality in partnerships. It is profoundly damaging for children to grow up in a culture that teaches these values about women, consent and gender.

When we frame prostitution as sexual freedom, we’re really talking about men’s freedom to access women’s bodies, while the woman in prostitution typically has no freedom as she is and has been economically coerced, and usually sexually abused as a child, and likely using drugs to regulate or numb her emotions.

Performance of desire isn’t freedom, it’s survival. Real sexual freedom would mean genuine desire, genuine consent, and genuine mutuality.

Prostitution is a commercial transaction built on desperation. Sex buying correlates with relationship infidelity and instability. It promotes the view that women are commodities, which affects how children understand relationships. Partners of sex buyers report trauma betrayal and feeling their humanity was denied. Relationships break down, and even fail to start in today’s culture.

Looked at like this, the Nordic Model isn’t restricting freedom. Rather it is refusing to call exploitation freedom. It is protecting the conditions for actual intimate mutuality, equality and dignity. It addresses broader factors of male entitlement, prostitution, pornography and how boys and girls learn about sexuality.

I speak up because I want others to speak up too. If we do not, we are culpable in allowing our children and young people to live with the unbearable. Everyone has a responsibility to have uncomfortable conversations before your daughter feels like it’s a good idea to sell her body, or your son decides it’s a good idea to buy a body to have an orgasm in.

A few questions for adults

  • Do you believe prostitution is safe for women, wives, partners, husbands, children and families?
  • How would you encourage or discourage your children to buy or sell sex?
  • How would you talk about safety?
  • How do you know if a woman has been trafficked, coerced or has contemplated suicide whilst selling sex? Remember the high rate of suicidality and attempted suicide.

[*] For example:

Leave a Reply