NPPR at 2011 ECPG in Budapest
At the 2011 European Conference on Politics and Gender in Budapest, Hungary last week, we presented our most recent paper, examining how sharply different ideas shaped very similar bans on the purchase of sexual services in Norway and Sweden. In Norway, policy entrepreneurs tailored the sex purchase ban as a solution to the problem of transnational trafficking, of which the public had grown acutely aware after the arrival in 2003 of Nigerian prostitutes in the streets of Oslo and other main cities. By contrast, our analysis of the Swedish case shows that ideas regarding gender equality, especially as linked to conventionally-accepted causal stories regarding the abusive history of female prostitutes, were central to the arguments made by those seeking the criminalization of sexual services in the late 1990s.
Castle Hill, Budapest. Photo by Bruce Tuten.
The chair and discussant for the panel, Sexuality and the State: Comparative Perspectives, was Professor Joyce Outshoorn (University of Leiden). Additional papers were presented by Isabelle Engeli (University of Geneva) as well as David Paternotte (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Manon Tremblay (University of Ottawa).
Our paper, “The Same Policy, But Different Ideas: The Ideational Underpinnings of the Norwegian and Swedish Bans on the Purchase of Sexual Services” is now at the revise at resubmit stage with a political science / gender studies journal.
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