The “Swedish” or “Nordic” model has in recent years risen to the centre of anti-trafficking and prostitution policy debates. It claims to revolutionise the policy field by criminalising the buying instead of the selling of sex. Sweden implemented this policy in 1999, relying on radical feminist arguments of commercial sex as a form of violence against women and a hindrance to gender equality. Since then, this policy approach has been adopted in several countries across Europe and America. The rise of this policy approach has coincided with the entrance of migrants into the sex industry, and they nowadays make the majority in many places in Europe and beyond. But how does this policy affect the people it claims to protect, sex workers and people in the sex trade? What does it mean that commercial sex is increasingly governed through feminist arguments of care and gender equality? Who is most affected by this approach, and with what consequences?
Drawing on a three-country ethnography including 210 interviews in the Nordic region (Sweden, Norway, Finland) where the approach originated, this paper examines the effects of criminalisation of sex buying on sex workers and people in the sex trade, especially on their vulnerability to violence and exploitation.
Niina Vuolajärvi is an Assistant Professor in International Migration at the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ European Institute. Her interdisciplinary research is situated in the fields of migration, feminist and socio-legal studies. Niina received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Rutgers University in 2021. Prior to joining the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the New School Zolberg Institute of Migration and Mobility.
Isabel Shutes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy at ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳.