Nordic Model Now!
Movement for the Abolition of Prostitution
In September 2016, a complaint was brought against Keith Vaz MP who was then the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC). The complaint hinged on Vaz’s conflict of interests – he was witnessed buying sex and offering to buy cocaine for another person to use shortly after chairing inquiries into prostitution and psychoactive drugs. In this article we respond to the House of Commons Committee on Standards’ report into the matter. Read More
This is the text of our submission (sent in October 2018) to the inquiry into modern slavery conducted by the Home Affairs Select Committee in the UK Parliament. Our submission is focused on our grave concerns about how the Modern Slavery Act 2015 frames human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation and how its failure to deal effectively with the forms of human trafficking that particularly affect women and children can be viewed as sex discrimination and a failure to protect children. Read More
This article (written in late 2016) by Alice Glass gives an insightful analysis of the 2016 Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) inquiry into prostitution and how it shamefully privileged pro-sex industry voices. She calls for higher standards of honesty and integrity among our politicians. Her arguments are as relevant to the current debate as they were to the specific situation she describes. Alice was herself in prostitution for a decade. Read More
This article, which originally appeared in the Morning Star on International Women’s Day, asks why the government can respond so quickly to the news of European men renting young women and girls for sexual use in Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake but find it so hard to respond appropriately to the coercion and inequality of prostitution here in Britain. Read More
The viral spread of the #MeToo hashtag over the last few weeks and the accompanying avalanche of women’s testimony of sexual harassment has spread to the British political establishment. In this article we draw parallels and connections between sexual harassment and assault, and prostitution, and we call for a new code of conduct for MPs and parliamentary staff that includes a prohibition against prostitution-buying as well as sexual harassment and assault, just as the UN does for its staff. Read More
The agenda for the 2017 TUC Congress has been published. It includes a motion from ASLEF, the train drivers’ union, calling for the full decriminalisation of “sex work.” This approach implicitly decriminalises pimping, profiteering and related activities that are currently considered to be exploitation. The motion is worded in such a way that on a superficial level it appears to be in the interests of the women and children who are involved in prostitution. However, that simply does not stand up to scrutiny. Read More
There is much that Britain can learn from Ireland’s adoption of the Nordic Model and commitment to tackling male demand for prostitution. Read More
Heather Brunskell-Evans examines options for prostitution law reform in the UK. She argues that full decriminalisation is predicated on outdated notions of the inevitability of men’s ‘need’ for sex and their concomitant ‘right’ to pay for the sexual use of women (or other men) as if they were a commodity, and that full decriminalisation’s vocal proponents make several erroneous claims. Instead she concludes that the Sex Buyer Law (aka the Nordic Model) is in line with 21st century ideals of equity and social justice. Read More
This is the text of an open letter to the Home Secretary from Nordic Model Now! with 14 other groups and organisations and 35 individuals in response to the UK government response to the interim report of the Home Affairs Select Committee Inquiry into Prostitution. Read More
Nordic Model Now! member, Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans, responds to Peter Tatchell’s recent political interventions. Read More
Nordic Model Now! has shown that the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) prostitution inquiry presided over by Keith Vaz was flawed and biased. Please write to your MP (template provided) to ask for their support for our demands that the interim report be scrapped and for the committee to have a strict ethical framework. Read More
On 6 September 2016, Nordic Model Now! had a protest in Westminster to demand that the inquiry presided over by Keith Vaz into prostitution be scrapped and restarted under an ethically constituted committee in which at least 50% of its members are female and all make a declaration of their sex buying history. Read More
PRESS: For Immediate Release Campaign group Nordic Model Now! (NMN) welcomes the resignation of Home Affairs Select Committee chair Keith Vaz MP. But they say that his sex buying has discredited the committee’s Prostitution Inquiry findings and they will be protesting in Westminster later today to call for it to be scrapped.
PRESS : For Immediate Release Campaign group, Nordic Model Now! (NMN), is demanding the immediate disbanding of the Home Affairs Select Committee’s inquiry into prostitution after chair Keith Vaz MP is witnessed buying young males for sex.
On 1 July 2016, the UK Parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) released an interim report on its inquiry into prostitution. Nordic Model Now! welcomes the recommendation to decriminalise soliciting and to delete convictions and cautions for prostitution from criminal records, and the call for in-depth research. However, we have some serious concerns about other aspects of the report. Read More