The "Nordic Model" of prostitution law is a myth....

One of the factor changing the sex trade through out Europe is the easy movement of people from very poor places to richer countries. Canada shares a border with the US. Movement accross the border is more difficult than between EU countries. Thus decriminalization is likely to take different presentation

The difference is the numbers. Canada has great poverty and exploitation. The victimization of poor women and particularly poor First Nations women and girls, is legion. But the existence of millions of desperate women and families with easy boarder access changes may aspects of the sex trade in Europe.

<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> wrote:

The difference is the numbers. Canada has great poverty and exploitation. The victimization of poor women and particularly poor First Nations women and girls, is legion. But the existence of millions of desperate women and families with easy boarder access changes may aspects of the sex trade in Europe.

I don't know about 'millions', but I think that criminalizing clients in some EU countries forces women and men who are already sex workers to migrate to a country that is not criminalizing.   In fact, on one of the blog pages she makes a short list of things she is tired of spoonfeeding people, one of which specifically says "There are not 27 million sex slaves in the world."   http://www.lauraagustin.com/dear-students-of-sex-work-and-trafficking 

Laura Augustin is a researcher of sex worker migration (for want of a better description) and studies this.    

http://www.lauraagustin.com/laura-talking-on-camera-migration-trafficking-sex

What impressed me in September when I was in Europe were the numbers of East European working in the industry. The women I met WERE NOT TRAFFICKED or SLAVES. They were workers who had moved to the city I was in and overwhelming were in the sex trade because it paid better than the other jobs available to them.

Of course. Capitalism creates misery and wealth. Very poor people move to find work and are exploited where ever they go. Their only protection is in collective action, which is what unions are born of.

quizzical wrote:

you were impressed that the poverty in their own countries forced them to move and become prostitutes servicing privileged rich white men in order to survive?

 

Do you really assume that all clients of sex workers are white and rich?    That is interesting as well.   

I have a client who works at McDonalds.    Another who is unemployed.   A woman who is an entertainer, and being Canadian, not a well paid one.    Maybe 50% of the people I see are not white, and 95% of the people I see are not rich.    However some of them, not a small  percentage,  consider themselves 'privileged' just because I agreed to see them. 

Here we have someone who was actually there and actually spoke to the migrant sex workers, and you want to deny the sex worker their contentment with their own choices.     It wasn't that long ago that men, those white rich privileged dudes, wanted to deny womens' right to vote, womens' right to work, and womens' right to choose whether or not they want to be pregnant, or even get pregnant.   And all of that, btw, was being decided for 'their own good', because someone else always seems to know what is best for grown adult women, except for those grown adult women themselves.    

M, i did answer your question.   I said "We" etc .    Seems fairly clear what I am saying there :)  

Sex workers and their clients have been working around the ridiculous 3 laws that were recently overturned for decades.   They will continue to be able to work around anything new.  The only ones who will continue to suffer will be the street workers, who've already been hounded for decades due to the public solicitation laws being so easy to enforce.    if there is a Nordic model, then the clients will continue to be a target, just as they always have been anyway.    

Sweden isn't like Canada.    They didn't have these nuisance laws when they decided to make clients criminals.  Neither workers nor clients had developed ways to work around those laws, the way we have here.   

If criminalization was so great, then why was it so ineffective?   If it didn't work the way it was set up before, why does anyone really believe it will work if only they can tweak it the right way?   

A pretty hard-hitting article by Robin Morgan posted on the CNN website that proclaims the successes of the Nordic model and seeks to mobilize support for a campaign targeting Amnesty International which is currenty leaning towards adopting a policy that endorses decriminalization. 

 http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/07/opinion/morgan-amnesty-prostitution/index.html?hpt=hp_c5

sherpa-finn wrote:

A pretty hard-hitting article by Robin Morgan posted on the CNN website that proclaims the successes of the Nordic model and seeks to mobilize support for a campaign targeting Amnesty International which is currenty leaning towards adopting a policy that endorses decriminalization. 

 http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/07/opinion/morgan-amnesty-prostitution/index.html?hpt=hp_c5

Here is one commentator's breakdown:

Malicious and dishonest. Shame on the author and on CNN for not checking the author's rank dishonesty.

The author: "An Amnesty International document, 'Decriminalization of Sex Work,' argues that pimps and johns should be 'free from government interference' and allowed to 'exercise their autonomy.'"

The report: "Amnesty International believes that the conflation of sex work with human trafficking leads to policies and interventions which undermines sex workers’ sexual autonomy, and causes them to be targets of exploitation and abuse, as well as may enable violation of their human rights. The disproportionate focus on trafficking into forced prostitution by some governments also ignores the human rights violations suffered by people trafficked into domestic work, construction, agricultural work, or other forced work, in which they often suffer a range of violations, including exploitation and violence. It further ignores that some people who are trafficked into other forms of forced labour are often subjected to sexual abuse and violence.

 

 

If you start with falsified information, the way Morgan does, then of course your conclusions and opinions will be flawed.  If you start with the truth, then a lot of her comments, and complaints and 'solutions' simply won't do.    She begins with a case study, of what happens to a teenage runaway.   Well, maybe so, but teenage runaways are not all sex workers.    She carries on by proclaiming "See?  the nordic model works..."  with false information to support that.    The fact that police harassment of both sex workers and clients led to a decline of STREET workers on the street, does not mean that the total number of sex workers has declined.  It simply means that they can't see them, or can't see them as easily.     

In Vancouver's downtown and west end in the 70's and early 80's, you always knew where to find the sex workers.   In front of fancy hotels, in the west end streets, and downtown core.    By the mid 80's, you would assume, if you went to those areas, that the number of sex workers had declined significantly.    It hadn't, they simply got forcebly moved over the eastern, less populated part of the city of Vancouver.  Some of them moved indoors and placed newspaper ads.     The total number would remain the same, the laws against public solicitation didn't change the number of workers, it simply changed how they work.