A call to everyone living in the wake of a system that treats women as purchasable and calls it freedom
By Amanda Quick
On 3 February 2026, the Scottish Parliament debated and voted on Stage 1 of Ash Regan’s Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill (known colloquially as the Unbuyable Bill), which if passed would have brought the Nordic Model to Scotland. In spite of impassioned speeches from Regan and supporters of the Bill, 64 MSPs voted against the Bill compared to 54 who voted for it. This means the Bill has fallen.
In spite of this, there is political ground on which public awareness can now grow. Having attended the Scottish Parliament in October 2025 to give oral evidence of my lived experience of prostitution to the Criminal Justice Committee as part of the process, my hope is that many other women, girls and men will also find the courage to be vulnerable and speak out regarding the harms of selling sex. Not only women like myself, but also women who experience a traumatic parallel process of finding that their husbands or partners buy sex.
As I said to the Criminal Justice Committee, I wonder how many of them would send a 16 or 17-year-old into a brothel for work experience?
This is not just a statement from those of us who have exited prostitution. This is a call to everyone harmed by the systems Ash Regan’s Unbuyable Bill sought to address and to those ready to name what they’ve witnessed, what they’ve lost, and what was taken from them in brothels and the quiet of their own homes.
We thank Ash Regan MSP for her work, and we stand with the survivors, advocates, and organisations who gave testimony, research, and hours of unpaid labour to make this moment possible. Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, offered her clear support, reinforcing what many of us have been saying for years: the demand for sexual access to women and girls is the engine of harm, and any serious response must centre that demand.
But this is not only about those of us who have been prostituted. It is about everyone living in the wake of a system that treats women as purchasable and calls it freedom.
It is about families torn apart by betrayal that is normalised, romanticised, or hidden behind the language of male sexuality as uncontrollable need. Women and men whose relationships have been lost, annihilated or damaged by digital prostitution, pornography use, and the buying of sex. Partners who discovered the betrayal. Children who felt the absence. Those who watched someone they loved disappear into something that might look like a job, but which behind closed doors functions as paid rape.
Jenna, a prostitution survivor in the Nordic Model Now! group, responded to the news with this:
“The realisation that the issue of male violence against women and girls doesn’t matter to the majority of people in positions in power is crushing. Listening to Maggie Chapman speaking of prostitution as meaningful, fulfilling work felt like being subjected to a masterclass in gaslighting. The feeling in that building was one of total detachment. Ash Regan is a woman of real integrity and strength and that was what comforted me in those hours after realising that change was not going to happen. It’s not the end and women will not stay silent. “
This matters way beyond parliament
Power moves quietly through society. Sometimes it shows up as attention or money that feels flattering before it feels painful. Sally Rooney named this dynamic in “Normal People”—how domination does not usually announce itself as cruelty but arrives wearing the clothes of attraction, borrowing the language of desire.
This is not a pathology unique to one woman or one man. It is learned. And what Rooney diagnosed in fiction plays out daily in living rooms across the UK. Men who believe pornography or prostitution use is not their wife’s or partner’s business. Women who discover their husband’s use of another woman or girl to orgasm in, and feel the ground shift beneath them. Children who sense something is wrong at home, but have no words for it.
Western culture has long been confused, misinformed and uneducated about sexual exploitation, commodification and the selling and buying of sex. Even in a supposedly more aware era, selling sex can still look empowering and glamourous when it is normalised as income or work.
The Unbuyable Bill, like the Nordic Model, challenges that logic at a structural level. It says we will no longer protect the systems that allow men to buy women while pretending this is a private choice with no public consequences.
Misogyny and internalised misogyny
One reason, among many, that the Bill did not pass is misogyny and internalised misogyny. The Unbuyable Bill was not primarily about punishing men, but rather a call to action for a change in thought and attitude.
Internalised misogyny operates quietly. It shows up when women’s testimony is doubted more than men’s comfort. The Epstein files are witness to this.
It shows up when the harms described by survivors are weighed against abstract concerns about “agency” that somehow never extend to questioning why the market exists in the first place.
It shows up when legislators who would never defend any other industry built on exploitation suddenly adopt libertarian language the moment the industry involves the commodification of women.
The male gaze is absorbed, then reenacted internally. Margaret Atwood described this as a form of control so normalised it feels like this: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” From an early age, women are taught to observe themselves through the male gaze. Self-esteem is built on male sexual gratification, and therefore becomes the unconscious “boys will be boys” mentality.
The same mechanism protects prostitution. We have internalised the idea that male sexual entitlement is natural, that women’s availability is inevitable, that women are not entitled to an independent income unless they are sexually available to men, that the harm done in prostitution is either exaggerated or freely chosen. We minimise our own discomfort. We moderate our objections. We perform acceptance because speaking out feels unsafe or unfeminine or prudish.
Male domination and entitlement thrive in fear and silence. Changing the law isn’t about individual cruelty or punishment. It is to break down the fear and silence of a system built on exploitation and violence.
What happens in living rooms.
The conversation around prostitution has long been framed as a clash between “sex workers’ rights” and “abolitionists”. But the real conversation is broader and more urgent. It is about what we are willing to tolerate in our homes, our relationships, our culture. It is about whether we will continue to accept that men’s sexual habits are private matters even when they shatter trust, destabilise families, and teach children that intimacy is transactional.
Many of us have watched someone we love glow under intense focus, only to notice later how small their world has become. A partner sits on the sofa, screen angled away. A child asks why mum seems sad. A woman discovers a browser history and the room tilts. From the outside, it looks like a private struggle. From closer up, it is a pattern reproduced across thousands of living rooms. Silent, corrosive, sexual betrayal, protected by shame.
Prostitution whether on the street, in a brothel, at home, or on a screen depends on silence, shame and internalised misogyny.
The unheard voices.
Where are the women and men with their experiences of buying sex, the betrayal and family breakdown related to pornography use, digital prostitution, and the buying of sex. These stories matter. They are evidence. They are the missing testimony.
Of course, there is punternet, full of anonymised men who critique and slay a woman or girl’s bought body. Many, many of the anonymised men who buy sex are in relationships. There are forgotten wives and partners whose voices and betrayal go unheard.
If you are a man who has come to understand the harm of your own use, who are you? If you are a betrayed woman, who are you? Many children are also impacted by prostitution, either through parental selling or buying.
Another prostitution survivor responded to the news that the Unbuyable Bill had fallen like this:
“I spent years in prostitution through violence, coercion and poverty. My daughter sadly had the same experience. Neither of us want this for our younger generations. The physical problems and psychological issues it’s left us with are lifelong. Women and girls deserve better than to be told we should sell ourselves and be happy about it!”
Internalised misogyny is learned, which means it can be unlearned.
Structures that protect male entitlement are inherited, which means they can be dismantled.
The fact that 54 MSPs voted to centre the rights and safety of women in prostitution over the perceived right of men to buy them is evidence that the dismantling is already underway.
Nordic Model Now! remains committed to education, advocacy, and supporting women to exit. The evidence will not disappear. Those who have exited prostitution, the survivors who spoke, will not be unheard.
And now there are voices of those living with the private wreckage of the public systems we are trying to change. Public awareness, through political debates is very much part of breaking the systems down, one testimony, one uncomfortable conversation, one vote at a time.
On closing, I leave you with the response of another prostitution survivor to the Unbuyable Bill falling:
“My thoughts are as a survivor of prostitution, who entered the industry at 17 when I was still a child and looked like a child. I was very vulnerable and had grown up seeing women treated as servants to men and believing that was my role. I followed peers into the industry as doing so felt preferable to being alone. It was my rock bottom. I consumed an increasing amount of drink and drugs to escape from what was happening to me and my mental health plummeted.
Predominately middle-aged men paid to use my body for their own pleasure, even though I was dying inside and hating myself and what my life had become.
The result makes me feel that the Scottish government believes the behaviour of these men to be acceptable. And the behaviour of the people who ran the brothels that I was sold in, who took a cut of my earnings and demanded that I go and ‘line up’ every time a man came in to choose whose body he wanted to make use of.
It hurts that what they are saying is that this should continue to other girls.”
The Reality of Prostitution: Survivor voices
During the debate on the Bill, Jamie Hepburn MSP suggested that he had not had sufficient opportunity to listen to prostitution survivors. If only he had accepted Ash Regan’s invitation to attend an online event the previous evening, which was organised in collaboration with Nordic Model Now! And if only the Criminal Justice Committee had asked us to organise for a group of survivors to speak to the committee.
The event the previous evening (2 February 2023) featured two UK prostitution survivors and one from both Sweden and New Zealand (scroll down for more about them). After the talks, there was a Q&A session, in which some of the MSPs watching put questions to the survivors. You can watch the recording here:
About these survivors
Venessa MacLeod: Venessa is a Scottish survivor of the sex industry; she shares her experience of being trafficked into prostitution in Edinburgh at 17, advocating for legislative change that protects women and girls from male violence.
Jenna: Jenna is a survivor of prostitution in the UK and a passionate advocate for its abolition and for the implementation of the Nordic model.
Cajsa: Cajsa is a survivor of prostitution in Sweden. After escaping an abusive relationship as a teenager, she started to abuse drugs and turned to prostitution to finance her habit. Now clean for eight years, Casja fights for women’s rights and is a member of #intedinhora, an organisation of people who have experienced prostitution in Sweden and who passionately support the Nordic Model.
Chelsea Geddes: Chelsea is a survivor of 20 years of prostitution in New Zealand, from the age of 14 in 2001 (two years before the full decriminalisation law came into effect) until age 34 in 2020.