A Swedish Sex Worker’s Thoughts on the Criminalization of Her Clients
In 1999, Sweden passed a law the prohibits the purchase of sexual services. Under this law, men who use prostituted women or buy sexual services are criminalized and nailed with a fine and/or or up to six months in prison. Meanwhile, the women are not criminalized, but offered exit strategies to get them out of prostitution. Though the majority of Swedes supported this law, there are a few that are not so pleased.
Here is a short interview with Swedish sex worker Pye Jacobsson, who has some serious issues with the legislation. We have added our response to the interview below, addressing how this all relates to sex trafficking. Please watch the clip, read our comments, and add yours.
- To begin, Jacobsson criticizes how the law states that “no prostitution is prostitution out of free will” and that “every woman engaging in prostitution is a victim.” In our opinion, maybe the Swedish government did go a little too far in making this statement. We know that there are some women (usually white, middle-class) who choose to make this their profession for one reason or another. However, the majority of women and girls in prostitution do not have the luxury of sitting in an IKEA furnished room with a coffee, cigarettes, nice clothes, and a coy smile while chatting on camera about their choices when it comes to sex work. If you throw in some drugs, second-hand clothing, and the watchful eye of a pimp, you’ve got yourself a more realistic picture of what the majority have for a work environment.
- Jacobsson claims to be representative of sex workers in Sweden. Maybe she is representative of her circle of sex worker friends. She alludes later in her interview to the fact that they are able to compete against foreign sex workers because their clients feel safer with Swedish women. Who does she mean by foreign sex workers? The ones that came by their “free will” to prostitute themselves on the cold streets of Stockholm? I highly doubt the is representative of these individuals as well. Therefore, Jacobsson only represents Swedish middle-class sex workers who work indoors. This means she cannot speak on behalf of the sex trade industry, specifically when it comes to trafficking victims.
- She continues to criticize the law because it has had so many amendments. To this we say: just because a law is not perfect does not mean it cannot be improved upon. It’s not about the law itself but the spirit of the law, which aims to protect those who are victimized. Even laws regarding crimes like murder and drunk driving have developed over the years. Ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade was an implementation nightmare, yet it was taken on because it was the right thing to do. And eventually the trade came to an end. Sure, business owners were no longer able to use slaves, and many revolted because their “rights to use free labour” were being taken away. But the law dictated that the rights of the downtrodden had to prevail over the profits and “rights” of the slave masters. It is the same with prostitution. Because sex trafficking increases when prostitution is legalized or tolerated, we believe that sex workers must make a sacrifice in order to spare those who are victims.
- Jacobsson expresses her concern that there are a number of women in the strip and porn industry who have had their children taken away from them. I wonder, what is this number in comparison to the number of mothers who have lost their children to traffickers? Or the number of children that have been born with Johns as fathers?
- She claims that the law is responsible for the increased stereotypes of prostitutes; that the law makes society view them as less human – and that as a result sex workers are treated more poorly by the men that use them. But what I would say to her is this: the men that are willing to come rent your body parts already see you as less than human! Human beings are more than sexual objects. Paying to have sex with a prostituted woman/sex worker is inherently dehumanizing because it takes the wholeness out of the woman’s humanity. So don’t tell me that it is the law that dehumanizes prostituted women. Men do it just fine on their own.
- I think the most outrageous argument Jacobsson brings to the table is when she says that the normal way for the police to find out about trafficking victims is from “good clients, who report trafficking victims when they discover them. She claims that now that the law is in place, these men are afraid to report them because buying sex is illegal, and therefore trafficking victims have no one to rescue them. It is incredibly naive to think that there was ever a point in history where the users of prostituted women were the heroes that rescued victims of sexual exploitation by giving police the necessary alerts between their sexcapades. The financially secure CEO with five kids and a wife was calling the police regularly with updates on the trafficking situation in Sweden. Right. Sure, there may have been a few girls that were rescued from tips received by “nice Johns,” but if the Johns weren’t the ones creating demand there would be no trafficking problem in the first place. Jacobsson’s assertion that Johns need to feel safe while they fuel the industry through demand – so they can “rescue” victims – is absurd.
- Finally, Jacobsson says that women are not offered exit programs. But in fact the Representatives of the Prostitution Unit in Stockholm, a group that helps individuals leave prostitution, say that 60% of the people they have had contact with between after the law was put into place have left prostitution permanently. Many of these women pointed to the law (and the funded exit programs) as their reason for seeking help.
According to Gunilla Ekberg’s article, The Swedish Law That Prohibits the Purchase of A Sexual Service: Best Practices for Prevention of Prostitution and Trafficking in Human Beings, here are some more facts about the law’s effectiveness Sweden.
- When buyers risk punishment, the number of men who buy prostituted women decreases, and local prostitution markets become less lucrative. By 2004, the number of buyers in Sweden had fallen by 75%-80%.
- Human traffickers now have to transport girls to various hidden locations and move them around, which requires more money, more time, and more local contacts. As a result, traffickers (in conversations recorded during crime investigations) have expressed frustration about setting up shop in Sweden, and choose other, more profitable destinations.
- According to the testimonies of human trafficking victims, since the law was put into place, traffickers prefer Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, where prostitution is legalized or tolerated, and men are not criminalized.
Though Pye Jacobsson makes some good points in defending her group of sex workers in Sweden, she fails to see that prostitution and sex trafficking cannot be separated. This has been seen time and time again in several global contexts. And because they are linked, the world should follow Sweden’s model by criminalizing men who pay for sex and offering exit programs to the majority of women and girls who are, in fact, victims.
Your thoughts?
14 People have commented on this post
Because trafficking or illegal activity increases when sex work is stigmatized and sex workers are being marginalized and criminalized, I believe that society and activists for human rights and victim support must make a sacrifice in order to change laws for decriminalisation and legal rights for sex workers, informal migrants and people without papers.
In Sweden related to the anti-sex-buying-law in the last four years there were per year:
- costs of about US$ 7 million
- 3 sentences on trafficking in persons
- 18 sentences on pimping
- 75 sentences on buying sex
in a country with 9 million people.
http://www.wisdomofwhores.com/2010/04/20/do-chicago-sex-workers-need-swedish-laws/
Not only the Johns create demand for prostitution, but we sex workers or migrants also have demands and needs: We need money to make our living and we need a future for our families. That is why so many of us -and often not the most pure and disadvantaged- take unconventional jobs like sex work or risky migration routes as travelling informally to your country.
The worst males or clients you will typically find in settings like street hustling with drug consuming people. Guess why? Not because clients are evil per se in creating demand for sex, but because some evil perpetrator know where to find victims society does not care about.
So we need a society where sex workers are not victimized by law but tolerated like homosexual people or divorced couples. They are precious and have something to give which society needs. Not every body is given character, personality, looks and income to find a reciprocally loving and permanent partner. But punishing clients is making it even harder for sex workers to find any nice customers and income, but only perpetrators will stay unimpressed in the game.
In Germany with 81 million people, no increase of trafficking in persons has been found since introduction of new prostitution legislation (ProstG) in 2002, which partly decriminalized sex work:
2002 — 811 victims (new law)
2003 – 1235 victims
2004 — 972 victims
2005 — 642 victims
2006 — 775 victims
2007 — 689 victims
2008 — 676 victims
2009 — 710 victims
http://www.bka.de (Bundeskriminalamt, federal criminal police forces)
In Germany there are 200.000-400.000 sex workers delivering 365 million of sex service units per year and exchanging millions of Euro between the sexes. The sex slavery problem is still there and not tolerable but only accounting for 4 o/oo (per mill) of all workers.
So sex work and sex slavery has to be distinguished as e.g. with depository banking and investment banking finance fraud etc. .
Because one personally feels different or uncomfortable with his body in relation to foreign anonymous or changing male partners, this does not legitimize you to victimize other women, men or trans people working in the sex industry and using degrading words on us like “prostituted women’s body”. We sex workers who are not victims or sex slaves, we do never sell our body like selling organs, but we sell sexual services, staged energy and erotic wisdom.
Get in contact with us, read our stories in books, on the internet and blogs… But don’t expect us to make ourselves vulnerable to a hostile public unless you honour our existance and contributions.
Just a few comments. The IKEA furnished room I am so “priviliged” sitting in is the office of the Swedish Drug Users Union, I come from a working class background and the Stockholm prostitution unit, according to themselves, offer “therapy and treatment”, not any exit programs. Check your facts!
So – let’s see the facts:
Here in Germany the official discourse also links prostitution to trafficking.
In consequence here are ongoing police crackdowns on free and legal working prostitutes.
Nevertheless – police couldn’t procure more than 4 per mill of all checked prostitutes as “trafficked”.
And remember – even that are police figures … after passing the courts only a fraction will remain as “really trafficked”.
Given the fact that persons aged between 18 and 20 are denied to make their own decisions regarding paysex,
a part of the remaining has to be seen not so much as trafficked, but as criminalized by arbitrary laws.
So what do you really want? Do you want to deny at least 998 out of 1000 prostitutes their human and basic rights,
in order to dry up that “huge swamp of trafficking in prostitution” – which affects at maximum 2 out of 1000 hookers?
Or do you involuntarily support efforts towards state control of prostitution? To empower police officers to get free sex
and earn money via pimping? http://diepresse.com/home/panorama/welt/542483/index.do
Just one example from Sweden – for those trying to sell Sweden on us as a kind of role model for right conduct regarding prostitution.
No special point against Sweden as a country – everybody knows any country trying to control prostitution has exactly the same problem.
So what remains? Only the dirty fantasies of of some putophobic prohibitionists … and the question, why anybody would support them.
Some dirty fantasies of them own, hu?
Just as a reminder: “Dark figures” are fantasies, too
Love, Aoife
Please note my previous post contained a terrible typo. I wrote “prove” when I meant to write “destroy the myth”.
The post should read as follows:
I found this interview very helpful. I am not a sex worker but Ms. Jacobsson’s comments seem to ring very true to what I understand of the local street-based sex work women’s experience where the women are predominantly middle-aged (median age of 39), predominantly working with regulars (and without pimps in the downtown strolls), and using the skills available to them to work to procure their necessities: shelter, food, and, yes, often drugs or alcohol, too. It really resonated that there are “good and bad dates” on the street, and by scaring the “good dates” indoors, that leaves the street-based, survival sex worker with the guys s/he would have said no to before, out of desperation.
I also feel Ms Jacobsson hits the nail on the head is when she says Sweden is trying to deal with a Social problem using the Justice System. Square peg, round hole. It won’t work.
As for the horrific stereotype of a 13 year old, sold by her parent or abducted and forced into “sex slavery†where she is repeatedly raped and beaten – that story may have resonating truth for a very, very small number of women. The fact is, laws are being enacted and defended based on that horrific image, when the reality is very far removed from that. When there are acts of violence against women, sexual coercion and sexual exploitation of youth – those are CRIMES, not sex work. The conflating of the two, as is commonly done in most “anti-trafficking†and pro-criminalization campaigns – this makes me crazy! They are separate. But stigmatizing sex work (as criminalization does) reverses all the educational work done to destroy the myth that “sex workers who are beaten and raped were asking for it.†By making sex work or the purchase of sex work criminal, I think that “she asked for it†argument gets stronger. Criminalization clouds the fact that some things are sex and can be paid for with the permission of the seller (work), and some things are violence and are inflicted on the seller (crime). It should be that as feminists we are educating people that one is work, the other is violence. As feminists we should not be equating this with “slavery, murder etc” It is wrong to say: “Because trafficking increases when prostitution is legalized or tolerated, we believe that sex workers must make a sacrifice in order to spare those who are victims.” That is agreeing to conflate two very separate things into one thing. Another thing it does is it implies that there is no issue of migration at play when women move to a place because it is safer for them to work as a sex worker. To educate yourself on the issues of diaspora/migration and sex work, I refer you
to:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a727325856&db=all
While personally if I were to engage in transactional sex, for me it would feel like it “took the wholeness out of my humanityâ€. But who am I to speak for all women? I certainly think I’m pretty mainstream, but then again – there are a lot of women, as Ms. Jacobsson says who are having one-night-stands- beer-for-sex kind of experiences, which here in Canada is pretty mainstream too. in my opinion that is on the same continuum as women who marry for money… so how far do you take this protest against transactional sex? Well, logically, it continues on to where Andrea Dworkin took it: all penetrative sex is rape. Right? That’s the intellectual conclusion one must get to. So while I’ll I can follow that line of reasoning intellectually, criminalizing sex work tries to force us onto that path in reality.
Just briefly – Gunilla Ekberg’s article has been widely discredited, and as far as I know, she is no longer consulted by Socialstyrelsen (the Swedish Board of Health and Welfare).
I can also verify Pye’s above comment regarding the Stockholm Prostitution Unit. Additionally in Stockholm, outreach by the unit does not involve condom provision, and there are reports of conditionality of services provided.
Survivors of human trafficking – breaking the silence
What bad consequences the anti-sex work hate may cause:
7 June 2010 – OHCHR
Kikka Cerpa, from Venezuela , told the harrowing story of how she was forced into prostitution in New York 18 years ago, by her former boyfriend.
She told the Human Rights Council:“The other women and I were arrested over and over for prostitution. Never did the police or prosecutors ask us if we were trafficked. Never did they offer us help and protection.â€
[...]
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/SurvivorstraffickingBreakingthesilence.aspx
You wrote: “It is incredibly naïve to think that there was ever a point in history where the users of prostituted women were the heroes that rescued victims of sexual exploitation by giving police the necessary alerts between their sexcapades.”
So here are some facts – official police figures from Germany ( http://www.sexworker.at/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=76620#76620 ) :
Only 37% of the victims of trafficking were found by police,
40% filed the charges themselves,
and in 20% of the cases the very johns told police to have a closer look.
So what’s the moral to the story? Maybe that moralist lawmakers hypnotize them people into believing it’s incredibly naive to think that reality- adapted laws would show better results?
Love, Aoife
Just like to say a big thank you. I am writing a dissertation on the aspects of control within prostitution and your video was incredibly useful concerning formal control.
Great thanks, really inciteful.
Lucy
You are very welcome Lucy, all the best with your dissertation!
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