Criminalizing the Buying of Sex? Experiences from the Nordic Countries

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. 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 gender equality? Who is most affected by this approach, and with what consequences? This event provides a unique opportunity to find answers to these questions and to understand how the "Nordic model" functions in various geographic locations.

In this event, Niina Vuolajärvi will outline the main outcomes and recommendations of a policy brief on sex buyer criminalization and its intersections with immigration controls in the Nordic region. The brief is based on Vuolajärvi’s large-scale ethnographic research that includes 210 interviews conducted between 2012-2019 in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. The panel will discuss how the "Nordic model" style regulation looks like in other countries and from a perspective of anti-trafficking efforts.