By Anna Fisher

Nordic Model Now! (NMN) is ten years old this month. To mark the occasion we are publishing this article about how it began and are considering follow up articles about some of our key achievements over the last decade.

The beginning

I co-founded NMN in the spring of 2016 in response to my growing concern that the UK was at risk of sleepwalking into implementing a fully decriminalised prostitution system along the lines of New Zealand’s.

Most people agree that women involved in prostitution should not be criminalised. So, to the casual observer, decriminalising it might seem like a no brainer. But the people who are pushing this don’t just mean decriminalising selling sex. They mean decriminalising the entire prostitution system – advertising, brothels, pimping, sex buying, the whole caboodle. They want to open up prostitution to the full fury of modern capitalism – with no holds barred.

When most people really think about this, they begin to hesitate. Do we want job centres sending single mums and girls just out of school down to the local brothel? Do we want huge multistorey brothels in every town centre and out of town business park? Do we want those same brothels advertised on hoardings by the side of motorways and on the side of buses? Is the culture not already suffering from the impact of industrialised online porn? Do we really want to add to that with industrialised brothels full of young women catering to every male desire and fetish? Is that not going to impact all of our intimate relationships and how men and women see each other? How will it affect children?

In Germany, which has a similar system, there are brothels next to McDonald’s restaurants. Do we want that here? What are you going to say to your four-year-old when they ask why the shop next door has pictures of naked ladies in its window? What is the implicit message all this will give to your 11-year-old about what it means to be a woman or a man and what they can aspire to in life?

Those pushing full decriminalisation do all they can to stop you thinking like this. They reduce it to the friendly sounding ‘decrim’ and insist, incorrectly, that it would be safer for the women, and that any disagreement is ‘moral panic’, and other thought-terminating cliches. And they have the backing and resources of a multi-billion-dollar industry desperate to expand and gain legitimacy, along with the assistance of the mainstream media, most of whom gave up real investigative and thoughtful journalism long ago in favour of sound bites and appeasing the powerful.

A couple of things happened to trigger my realisation that I couldn’t simply hope that someone else would do something about this trend.

Firstly, on 11 August 2015, Amnesty’s International Council voted at a meeting in Dublin to adopt a full decrim policy. Amnesty published the policy the following May and has been lobbying for it globally ever since.

Because of its record of campaigning for political prisoners and other oppressed groups, most people hold Amnesty in the highest regard. If it supports full decrim, surely that must be the best option? It is unthinkable that Amnesty would adopt a policy that does not conform to international law and is not in the best interests of the marginalised people who would be most impacted. Except that is exactly what Amnesty did do.

I wrote a blogpost at the time that showed that the way that Amnesty approached this failed to meet the ethical standards you would expect from such an organisation.

The issue was first raised at Amnesty UK’s AGM in Nottingham in 2008, when the Newcastle branch brought a motion calling for full decrim. The motion was the brainchild of Douglas Fox, then a member of the Newcastle branch and founder and business partner of Christony Companions, which at the time was one of the UK’s largest escort agencies. In other words, he was a pimp who had a powerful vested financial interest in the decriminalisation of pimping.

He encouraged his sex trade associates to join Amnesty to lobby for the adoption of the policy from within, and he argued for pimps – third parties like himself who profit from other people’s prostitution – to be redefined as ‘managers’ and ‘organisers’ of ‘sex work’, who should therefore be classed as ‘sex workers’.

Such mental gymnastics made it possible for Amnesty to claim that decriminalising pimping was in line with international law, when in fact several international treaties place a binding obligation on ratifying states to fight pimping and sex trafficking.

Clearly Fox’s strategy was effective in convincing the Amnesty leaders, because leaked minutes of a 2013 meeting of its International Secretariat showed it was determined to lobby for full decrim even though it had not yet conducted any research or consulted with members. They did subsequently run a consultation and conduct research in four countries, but these had serious limitations – including that they didn’t do any research in a country, like New Zealand, that had implemented the kind of system they were advocating. To my knowledge, they have still not done so, a decade later.

While the feminist movement was aware that this was the direction Amnesty was moving in, organised resistance was too little and too late. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) organised an open letter in July 2015 and there were a number of blogs and articles arguing against the proposals, but it was not enough to change the outcome.

The second thing that happened was that the following February, the Home Affairs Select committee in the Westminster parliament undertook an inquiry into prostitution. I was terrified that the outcome would be similar; that the committee, under the chairmanship of Keith Vaz, would come to the same conclusion as Amnesty and the then Conservative government would accept its advice and implement full decrim here in the UK.

First steps

I looked everywhere for a grassroots group campaigning on this issue to get involved with, without success. So, with some trepidation, I went about setting up such a group myself. We held our first meeting in March 2016 and at that meeting someone suggested we call ourselves Nordic Model Now! because we are campaigning for the approach first pioneered in Sweden and subsequently taken up by Norway and Iceland and that was then known as the Nordic Model, although now it is often referred to as the Equality, Abolitionist or Survivor Model. A supporter made us a logo and we created a website and social media channels, designed and printed flyers, and organised actions outside the office of Amnesty’s International Secretariat in Clerkenwell.

The Nordic Model recognises the prostitution system 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. It is the only approach that prioritises support and routes out of the industry for those caught up in it (almost all surveys show that the overwhelming majority are desperate to get out), while holding pimps and sex buyers to account.

Specifically, it decriminalises the selling of sex and provides those doing so with high-quality, non-judgemental support services, exit routes and alternatives; it strengthens laws against pimping, brothel keeping and human trafficking; and it makes buying sex a criminal offence with the key aim of changing men’s attitudes and behaviour. To be effective, it needs to be accompanied by a variety of holistic measures, including a public information campaign, education in schools, training for the police, and tackling the inequality and poverty that drive people into prostitution.

The Vaz report

The Home Affairs Select committee released its report on prostitution in July 2016. As I was reading it, I was overwhelmed with the impression that it had been written by a punter (sex buyer). The knowledge of how punters think and their duplicity is etched deep into my soul from my childhood in which my father sexually abused me from a very early age and passed me on to others to do the same, for political favours.

We published a response to the report on our website, in which we argued that it could not be considered evidence-based because the selection of evidence relied upon was biased and anything that didn’t fit that bias – for example, evidence supporting the Nordic Model approach – was downplayed and written off as “emotive” or deriving from “moral values”.

We also noted that eight of the 11 members of the committee were male, but there was no mention of whether any of them were sex buyers. We argued that as one of the inquiry’s remits was to consider whether sex buying should be criminalised, being a sex buyer was a clear conflict of interests. As it was statistically likely that at least one of the men on the committee was a sex buyer, we argued that there was a strong case for members of the committee to make a declaration about whether they had ever been a sex buyer and if they had, to recuse themselves.

Curiously, this prompted some career feminists to attack us for “smearing” the male members of the committee, which they described as “an act of political ineptitude unparalleled in the history of the UK abolitionist movement”.

It was gratifying therefore when in September 2016, the Sunday Mirror exposed Vaz as a sex buyer. Journalists had gained indisputable evidence that Vaz had recently sexually used and abused two young migrant men in exchange for money and had offered to pay for any cocaine they used during the session. Cocaine use, illegal in the UK, was another issue the committee advised the government on under Vaz’s chairmanship.

We campaigned for Vaz to go and for his report into prostitution to be scrapped. We demonstrated in Westminster. A couple of us met with the then Home Secretary and discussed this with her. Even though she appeared to agree with us, a few months later the Home Office under her leadership responded to the report on behalf of the government with no mention of Vaz’s conflicts of interests calling its validity and conclusions into question. As a result, his report remains on the Parliament website and in the House of Commons library as if it is a reliable resource and is frequently cited as evidence for decriminalising brothels, for example.

A complaint was brought against Vaz, hingeing on his conflicts of interests. The House of Commons Committee on Standards published its report three years later, concluding that Vaz had damaged the House of Commons’ reputation by offering to buy cocaine for the men he sexually used but not for paying to sexually use them. It inexplicably cleared him of the complaints of conflicts of interests. This demonstrates something of what we are up against: systemic reluctance at all levels of society to hold men to account. This is exactly what the Nordic Model challenges. It aims to hold men accountable for the damage that their prostitution-buying behaviour causes.

It is not possible to over-emphasise how much the Nordic Model is a profound paradigm shift. It is a fundamentally different way of seeing the world compared to what has been the norm in the UK and many other places for centuries, where the state has condoned and even facilitated prostitution for men, especially men in the military, while blaming and punishing the women, most of whom entered it under duress and often to avoid the destitution that was otherwise inevitable, given women’s systematic exclusion from equal participation in economic life.

10 years later, it would be easy to think that not much has changed. However, we have achieved some successes and we have witnessed in this past decade a flourishing of an international movement of prostitution survivors speaking out about the harms of prostitution and calling for the Nordic Model approach. We are proud to have played a small part in the growth of that movement.