Nordic Prostitution Policy Reform

In 1999, Sweden criminalised the purchase of sexual services. Existing research has attributed this path-breaking policy stance to the successful, strategic lobbying of female parlamentarians and their allies in the broader women’s movement. Such claims can be expressed in terms of theoretical models emphasising the relative power of strategic actors as well as related feminists theories of women’s representation. However, such models add only partial pieces to the puzzle of prostitution policy reform, especially in a comparative perspective.

Usually, the first cut in explaining policy change is theoretical models focusing on the relative power of self-interested rational actors and their strategic interaction. Such models assume that “policy outcomes are determined by negotiations between powerful actors, each trying to advance its agenda.”¹

In terms of fundamental assumptions and empirical expectations, this so-called power-interest model partially overlaps with feminist research on representation, which often starts from the assumption that the representation of women in parliaments and other political assemblies is crucial in explaining the emergence and adoption of women-friendly policies. This branch of feminist scholarship shares certain assumptions with the power-interest model, such as the emphasis on relative power and strategic interaction, as well as the assumption that interests can be treated as an analytical given.

The key theoretical claim in this line of research is that “Women, when present in politics, are more likely to act for women than men.” Specifically, this assumption has in-formed the so-called critical mass hypothesis, which claims that “once women constitute a particular proportion of parliament, ‘political behaviour, institutions and public policy’ will be transformed.”  ² That is, once political decision-making assemblies reach this threshold or tipping point, we should expect a substantive shift in political outcomes.

A general theoretical problem with the power-interest model is that they tend to take in-terests for granted. But in attempting to explain policy change, the real puzzle is often why certain actors come to define their policy preferences in the first place. Especially, this ap-proach seems to have difficulties in explaining why analogous actors with similar power re-sources often take radically differing substantive policy stances. Moreover, emphasising ma-terial interests and power capabilities might seem less useful in explaining policy changes that have no direct bearing on entrenched material interests, but rather concern norm and identity politics.

Similarly, a theoretical problem in certain feminist scholarship on representation is the assumption that women share uniform interests. These interests are assumed to result from their shared experience of being women in a patriarchal society, as argued by Anne Phillips:

“Women have distinct interests in relation to child-bearing (for any foreseeable future, an exclusively female affair); and as society is currently constituted they also have par-ticular interests arising from their exposure to sexual harassment and violence, their unequal position in the division of paid and unpaid labor and their exclusion from most arenas of economic or political power.”³

Certainly, this assumption presupposes that women’s interests are contextualised in virtue of being connected to the ways in which societies are currently constituted. However, as some scholars argue, gender is not a fixed, pre-political identity which women bring with them as they enter politics, but rather something which is constructed very much through the prac-tices of politics. As a corollary, we can’t expect “women’s issues” to be a given, objective agenda or something which we can deduce a priori from feminist theory. Whether women subjectively perceive that they have common interests and, if so, what those interests are, is an empirical matter.

Moreover, scholars all but agree on the linkage between numerical and substantive repre-sentation, that is, what consequences to expect in terms of policy as the number of women in parliament increases. As Wängnerud argues, “substantial change — whatever that means — cannot be taken for granted just because a group, such as women, is taking part in decision making to a larger extent than before.”⁴ Accordingly, recent contributions question the claim that is a straightforward relation between numerical (‘standing for’) and substantive (‘acting for’) representation of women.

Hypotheses on prostitution policy reform

Anyhow, according to feminist representation theory, one would expect that prostitution pol-icy reform results from, in broad terms, the increasing representation of women in parlia-ment and other powerful arenas. Following the critical mass thesis, women might need to reach a certain threshold or tipping point, before substantial policy changes occur. Such a critical mass can be strengthened by building strategic coalitions with other key policy actors.

In order to explain the adoption of the 1999 Swedish ban on the purchase of sexual ser-vices, certain scholars and policymakers have relied on the critical mass thesis. Gunilla Ek-berg, a former government adviser on gender equality, attributes the adoption of the new policy to “feminists and dedicated female politicians [who] understood the importance of and fought for the right of all women to have full control of their bodies.”⁵

Similarly, Inger Segelström, former member of parliament and chair of the Social Democratic Women in Sweden, claims that the ban was a direct effect of an increasing proportion of women in parliament:

“What happened in 1994 was that women got half of the seats in Parliament. Before then, there had been no possibility to pass any laws concerning violence against women or similar questions. Subsequently we got the law on violence against women and later the sex-purchase law.”⁶

Likewise, some scholars have argued that the adoption of a sex purchase ban in Sweden con-firms the critical mass thesis. For instance, Maud Eduards argues that the ban is an achievement by politically active women – extra-parliamentary activists and female parliamentarians – who acted in concert against conservative forces to “prevent men from exploiting women’s bodies”. While the women’s movement had presented identical demands throughout the 20th century, Eduards argues, it was only once women had taken 40 percent of the seats in parlia-ment that their demands resulted in legislative success.

“The women’s movement, especially ROKS [the National Organisation of Women's Shelters], women in elected offices and other centrally placed feminists have pushed the issue together. [...] women’s strong political representation and presence has been decisive for the making of the new law.”⁷

However, this explanation seems not to translate well to other prominent instances of prosti-tution policy reform. For instance, in New Zealand, Denmark and Germany, the number of women increased successively prior to major prostitution policy reforms, yet the substantive policies adopted were radically different than the abolitionist policies adopted in Sweden and Norway.

Prostitution policy reform and women in parliament in six countries, 1980-2009. Data from the Interparlamentary Union.

Moreover, in all those three cases, legalization of prostitute on was achieved under governments led by Social Democrats with a high profile in issues of gender equality (com-pared to their rivals) and with allies among feminist activists and women’s movements. Thus, while there might be some correlation between increasing representation of women and prostitution policy reforms, it seems that women’s movements and their allied representa-tives in parties and parliaments have taken different, almost diametrically opposed, stances on prostitution policy.

Thus, though the sample is by no means exhaustive, the critical mass thesis seems to give a poor account of substantive prostitution policy outcomes across these cases. An increasing proportion of women in parliament might well affect policy, but the direction policy takes cannot simply be deduced from women’s common interests. The critical mass literature’s recent turn to “critical acts” and “critical actors” indicates a desire to move beyond the simple mechanics of numerical representation in order to understand how and why different strategies and coalitions come to achieve success.

Representation might well be necessary, this argument goes, but it’s not a sufficient condition for achieving “women-friendly” policies:

“It is never just about numbers; it is also about positional power, the extent to which representatives are embedded in strategic alliances or develop coalitions, and have relationships with women’s movements.”⁸

However, the puzzle is not only to understand the mechanisms through which women’s increased representation impacts policy, but also to explain why and how similarly situated actors with similar power resources come to pursue such radically different policies. Policies on prostitution which are mutually exclusive cannot simply be subsumed under the common rubric of “women-friendly policies” just because they were proposed or embraced by female legislators, women’s movements and their allies. And just as we cannot just assume “women’s interests” to be a uniform category, the preferences of actors claiming to represent women cannot just be assumed as a given – they need to be explained.

Thus, a key puzzle here is to explain how and why specific policy proposals come to be framed as “women-friendly”, feminist stances. Obviously, such frames differ dramatically across countries. Answering such questions seem to point in the direction of alternative approaches highlighting contextual, ideational and institutional variables, rather than merely numbers, relative power positions and pre-determined preferences of strategic agents.

Footnotes

1. Bleich, Erik. “Integrating Ideas into Policy-Making Analysis: Frames and Race Policies in Britain and France.” Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 9 (November 1, 2002): 1054-1076, p. 1058. [↩]
2. Celis, Karen, och Sarah Childs. “Introduction: The Descriptive and Substantive Representation of Women: New Directions.” Parliam Aff 61, no. 3 (Juli 1, 2008): 419-425. doi:10.1093/pa/gsn006. [↩]
3. Quoted in Wängnerud, Lena. “Women in parliaments: Descriptive and substantive representation.” Annual Review of Political Science 12 (2009). [↩]
4. Wängnerud, Lena. “Women in parliaments: Descriptive and substantive representation.” Annual Review of Political Science 12 (2009). [↩]
5. Ekberg, Gunilla. “The Swedish law that prohibits the purchase of sexual services.” Violence Against Women 10, no. 10 (2004): 1187-1218. [↩]
6. Quoted in Parbring, Bosse. “Nordic countries vs. Europe.” NIKK magasin, 2009. [↩]
7. Eduards, Maud. Kroppspolitik : om moder Svea och andra kvinnor. Atlas akademi. Stockholm: Atlas, 2007, p. 174; cf. Svanström, Yvonne. “Criminalising the john — a Swedish gender model?.” I The politics of prostitution: Women’s movements, democratic states and the globalisation of sex commerce, edited by Joyce Outshoorn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. [↩]
8. Celis & Childs, ibid. [↩]

Related posts:

1. Prostitution policy change as a problem-driven process
2. Research on Norwegian prostitution policy
3. The impact of Finnish parliamentary election results on prostitution policy