Nordic Prostitution Policy Reform

With the NPPR project now being hosted at the University of Stirling, it’s become somewhat inevitable that the UK prostitution debate has increasingly found its way onto our collective radar screen.  Indeed, initial plans are already under way for a follow up project that will explore the debate over prostitution policy at different levels of government across the UK.

For the time being, in addition to our work on the Nordic cases, we’re continuing to keep an eye out for press coverage of prostitution and trafficking in the UK as a way to gain insight into how the issues are framed (t)here.  As part of that effort, two events have been of particular interest to us:  the revelation of Belle de Jour’s identity, and a recent conference organized at the Royal Society of Medicine in London on the sexuality of differently-abled people.  The coverage associated with both of these events has intrigued us for the way in which an implicit or explicit condemnation of sex work has either been absent, or has shared the stage with competing perspectives.

In today’s post, we’ll focus on the first of those – Belle de Jour – at some length.

Perhaps the dominant sentiment in the UK press coverage has been surprise at the fact that the Britain’s most famous former sex-worker, blogger, author (and subject of a former hit TV series) has a PhD and is a research scientist at the University of Bristol.  We now know that Belle is Dr Brooke Magnanti, who chose to become a sex worker while in need of cash in the final stages of completing her doctoral dissertation.  In what was apparently a pre-emptive strategy to prevent the Daily Mail from outing her, Magnanti contacted India Knight at the Times and offered her the opportunity to spill the beans first.

Choosing Knight as the journalist to break the story could certainly be seen as a bit of a risky move on Magnanti’s part.  Indeed, Knight points out that when she reviewed the first Belle book was published, she was ‘enraged by the view of prostitution that Belle de Jour presented — promoted, even, it seemed to me.’  Knight was not going to be a walk over for Magnanti.  We shouldn’t have expected her to be a sympathetic audience.  If anything, based on Knight’s earlier opposition to the tone of the Belle de Jour books, we should have expected that she would continue to be sharply critical.  But that’s not exactly what we get.  Rather, the Knight article is fascinating because of the way in which she allows Magnanti to make her points, without subsequent efforts to minimize their impact or to suggest that we should dismiss her logic.  What we get is Knight taking Magnanti seriously, and an effort to make sense of a seeming anomaly.

Knight sums up her basic stance towards Magnanti’s portrayal of sex work in the latter portion of the article, observing:

“I used to travel through King’s Cross every night for years. It’s since been cleaned up, but at that time it was prostitute central and those women were desperate — ill, dirty, addicted, abused, wrecked in every sense. The idea that anyone would propagate the myth that their job was somehow glamorous or fun or a bit naughty — “Let’s have a harmless laugh and then I’ll give you loads of money, which you could perhaps spend on a Conran sofa or some pesto” — seemed to me a lie that was both naive to the point of delusion and completely irresponsible.”

Pointing out that the Archbishop of York recently attacked the then-masked Belle de Jour for glamorizing prostitution, Knight asks Magnanti whether he may have had a point.  Magnanti’s answer is quoted at length, and without any editorial comment on the part of Knight:

“Look, of course trafficking occurs. It’s awful. Awful. Desperate. But you don’t have a go at prostitutes — you have a go at border controls. You do something on the policing front. I thought his remarks were so reductive and also slightly patriarchal, and I was upset at being used as a counter-argument — ‘Belle de Jour says this, but she is of course fake.’ The thing is that people are complex. People lead complicated lives. I’m not the only person walking around who’s an ex-call-girl, believe me. And you can’t say I’m not real, and that my experience isn’t real, because here I am. Some sex workers have terrible experiences. I didn’t. I was unbelievably fortunate in every respect. The people at the agency looked after us appropriately and instructed us appropriately and weren’t going to put us in harm’s way if they could possibly avoid it.” She is, she says, “entitled to speak about it, or write about it, as I lived it”.

To the extent that Knight does question Magnanti’s reasoning, it come in the form of wondering whether Magnanti is truly aware of the consequences that will result from her revelation.  Knight speculates that these consequences may be quite some time in coming. However, the early signs suggest that, at the very least, Magnanti will not be facing any sanctions from her state-financed employer, the University of Bristol, which has stated that, “This aspect of her past bears no relevance to her current role at the university.”

The revelation in the Times was picked up by the bulk of the British press, yet it appeared to be only in the pages of the Guardian that one could find an attempt by opponents of prostitution to frame Magnanti’s remarks as dangerous. There, Finn Mackay, of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution, sought to portray Magnanti’s sex work experiences as far from the norm:

“To come out saying, ‘It’s so wonderful’ is a slap in the face to the great majority of women who have had horrendous experiences in the sex industry. I’m glad to hear that she hasn’t been burned, beaten, buggered, raped and spat on, but she shouldn’t sell down the river those whose experiences are different from hers by glamorising and normalising sex work.”

Yet, Mackay’s indictment was not left unchallenged in the article, with Professor Helen Ward of Imperial College London, noting that:

“Belle de Jour’s case is not the norm, but it’s not that unusual either. Policy makers tend to portray sex workers as either drug-addicted young women like those murdered in Ipswich, or as trafficked migrant women who have no control over their lives. But I’ve been working with sex workers for over 20 years as a researcher and as a doctor, and I know that there is a wide range of people involved in sex work.”

The inclusion of these contrasting views is nothing short of fascinating to us.  In looking at the Swedish debate, we’ve seen a great deal in the way of framing strategies along the lines of Mackay’s comments.  Particularly in the past few years, our ongoing review of the Swedish daily press has revealed instances where those who do support the ban on the purchase of sexual services concede that some women may choose sex work (and not be tricked into it, or enter it out of desperation).  However, these cases are presented as being relatively rare, with the norm being the horrors described by Mackay.  What is far less familiar to us in the Swedish debate are statements from established academic figures at leading higher educational institutions observing not only that framing strategies figure into the prostitution debate, but that the characterizations chosen by opponents of legalized/regulated prostitution downplay the degree to which women enter sex work voluntarily.

For now, these observations are anecdotal, and nothing more.  However, they pique our interests in a very clear direction, one targeted at an exploration of the voices that are included in the media’s coverage of a given country’s prostitution debate, much along the lines of our post on Denmark and prohibition this past spring.  Drawing upon W. Lance Bennett’s indexing hypothesis, one might consider the extent to which the media tends to ‘tie’ the framing of prostitution debates to specific voices thought to represent an official consensus on the issue.  Can an official consensus, reflecting the ideas underlying prostitution policy, be identified?  If so, does this official consensus receive pride of position in media coverage? Are dissenting counter-frames allotted a meaningful role when the issue is up for discussion?  Or, potentially reflecting cases in which no one general ideational framework has been authoritatively deployed to frame the ‘necessary’ policies on prostitution, do we then see a more even-handed media when it comes to searching out alternative viewpoints?

In a future post, we’ll focus on the coverage received this past autumn by the Tender Loving Care Trust, in conjunction with their efforts to have the sexual needs of the differently-abled recognized by care workers.

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