Depicting sex workers as victims of human trafficking, and thus implying that sex workers in Finland are mainly of a foreign nationality and involved in sex work unwillingly, is no new way to describe those offering sexual services for a fee. In the broad social debate going on in Finland in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, which raised prostitution and questions of chastity as topics, one can find several reports of young Swedish women, who were convinced to travel from Stockholm mainly to Helsinki and Turku, promised work in cafes or restaurants, and, yet, actually lured and trapped into prostitution.[1] Today , Sweden is known as the first country in the world to have passed a general criminalization of the purchase of sexual services, and as a country, which also tries to influence the policy of other countries towards a criminalization of the purchase of sexual services.

A short study in Finnish newspapers from the last two decades reveals that a major part of the Finnish debate on sex work still revolves around the concept of foreigners. A clear shift has of course happened: the sex workers are depicted entering Finnish borders from countries east and south rather than west.  The dissolution of the Soviet Union and an increased possibility for travel from the eastern European countries to Finland created possibilities for sex workers, especially from Russia and Estonia, to travel to Finland for shorter periods.

The change of origin country of sex workers is also connected to the ideas of what is thought to be the main reason for people to enter the sex work industry: poverty. With poverty seen as the background factor for “ending up” in sex work, people, generally women, originating from the poorest countries are the ones who are most visible in debates on sex work.[2] The focus on severe poverty and limited career-, and perhaps, life-choices has focused the prostitution debate on victims of international human trafficking. Sex workers who entered Finland with false perception of the type of work they were to perform in the country, possibly with limited foreign language skills and their freedom of movement restricted or finances controlled by the employer/trafficker constituted one of the most distinct pictures of a prostitute in Finland. Still, not all foreign women involved in sex work in Finland are considered to be victims or having entered the sex work business unwillingly.[3] Statements pointing out how Eastern European women with short stays in Finland can collect earnings equivalent to several months salary in their home country imply that short periods of sex work in Finland actually is a smart business move.

Debating sex work without stepping into a discourse on morals has been largely impossible . The acceptable types of sexuality and the correct or allowed ways to perform that sexuality are almost always included in debates on sex work. Outsiders have deemed promiscuity as being prevalent in descriptions of sex workers and their choices in entering the business, alongside with mental disorders, low self-esteem, a lazy wish for easy cash and a lack of alternative career choices. Whereas the victims of human trafficking can largely be perceived as forced into prostitution, the “happy whore” stands for her own decision for her involvement in sex work, both in good and bad. In societies with strict sexual morals the “happy whores” might face rather judgmental attitudes when being public with their field of profession. Suggestions to criminalize selling sexual services can also stem from ideas of sex work as a profession entered willingly, and wrongly, one might add.

Still, it is not only people condemning women involved in sex work who argue that it is the quest for pleasure that has driven some women into prostitution . Self-employed sex workers who claim to be happy in their self-chosen profession distance themselves from statements that the selling and purchasing of sexual services would be an act of violence against women or a question of gender inequality.[4] Even though many sex workers state the salary as the best part of their work, or admit that sex work never was the profession they aimed for, several sex workers stress that they greatly enjoy sex and the possibilities to explore their sexuality in their work. Still, the statement that the bargaining of sex would be a mutual contract between two equal adults has been criticized for making a very elitist perspective both on sex work and the negotiating possibilities of sex workers.

Thus, while almost apparent, it is clear that the contemporary debate about sex work in Finland is heavily permeated both by ideas about nationality and agency for women, as well as differing views on sexuality.

[2] Poverty has been connected to sex work in several newspaper articles, parliamentary debates on sex work as well as in the reports on human trafficking and prostitution written by the working group appointed by the Ministry of Justice.

[3] See for instance Lehti, Martti, ’Naiskauppa ja Suomi’, Haaste 2/2002.

[4] Amongst other, members of SALLI, the United Sex Professionals of Finland, have argued for the positive aspects of sex work.

Related posts:

1. Legitimate and illegitimate sex work – the role of identities in the Swedish pornography debate
2. The impact of Finnish parliamentary election results on prostitution policy
3. Pia Levin joins NPPR staff

A heated debate over pornography sparked in 2000, following the anti-pornography documentary Shocking Truth which was displayed to the government and in Swedish cinemas. Following this debate, the Social Democrat Minister of Culture Marita Ulvskog proposed an extension of the censorship law. Censors had their periods of employments cut by half, on the ground that they were thought to gradually become insensitive by watching pornography. It was decided that Swedish prisons should be able to prevent sex criminals from watching pornography in prisons. Margareta Winberg, Minister of Equality, tried to ensure that hotels didn’t show pornographic movies if they wished to receive municipal contracts. An epistemic community of feminist debaters, experts, journalists and politicians (from now on referred to as debaters) shared a consensus that pornography constituted men’s violence against women. However, a crucial difference to the Swedish prostitution debate is that not all pornography is perceived as bad. While debaters are working hard to ban one kind of pornography, another kind is not only accepted, but also promoted: in 2009, the Swedish film institute (SFI) decided to finance the making of the feminist pornographic movie Dirty Diaries, which did not engage any of the anti-pornography debaters heard in the Shocking Truth debate. How can this be explained?

Identities, defined as the terms and labels used by debaters to describe those individuals producing and consuming pornography, seem to be crucial in understanding the respective policy debates and decisions following Shocking Truth and Dirty Diaries, not least because of the general quality of a label to simplify and homogenize. Debaters were employing identities and subjective emotion as evidence, rather than hard facts, in order to further their discourse, which frequently lead to the disregard of nuances. The most common identities found in both debates were female victims and male perpetrators. These identities functioned mainly as a widely accepted argument as to why pornography constituted men’s violence against women.

A frequent strategy in the Shocking Truth debate was that scripted pornographic scenes were perceived as documentary in order to fit the anti-pornography debaters’ arguments. Hence, in one scene that director Alexa Wolf picked out for her film, a woman is having sex with five men, wearing animal masks. In a following scene the woman is telling the camera that her dad’s friends did the same to her when she was 11 years old. This scene is dramatised and not documentary. However, Wolf and many others in the debate stressed that the scripted scenes should be seen as documentary. The argument was that sexual abuse is driving people into the porn industry; Wolf estimated that 95 % of the people acting in porn movies have been subject to sexual abuse in their childhood. However, in an interview with Svenska Dagbladet she admitted that there is no scientific proof for this claim.[1] Helena Karlén from ECPAT Sweden reproduced the view that the above mentioned scenes are documentary in a debate article: “[t]he fact that the porn industry is making an incredible amount of money on the humiliation of women who have been raped when they were children is unacceptable”.[2] This quote is representative for a large part of the debate; the line between what is reality and fiction is consistently ignored as irrelevant. Debaters defending the victim – perpetrator identity formation tend to argue that pornography in general, and the debated scene in particular, is documentary.

Identities simplify and homogenize in order to be rendered meaningful, which can explain why the debate came to focus almost exclusively on the categorisation of women as victims and men as perpetrators. The Minister of Culture Marita Ulvskog argued in an interview that “the women [in porn films] are portrayed like dead meat with body openings and the men like sex machines.”[3]

The view that women are victims for men’s sex drives, rather than sexual subjects, eventually lead to the connection between group sex and group rape. Just a few days after Shocking Truth, a range of politicians, experts and newspapers started to connect pornography with a recent occurrence in Rissne, where a girl was raped by a number of young men. Helena Sutorius, lawyer and researcher on sexual crimes argued that “the group rape verdicts I have studied are copies of the acts we have seen in the movies. There are clear parallels between the TV-channels’ pornography and the group rapes that have occurred during the recent years in Sweden.”[4] Inger Segelström from the Social Democrats argued that there had been a large increase in group rapes during the recent years and that there was a strong connection to the gangbang scenes in porn.[5] However, two months later, Ann-Marie Begler, director-general at the Swedish Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet), strongly reacted to this connection and claimed that a consistent decrease in reported group rapes in fact had occurred during the recent years.[6]

So how come many leading experts expressed this view, despite the lack of evidence? This case clearly constitutes an instance of where identities are crucial in providing a simple version of reality and a credible causal story. With the help of the victim – perpetrator identities, this connection could explain the social problem of rape, and at the same time offer a legitimate reason for why pornography had to be banned. The consequence of this view is that the male sexuality is perceived as dangerous and something that has to be stopped, while the female sexuality seems to be drastically different from the male.

Later, it turned out that one of the ’victims’ in Shocking Truth in fact was a business partner of porn companies and had acted in thousands of porn movies. “I suggested the rape scenes myself”, she said to the TV channel TV3; “I wanted to do something sinful, wild and crazy”.[7] None of the actors in the debate chose to comment on this since the identity that this woman expressed did not correspond with the identity of the female victim that they defended. This is only one instance of how debaters sometimes were predetermined to a certain finding and refused to accept counter-evidence that conflicted with the identities. This tendency is described by Becker and Hendriks who argue that a typical attribute of a paradigm, around which epistemic communities gather, is the disregard of nuances: “…disturbing aspects of reality and critical questions are easily ignored.”[8]

The perceptions of the victim – perpetrator identities allowed not only politicians, but also experts to make subjective and normative claims. There was an accepted subjective tone in the debate where emotion was used as evidence. Being inexperienced and emotional was seen as a positive quality when it came to review pornography. The Minister of Culture Marita Ulvskog argued that the Swedish Board of Film Classification (Statens biografbyrå) was not emotional enough when it came to the review of pornography. She claimed to be worried that the censors watched the films “from a professional and analytical point of view rather than based on emotion and experience.”[9] Hence, the emotional element is not only accepted – it is demanded. The executive at the Board of Film Classification, Gunnel Arrbäck, was very critical and pointed to that their mandate required them to be professional and not emotional. Despite this, Ulvskog soon introduced a shorter time limit for the censors’ employment on the grounds that censors become less sensitive the longer they work. Their periods of employment were decreased from 12 to six years.

The emotional tone in the debate allowed for personal and subjective constructions of pornography. Ewa Larsson from the Green Party questioned the Board’s definition of brutal violence and claimed that: “some movies ‘look like’ they are made equally. But then it ends with the man shooting his sperm onto the woman’s face. And what fun is that?”[10] Larsson was expressing her own subjective preferences and emotions as a relevant argument, and this is somewhat representative for the arguments in this debate in general. There is a notion of a common understanding of what sexuality is and should be, rather than a perception of individual taste, not conditioned by sex or gender.

When identities are successfully employed in a debate, they seem to open up for a subjective and emotional tone, as opposed to a focus on professionalism and hard facts that could nuance the picture. Furthermore, when the identity of the female victim who has to be saved from the male perpetrator is translated into policy, it functions to homogenize both female and male sexuality; and stigmatise the male sexuality as inherently dangerous.

The victim – perpetrator identities are reproduced also in the debate about the government’s financing of the feminist porn film Dirty Diaries. Chief Executive at SFI, Cissi Elwin Frenkel was eager to assert that SFI does not support pornography, but a new approach to depict female sexuality. Feminist pornography, expressing a feminist sexuality identity is defended and celebrated in opposition to mainstream pornography, which is seen to express an illegitimate sexuality. This can explain why Dirty Diaries did not spark a big debate. In fact, Dirty Diaries received more attention abroad than in Sweden. The female victim – male perpetrator identities are expressed in both debates. Thus, rather than representing a shift in the pornography discourse, Dirty Diaries seem to be part of the same discourse expressing a view of a legitimate kind of pornography alongside with the notion of an illegitimate mainstream pornography, represented by Shocking Truth.

By isolating the pornography debate from the prostitution debate, an important finding is distinguished: not all sex work is seen as bad. One narrow form of pornography, where feminist women are in charge, is in fact encouraged; moreover empowered by a strong feminist discourse with the interpretive prerogative of sex work in Sweden. While there are close connections between the pornography debate and the prostitution debate, an intriguing question is why similar identities of legitimate feminist sex workers are not found in the prostitution debate.

^[2] Karlén, H., “Alla måste bli förbannade”, Aftonbladet, 21 February 2000.

^[3] Sjödin, S., “Förbjud all porr i tv”, Aftonbladet, 15 February 2000.

^[4] Andersson, E., “Våldtäkter kopieras från tv”, Svenska Dagbladet, 17 February 2000.

^[5] “Tv-chefer hängs ut på internet”, Göteborgs-Posten, 13 February 2000.

^[6] ”Färre anmälda gruppvåldtäkter”, Sydsvenskan, 11 April 2000

^[7] Österholm, U. L., “’Offret’ i Shocking truth: Jag föreslog våldtäktsscenen”, Aftonbladet, 21 October 2000.

[8] Becker, U., Hendriks, C. (2008), “’As the Central Planning Bureau says’. The Dutch wage restraint paradigm, its sustaining epistemic community and its relevance for comparative research”,  Review of International Political Economy, 15:5.

^[9] Persson, A., “Påfrestande vara filmcensor”, Dagens Nyheter, 10 May 2000.

^[10] Mårtensson, M., ”Vad tycker ni om porren, politiker?”, Aftonbladet, 17 February 2000.

Related posts:

1. The rise and fall of the Joint Action in Norway
2. The Happy Whore and the Victim of Human Trafficking – Stereotypes Prevail in Finnish Debate on Sex Work

A defining moment for the potential to reach a joint European statement on whether sex workers/prostitutes should be regarded as workers or victims, was the debate that took place during the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) congress in Seville 2007. During the congress, the increased prevalence of illegal labour migration and smuggling of humans was on the agenda. One aspect of this development was a discussion about how to prevent the increase in women and men being trafficked across borders for the purpose of sexual exploitation. While no national labour union disputed the fact that forced trafficking for the purpose of selling sexual services is unacceptable, the negotiations that followed showed that what was deemed as voluntary sex work varied greatly between the unions represented at the congress.

During the meeting, an amendment to an action plan dealing with the problems of illegal labor migration was put forward by Dutch labour representatives. It advocated action against trafficking and forced prostitution, but also stressed the importance of interlinking these issues with the rights of sex workers to organize. Swedish labour union representatives protested the amendment, and urged the Dutch to strike the mentioning of labour rights for sex-workers since voluntary sex work was nonexistent from their perspective. In the end, the proposal stressing sex-workers right to organise was not included in the declaration.

The outcome of the ETUC negotiation is interesting, both from an industrial relations perspective and for the broader research on prostitution policy. It has given rise to an important question: why do labor unions that purports to represent solidarity among the working classes for better rights, wages and benefits choose to exclude potential members? This is especially interesting in the light of the development in recent years, when sex workers more frequently have sought to organize, and in the context of the declining union membership across Europe.

Interviews held with key figures present during the congress in 2007 demonstrates that the interest of Swedish labor unions are shaped by ideas and normative concerns regarding gender equality rather than industrial relations, and that Swedish unions, with support from their Nordic colleagues managed to change the perceived societal problem of sex work from a question of industrial relations to a question of the suppression of women. This was done by successfully framing sex workers as victims rather than workers.

Convention Center for the 2007 ETUC Congress in Seville, Spain

Sture Nordh, president of TCO, explained that from the Swedish side there were no mentioning at all of accepting voluntary sex work during the negotiations in Seville. According to him, women become involved in the sex industry when they are very young, many of the times when they are under the age of fifteen, and therefore selling sex is rarely a voluntary decision. When asked where these statistics came from Nordh admitted to not have any data supporting his claim, but continued to say that organizing sex workers would support the idea of women being happy to sell sex^[2]. How the Swedish labor movements perceive sex work is made even more clear when Lars-Anders Häggstrom, president of Handels,  emphasises that Handels not only is a workers organization but a feminist organization; “It [feminism] is a very important aspect of our work. Years back it was very much a question of a class perspective that was important for us as a labour organization, but it has become more and more evident for us that this is not enough, we need a feminist perspective. This has become apparent to us during the last ten years, especially since the sex-purchase law.^[3]” Both of the interviews indicated that ideas on sex-work as oppression rather then a form of labor have become normatively embedded and therefore provides a framework that actors dealing with different kind of policy (in this case labor unions dealing with industrial relations) automatically refer to in situations of uncertainty or conflict. Marjolijn Bulk from the Federation Dutch Labour Movement (FNV) who also were present during the congress, further demonstrates how ideas on sex work as a form of oppression influenced Swedish trade unions; “We [FNV] discussed the amendment amongst ourself, and before we presented it I had a discussion with Helena from TCO [Helena Johansson]. When speaking to the Swedish delegates they told us that from their perspective there was no distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution, and they would never support our amendment. As I remember, we decided to strike the last 5 words of the text including the right to organize.^[4]” It was also explained to her by the Swedish delegates that the organization of sex workers was against their national beliefs on the exploitation of women.

Domestic ideas regarding gender equality carried by Swedish trade union delegates managed to block the possibility of a joint international statements or policy orientation on how to deal with the organisation of sex workers during the Seville congress in 2007, and the question of labor rights for sex workers is still a policy area to be dealt with on the domestic level. This demonstrates that utilizing an ideational approach, focusing on key formative moments, makes it possible to add to the understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing sex worker unionization.

(This blog post is based on Karin Persson Strömbäck’s dissertation for the MSc in International Conflict and Cooperation, titled, Domestic Ideas and International Policy Outcome: Sweden’s Influence on ETUC Policy Concerning Sex-workers’ Right to Organize. Karin was awarded an MSc with distinction for this dissertation in 2010, and it can be downloaded here.)

^[2] Nordh, Sture. President of TCO (The Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees) Interview held 2010-07-02

^[3] Häggstrom, Lars-Anders. President of Handels (The Swedish Union of Commercial Employees) Interview held 2010-07-02

^[4] Bulk, Marjolijn.  Policy officer at The Netherlands Trade Union Confederation FNV (Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging) Telephone Interview held 2010-08-19

Related posts:

1. The framing of sex workers as victims in Denmark

As the second country in the world to ban the purchase of sexual services, Norway stands out as a key case in NPPR’s comparative analysis, not least because of the sudden shift in policy. In late 2004, for instance, a Justice Department Working Group on Legal Regulation of Purchase of Sexual Services advised against criminalising the purchase of sexual services.

Yet, only a few years later, proponents of the ban had achieved the necessary parliamentary majority for criminalisation, the tipping point being the Labour Party congress in April 2007. Two years earlier, the congress had turned down criminalisation. This year, too, party leadership argued against the proposal, suggesting instead to give government more time to consider the issue. Among those who entered the podium during the debate were party heavy-weights such as Knut Storberget (Minister of Justice), Dag Terje Andersen (Minister of Industry), Helga Pedersen (Minister of Fisheries and vice party chairman) as well as Anniken Huitfeldt, leader of the women’s network, who all endorsed postponing the decision.

Eventually, though, 184 out of 300 delegates voted in favour of criminalisation. Press reported it as a victory for the youth wing, influential regional branches of the party, including Oslo AP, and certain members of parliament, who managed to win the support of the congress. As the Labour Party’s coalition partners, the Socialist Left Party and the Centre Party, already favoured criminalisation (as did the Christian Democratic party), a broad majority now supported criminalisation. A year later, in April 2008, Storberget presented the bill (Ot. prp. 48 [2007-2008]) which resulted in a sex purchase ban taking effect on 1 January, 2009.

Hence, recent prostitution policy in Norway represents an intriguing shift: How did proponents of criminalisation manage to turn the tide? While there are a number of studies which address, broadly, the shifts in Norwegian prostitution policy over the past decade, few studies of Norwegian prostitution policy have reached English-language academic publications. Most existing studies are written in Norwegian, aimed for a national public debate or commissioned by official or semi-official inquiries, and hence rarely seek a structured explanation of prostitution policy reform.

Casting the net widely, however, we can discern three types of resources to draw upon in the literature, focusing on discourse, agents and regulations, respectively.

• Discourse: One type of studies focus on how prostitution, prostitutes and clients are represented in media discourse and, as a sub-theme, how academic research feeds into those debates.
  • Prominent examples of such studies include Dag Stenvoll’s critical discourse analysis of how Norwegian newspapers construed Russian women in prostitution in rural northern Norway in the 1990s, identifying recurring themes connecting prostitution to organised crime, contagious diseases, moral hazard, social stigma and an outside threat to an established social order.¹ Stenvoll has also written on the representation of clients in media, popular culture and politics.²
  • Similarly, Synnøve Økland Jahnsen analyses how Norwegian newspapers covered Nigerian women in prostitution in Norway in the mid ’00s, arguing that media narratives revolve around three conflicts: the ‘Norwegian prostitution market’, emphasising competition between women of different ethnic origins offering sexual services; the ‘Norwegian lines of tolerance and decency’, describing a conflict between prostitutes and ‘regular citizens’ in the use of public space; and ‘a global sex market’, which emphasises unequal relations between women and men and between Norway and Nigeria. Nigerian women in prostitution are portrayed, paradoxically, as both illegal aliens exploiting Norwegian men and victims of cynical networks of transborder crime.³
  • May-Len Skilbrei, too, discusses how recent public debates, both nationally and locally, have dealt with the phenomenon of Nigerian prostitutes in the streets of Oslo. Skilbrei notes that while traditional discourses victimise prostituted women, the terms of debate shifted in these years, casting “regular Norwegian men” as victims of aggressive marketing of sexual services, while the Nigerian women were singled out and blamed for pushing their trade in the wrong place (the Karl Johan Street) and in the wrong way (too aggressively). In effect, prostitution by Norwegian women was either construed as more orderly and less disturbing, or simply neglected.⁴
• Agents: A second type of studies addresses, instead, the agents engaged in prostitution policy making, such as women’s movements and sex workers’ organisations. Often, such studies are written with from the partisan perspective of a particular movement. This type includes Agnete Strøm’s recent historical account of the Women’s Front and its struggle against prostitution over 30 years⁵. From a different perspective, Astrid Renland and Arne Randers-Pehrson both discuss how sex workers’ groups and the women’s movement have struggled over the privilege to define sex work and sex workers.⁶
• Regulations: A third type of research seeks to describe public policies, legal regulations and their implementation and effects through institutions such as courts, the police and social agencies. May-Len Skilbrei has contributed immensely to documenting prostitution policies, laws and regulations in Norway.⁷ While these studies often provide useful, detailed accounts of the dependent variable (prostitution policy), they usually do not aim to provide theoretically founded explanations of policy change, but are descriptive, historical and atheoretical.

Naturally, a study on any one aspect of prostitution policy will necessarily also touch upon related aspects, and hence these types are not mutually exclusive categories. However, few studies claim to establish causal links between the different aspects, say, how media discourse influences policy, or the other way around, how policy implementation feeds back into public perceptions of prostitution. Additionally, there are a few studies which detail the subjective experience of prostitutes and their clients.⁸ While such studies often give insights into very concrete effects of prostitution policy, they are less useful in explaining it, since, as many of these studies document, sex workers and sex buyers are rarely represented in public discourse and policy making.

While existing research provides knowledge about the input and output of prostitution policy reform, we know less about the mechanisms by which such input is translated into output. ("Albertine" by Alfred Seland at Oslo City Hall. Photo: Margaret Maloney.)

However, few of the existing studies have focused on the political processes through which prostitution policy is made. For instance, although we know that prostitution policy has been debated within and across Norway’s political parties for decades, there are no studies that we are aware of that seek to describe, let alone explain, how and why their positions have shifted, and how such changes, in turn affect the opportunities for prostitution policy reform.

As such, while individual studies shouldn’t be faulted for having a particular, limited focus, collectively they leave the political arena as a blank spot on the map, or a black box.⁹ We know the input in form of media discourse, academic and activist knowledge production and various grassroots and elite organisations participating in such discourses, and we know the output in the form of policies and regulations which produce certain effects on prostitution as such and the various agencies in charge of regulating it. But we know little about the mechanisms by which such input is transformed into such output.

This seems especially puzzling if we’re looking for causal explanations of prostitution policy reform, such as why Norway criminalised the purchase of sexual services as of 2009. While it seems likely that changes in media discourse, corresponding to changes in prostitution markets, did influence policy, that shift is only half the story: the nature of the influence as such must also be documented.

Hence, discourse studies need to be complemented with a careful assessment of, for instance, how various policy entrepreneurs, unlike their competitors, were able to use the discursive shift as an opportunity to achieve legislative success. Such processes are by no means a self-evident or mechanical, and while the outcome, in retrospect, might seem overdetermined, it is produced by active, purposive agents: Policy makers might seek to resist changes in the broader ideational framework or selectively draw on available information in order to maintain their preferred policy stance. Drawing on ideational and constructivist theories, the NPPR project hopes to contribute with such an account of prostitution policy change in the case of Norway.

Footnotes

1. Dag Stenvoll, 2002: “From Russia with Love? Newspaper Coverage of Cross-Border Prostitution in Northern Norway, 1990—2001“, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 9:2, 143–162.
2. Stenvoll, Dag, 2007: “Kundebilder: Representasjoner av menn som betaler for sex”, 113–130, in Jessen, Liv (ed.), 2007: Det ideelle offer – andre tekster om prostitusjon. Oslo: Koloritt.
3. Synnøve Økland Jahnsen, 2007: Women who cross borders – black magic? A critical discourse analysis of the Norwegian newspaper coverage of Nigerian women in prostitution in Norway, Department of Sociology, University of Bergen; cf. Simonsen, Anne Hege, “Ubehaget i journalistikken : verden midt i blant oss” pp. 305–322 in Grenser for kultur? Perspektiver fra norsk minoritetsforskning, Øivind Fuglerud & Thomas Hylland Eriksen (eds.), Oslo: Pax, 2007.
4. May-Len Skilbrei, 2009: “Nigeriansk prostitusjon på norsk: Feil kvinner på feil sted”, in Norske seksualiteter, edited by Wencke Mühleisen & Åse Røthing, Oslo: Cappelen. Cf. Skilbrei, May-Len (2001), “The Rise and Fall of the Norwegian Massage Parlours: Changes in the Norwegian Prostitution Setting in the 1990s” Feminist Review 67, 63–77.
5. Agnete Strøm, 2009: “A glimpse into 30 years of struggle against prostitution by the women’s liberation movement in Norway”, Reproductive Health Matters 17:34, 29–37.
6. Renland, Astrid, 2007: “Fra medsøstre til ofre, horer og streikbrytere”, 29-56; Randers-Pehrson, Arne: “Sanne bilder av prostituerte? Hvilke bilder kan vi tåle?” in Jessen, Liv (ed.), 2007: Det ideelle offer – andre tekster om prostitusjon. Oslo: Koloritt.
7. e.g. Skilbrei, May-Len (1999), “Norsk prostitusjonskontroll på 1990-tallet”, Kritisk Juss 26:1, 59–74; Skilbrei, May-Len (2006),”Prostitusjonslovgivning i Danmark, Norge og Sverige” in Trine Lynggard (ed.): Sex säljer: Kön och makt inom prostitution och pornografi, NIKK-rapport; Skilbrei, May-Len (2008), ”Rettslig håndtering av prostitusjon og menneskehandel i Norge”i Charlotta Holmström og May-Len Skilbrei, red., Prostitution i Norden. Forskningsrapport, TemaNord-rapport; Stridbeck, Ulf (2005): “Prostitusjon i Norge: Realiteter, politikk og regulering”, Nordisk Tidsskrift for Kriminalvidenskab, 92:1, 54–72.
8. e.g., Brunovskis, Anette: “Når ofre for menneskehandel sier nei til hjelp”, in Jessen, Liv (ed.), 2007: Det ideelle offer – andre tekster om prostitusjon. Oslo: Koloritt; cf. Dotterud, Per Kristian: “Prostitusjonsdebatten – en historie om usynliggjøring og undertykking”, in Jessen, Liv (ed.), 2007: Det ideelle offer – andre tekster om prostitusjon. Oslo: Koloritt; Skilbrei, May-Len og Irina Polyakova (2006), “My life is too short; I want to live now”: Kvinner fra Øst-Europa forteller om veien til og livet i prostitusjon i Norge, rapport Institutt for kriminologi og rettssosiologi, UiO; Skilbrei, M-L, M. Tveit and A. Brunovskis (2006), Afrikanske drømmer på europeiske gater. Nigerianske kvinner i prostitusjon i Norge. Fafo-rapport 525.
9. For an exception to this rule, see Skilbrei (2009).

Related posts:

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

This so-called problem-solving approach to policy change assumes that actors respond to societal problems “by implementing new and better policy solutions arrived at through processes of learning.”¹ Corresponding to the intuitive notion that events in the outside world trigger policy change, this perspective would assume cross-national differences in policy outcomes to result from differences in the nature of the problems actors face and the lessons that they learn.

While the problem-solving perspective has rarely been deployed as a self-standing, coherent theoretical perspective, any explanation of policy change needs to take into account, somehow, the phenomena in the external social world which policy is aimed at. In international relations theory, the nature of problems as such is sometimes attributed an important explanatory role. In a family of functionalist theories of international cooperation, the properties of certain common problems, such as climate change, transnational crime or pandemics prevention, are sometimes suggested to explain why actors successfully cooperate on certain issues, but not others. More recently, constructivist IR scholars have suggested that the properties of social problems might explain why some problems emerge as issues of international norm building, while others don’t. Keck & Sikkink argue that certain attributes of a social problem might make it easier to frame it as an issue, for example, “causes that can be assigned to the deliberate action of identifiable individuals; issues involving bodily harm to vulnerable individuals, especially when there is a short and clear causal chain assigning responsibility; and issues involving legal equality of opportunity.”²

While no account of policy change can discount the underlying phenomena in the social context which policy aims to regulate, the puzzle is to explicate the processes through which such phenomena get constructed as policy problems. Photo: Christy Sheffield.

An example, if only partial and implicit, of problem-focused explanations of prostitution policy outcomes is a research report edited by Charlotta Holmström and May-Len Skilbrei.³ In their report, they suggest that recent changes in sex markets is a key causal factor explaining policy outcomes across the Nordic countries. As such, the causes for changes in sex markets are diverse and include geopolitical factors, such as the fall of the Soviet bloc, leading to increased migration across previously closed national borders; the economic downturn in the 1990s, affecting people both in the Nordic region and in eastern Europe; as well as new means of communication, such as the internet and mobile phones. All in all, such diverse factors have shaped prostitution markets and in turn, affect policy, the argument goes. For instance, the increasing number of foreign women in prostitution in the Nordic countries “produces new needs which require changes in the Nordic countries’ social and legal efforts.”⁴ In sum, they write: “Prostitution changes, the law follows behind.”⁵

Undeniably, changes in material, economic and technological conditions might have grave implications for politics and policy. Politicians and other actors in policy processes respond to societal problems around them. But as a theoretical account of policy change, the problem-solving approach needs to be complimented, both in theory and applied to the issues of prostitution and trafficking.

For one thing, the problem-solving approach seems to rely on a technical and depoliticised notion of societal problems and policy issues, which might seem politically naive. Not only do policymakers in different settings often respond differently to similar problems; moreover, problems come to be perceived and constructed as such through discursive processes. Thus, the inherent nature of the problem of prostitution never affects policymakers immediately; such impact only occurs through a process by which a phenomenon becomes represented as a problem.⁶ And those processes of construction, of course, open for a great deal of political maneuvering on the part of various actors with interests in constructing issues one way rather than another.

For instance, while changes in the sex market, triggered by geopolitical, socio-economic and technological developments, have affected the Nordic countries fairly similarly, policy-makers have chosen different policy solutions to those problems. And even those solutions that seem similar in a technical sense are quite differently framed and justified in public discourse, and have different consequences once they are to be implemented. For instance, whereas the Swedish sex purchase ban was presented as a solution to the problem of violence against women and gender inequality, Norway’s similar ban was also suggested to be a solution to the problem of Nigerian women aggressively soliciting in the streets of Oslo.

Thus, it is difficult to talk of changes in a “sex market” which exogenously triggers changes in prostitution and trafficking policies. As Laura Agustin argues, “transactions involving both sex and money mean do not mean the same thing everywhere; sociocultural contexts change meanings”.⁷ Indeed, the very notion of prostitution as a ‘sex market’, driven by geopolitical, economic and technological change, might be what’s contested and debated.⁸ Likewise, analysing prostitution debates in Sweden and Germany, Susanne Dodillet (2004) notes that German and Swedish politicians ascribe such different meanings to prostitution that they “do not speak of the same issues when they discuss the same question.”⁹ The politics of prostitution policy frequently just is a struggle to define what the problem of prostitution is.

On the other hand, if there are any inherent, essential properties to the phenomena of prostitution and trafficking, it is the lack of reliable knowledge. Skilbrei & Holmström emphasise how difficult it is to assess the extent of prostitution and trafficking. Information on such phenomena is usually produced by the police, social services and academic researchers. These different knowledge producers use different methods to gather official and semi-official data on prostitution and sex-trafficking, but all are inevitably biased in their focus. Moreover, as Agustin argues:

“The vast majority of prostitution research bases its conclusions on a small portion of the total of people who offer sex for money, whether researchers conclude from the evidence that prostitutes are victims or not. […] gatekeepers play a large role and researchers’ choices regarding the populations they consider reflect a bias from the beginning.”¹⁰.

To complicate things further, the way in which official discourse conceives of the problem at hand often informs and guides research. For instance, research on prostitution across the Nordic countries tends to regard the problem in the same gendered terms as official discourse, thus reinforcing the notion that prostitution is a problem mainly affecting women, while neglecting other conceivable problem-frames, for instance those including men as both providers and consumers of sexual services.¹¹ In such cases, the knowledge produced would tend to support already established problem frames, indicating circularity between policy-making and knowledge production.

Even so, the problem-solving approach would need to emphasise the mechanisms through which policy makers learn about the social problems they are addressing. For instance, how do they select useful information from available knowledge? For what purposes do they employ it, and in what ways?¹² How do they deal with epistemic uncertainty?

And yet, the lack of knowledge rarely constrains policy makers from taking action. Indeed, actors often seem unbothered by the real extent of the phenomena they construct as problems. For example, Spanger notes a discrepancy in Denmark between the politicisation of trafficking in public debate and the relatively few cases reported by the police.¹³ Likewise, studying the social construction of trafficking, Ronald Weitzer argues that US trafficking policy has been informed by empirical claims that are exaggerated, unverifiable or demonstrably false.¹⁴ Thus, sometimes there is no direct link between social conditions and the particular construction of policy problems.

Thus, problem-solving approach adds important pieces to the puzzle of explaining prostitution policy change: No account of policy change can discount the underlying phenomena in the social context which policy aims to regulate. As regards the the social phenomenon of prostitution in the Nordic countries, political events and long-term developments have changed its nature over the past decades. Yet the important part here is to explicate the process through which actors come to perceive of such changes as problems, as social issues needing solutions in the form of policy, legislation, regulation, resources, etc. In that process, experts play a crucial part, but expert knowledge is not neutral, raw data. For our purposes, the problem-solving approach needs to be complemented with a more elaborated theoretical account of such processes and the ideational approach seems a fruitful start.

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.
2. Cited in R. Charli Carpenter. “Studying Issue (Non)-Adoption in Transnational Advocacy Networks.” International Organization 61:3, 2007, pp 643–67.
3. Charlotta Holmström & May-Len Skilbrei (eds.), 2008: Prostitusjon i Norden. Forskningsrapport, TemaNord-rapport 2008:604
4. p. 17
5. p. 18
6. M. Edelman, Constructing the political spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); C. L. Bacchi, Women, policy and politics : the construction of policy problems (London: SAGE, 1999).
7. Laura Agustín: “Sex and the Limits of Enlightenment: The Irrationality of Legal Regimes to Control Prostitution.” Sexuality Research & Social Policy 5:4, 2008, p. 73-86.
8. See for instance Synnøve Jahnsen’s critical discourse analysis of media narratives about Nigerian prostitutes in Norway: Synnøve Jahnsen, 2007: Women who cross borders – Black Magic? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Norwegian newspaper coverage of Nigerian women in prostitution in Norway. Master`s thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Bergen.
9. Susanne Dodillet, “Cultural clash on prostitution: Debates on prostitution in Germany and Sweden in the 1990s”, in M. Sönser Breen and F. Peters (eds.) Genealogies of Identity. Interdisciplinary Readings on Sex and Sexuality (Rodopi, 2005).
10. Agustín, op. cit., 78
11. Holmström & Skilbrei, op. cit.
12. In a different policy setting, Christina Boswell argues that organizations might use expert knowledge instrumentally to expand their power or adjust policy output, but they might also value knowledge as a source of legitimation, which they can draw upon in order to establish epistemic authority, or as a way of substantiating their policy preferences, lending authority to particular policy positions. Christina Boswell: “The political functions of expert knowledge: Knowledge and legitimation in European Union immigration policy.” Journal of European Public Policy 15:4, 471-488.
13. Marlene Spanger, 2008: “Socialpolitiske tiltag og feministisk gennemslagskraft indenfor menneskehandel i Danmark”, in Holmberg & Skilbrei, Prostitusjon i Norden. Forskningsrapport, TemaNord-rapport 2008:604
14. Ronald Weitzer, 2007: “The social construction of sex trafficking: Ideology and institutionalization of a moral crusade.” Politics & Society 35:3, 447-475.

Related posts:

1. Interests, women’s representation and prostitution policy reform
2. Research on Norwegian prostitution policy

This phase of feminist activism against pornography and prostitution started in 1977, with the formation of Women’s Joint Action Against Pornography. Formed on the initiative of the Women’s League of the Centre Party, the Joint Action was a broad, makeshift coalition including feminist groups such as the radical feminist Women’s Front, far left parties such as the Maoist Worker’s Communist Party, Christian Democrats and church parishes, trade unions and housewife assocations, joining forces in the struggle against prostitution and pornography. At its peak, it gathered some 30–40 organisations claiming a total membership of ca 500,000 people and local groups across the country.¹

The Joint Action was triggered by a series of events which had put pornograpy on the public agenda in the mid 1970s. For instance, two female train conductors in Oslo were fired after having refused to collect tickets in wagons with advertisement for a pornographic men’s magazine, but were re-employed after public outrage and intense campaigning by various women’s groups. Feminist activists also demonstrated to have strip clubs and massage parlours closed.²

However, pornography had been a hot topic in Norwegian politics for decades.³ Admittedly, these earlier debates had rarely discussed pornography in explicitly feminist terms, but rather in terms of Christian puritanism and traditional values versus sexual liberation and freedom of expression. On the other hand, feminist groups had initially paid little attention to matters of body and sexuality in the early 1970s, but the struggle for abortion rights drew such matters to the forefront, according to Unni Rustad of the Women’s Front.⁴

In the early years, a series of militant direct actions were directed against porn shops and strip clubs. Women’s Front activists would enter porn shops, seize magazines and put them on fire in public places while addressing the public. However, the Joint Action also aimed for broad, mass actions in which all grassroot members should be able to participate, such as postcard campaigns and petitions.

Egertorget at Karl Johans gate, Oslo -- the site of a public porn burning arranged by the Women's Front. Photo: Kjetil Ree.

In 1981, the organisation changed its name to Joint Action Against Pornography and Prostitution (Fellesaksjonen mot pornografi og prostitusjon), which also reflected a partially broadened focus. “We decided to take on prostitution because a study about prostitution in Norway had suddenly made us aware of the conditions that women live under in the prostitution industry”, says Agnete Strøm of the Women’s Front in a speech tracing the history of the Norwegian sex purchase ban. The study by Liv Finstad & Lita Fougner summarised the so-called Oslo Project, which, according to Unni Rustad, “demonstrated how the two themes hung together.”⁵ The Joint Action now also allowed men to become members.

While the members of the Joint Action had different reasons for opposing pornography, they developed a common understanding over time, a process in which the Women’s Front seems to have played a leading role.⁶ The Joint Action’s 1984 platform – a short text, less than a page long – addresses pornography and prostitution in roughly equal length:

“Pornography gives a flawed and superficial view of sex life and love. The basic attitude in pornography is that women are sexual objects for men. Pornograpy has nothing but economic profit as its motive. … The Joint Action wishes to safeguard freedom of the press, but this freedom must be used with social responsibility. The Joint Action cannot accept that press freedom is used to degrade women.”

“Prostitution is a societal evil that must be fought. It is an expression of social problems and misogyni. For prostitutes, it implies a life in degradation and misery. Accepting prostitution strengthens the view of woman as an inferior sex object that can be bought for money, and furthers a use-and-throw-away mentality in relations between human beings.”

In the platform, the Joint Action also embraces criminalisation:

“The Joint Action supports measures to limit the supply of customers. We therefore wish for a legal prohibition against the purchase of sexual services. This would stress that society does not accept the purchase of human beings.”

While making normative assertions and demanding political action, the platform also repeatedly makes factual claims: That pornographic films and magazines show increasing brutality, that the industry is growing rapidly, and that “several recent studies show clearly that violent porn increases violence against women and that child porn inspires sexual abuse of children.” Interestingly, the platform refers twice to the Malmö Project, which was influential in Swedish prostitution policy at the time. Claiming that the Malmö Project demonstrates that prostitution can be fought, the platform demands “support measures for prostitutes similar to the Malmö Project.”⁷

In the struggle against prostitution, too, activists used militant methods, if not mass actions, in order to draw media attention. For instance, in April 1981, radical feminist activists spray-painted “hore client” (“horekunde”) on cars, the drivers of which had attempted to pick up prostitutes in Oslo. Radical newspaper Klassekampen published de-identified photos of the stunt, which sparked a debate on whether such vigilante methods should be used in the struggle against prostitution. In 1986, similar controversy was stirred after Klassekampen had published photos of a prospective client who had been set up by activists at a café. While faces had been covered, the man later sued the newspaper, claiming to have been identified as a someone who buys sex. According to Nilsen, this series of events made it legitimate to talk of men who buy sex as “whore clients” (horekunder).

During the 1980s campaigns, the Joint Action seems to have put both prostitution and pornography on the political agenda. Proposals for criminalising the purchase of sexual services surfaced repeatedly throghout the decade. In 1982-83, the Justice Department evaluated criminalisation, and again in 1986-87.⁸

Members of the Joint Action lobbied within their respective political parties to have the pornography paragraph of the Criminal Code sharpened. In 1985, the law was amended, which seems to have brought some closure to the controversy. The paragraph still referred to pornography in terms of indecency, but also introduced the concept of “degradation of one or both sexes”, seen as a feminist claim.⁹ While partial victory for the Joint Action, the pornography law also signalled the start of the demise of the movement.¹⁰

For one thing, the new law seemed not to have the consequences desired by anti-porn activists. The Joint Action had claimed that the 1985 law would prohibit porn magazines to be put on display in kiosks, such as the partially state-owned chain Narvesen. A set of mass campaigns were directed against Narvesen in the 1980s. For instance, 25,000 postcards were printed to and distributed for people to send to Narvesen, calling on the kiosk chain to “respect the human dignity of women” by neither selling nor distributing pornography. Another action encouraged people to report Narvesen to the police for violating the anti-porn law. Independently of the law, however, many shops stopped selling porn magazines and the Joint Action awarded them stickers praising their contribution to “a porn free neighbourhood”.¹¹

Toward the end of the 1980s, however, the Joint Action was torn by internal division over means and ends. One divisive issue concerned the use of pornographic material in campaigns. In lecture tours, school visits and exhibitions, a key method was to use “porn against porn”, that is, to display pornographic pictures and video clips in order to shock people. Re-evaluating such methods, some leading figures within the Women’s Front came to argue that the female porn models in these materials should be de-identified, so as not to objectify the porn models even further. In the words of Unni Rustad, leader of the Women’s Front:

“It struck me as lightning what I had done, for these women had agreed to have photos taken of them at some point in their life, I knew nothing about these ladies, other than what the porn mafia told me, and I pasted them on the wall in a giant format and let everyone look at them.”¹²

“We used the pictures as they were in pornography until we realised that when we used the pictures in that way, we excluded the women from women’s solidarity, from our community. I would never have used pictures of women I know in such a way that I had been using pornographic pictures for years. When I realised that, I felt ashamed for a long time.”¹³

Others, however, claimed that using porn against porn was an efficient method, and that showing the eyes of the porn models was essential to this strategy. These debates revealed a deeper dispute abouts means and ends in the struggle against pornography, described by Asta Håland & Ane Stø in the following terms:

“in 1989, the new leadership of the Women’s Front became positive both to [erotic magazine] Cupido and ‘feminist porn film’. The leadership of the Women’s Front also distanced itself from the grand alliance with traditional popular organisations. Puritanism and Christian people were again defined as the main enemy. To campaign against porn and prostitution was seen as a violation of the women in the sexual trade, and as an expression of puritanism. at the same time, the main strategy for more than ten years – porn against porn – was rejected by the same leadership. The reason for this was again that the method was seen as a violation of the female porn models, first they were exposed in porn magazines, and then we would divulge them again! … We who support the old line were not willing to give up such an efficient method. We thought that it was important to show the eyes, which show that they often are drugged and scared, rarely happy, and that they are real people. The eye-covering debate [Sladdedebatten] concerned the foundation of our political work, charity or solidarity.”¹⁴

The use of militant action against prostitution was also debated. While the militants claimed to take precaution not to mistake ‘innocent’ men for “whore customers”, some argued that the campaigns affected the innocent anyway, such as the men’s families.

“The Women’s Front emphasised that women should not suffer in these actions, the women should be in focus. But [those who later formed the more radical organisation] Ottar wished to take more drastic measures”, says Liv Finstad.¹⁵

Eventually, these internal differences over means and ends led to the dissolution of the Joint Action in the early 1990s. It would take another two decades before the purchase of sexual services was criminalised in Norway, and then on strikingly different grounds than the ones that moved the Joint Action in the 1980s. A Justice Department working group rejected criminalisation as late as in 2004, but mass media’s sudden attention to Nigerian prostitutes in the streets of Oslo changed the terms of debate. While the anti-pornography law remained in place, the Norwegian Supreme Court struck it down in 2005, making it legal to show uncensored sex between adults in print (though not in cable TV hardcore porn).

The controversy does not end there, though: In early 2010, Ottar called for reviving a broad coalition against pornography, demanding that the purchase of pornography be legally prohibited, per analogy to Norway’s recent sex purchase ban. Unsurprisingly, the Women’s Front disagreed to prohibiting all pornography and instead expressed a wish to invite Mia Engberg, the Swedish director of Dirty Diaries, a feminist porn film.

Still, from the NPPR perspective, the rise and fall of the Joint Action raises a number of intriguing questions.

• The Joint Action seems to have been closely interrelated with experts’ knowledge production, drawing on and acknowledging scholarly research as an important source of information and arguments. As a research report had led the Joint Action to take on prostitution too, scholarly knowledge production served a key role in mobilising the movement and shaping debates.¹⁶ Here, we see the velvet triangle at work, with tight links and sometimes blurred boundaries between activists, politicians and researchers.
• While the Joint Action campaigned against prostitution as well as pornography, the latter seems to have been the key target. Perhaps it was precisely the tight linkage between pornography and prostitution that served to both facilitate and limit legislative success. For one thing, there was already a law in place regulating pornography in Norway, which made it easier for the political establishment to accomodate the anti-porn movement’s demands, whereas criminalising the purchase of sexual services was uncharted territory in the 1980s.
• Interestingly, radical, militant action seems to have been a unifying rather than divisive factor, at least according to radical feminists writing the history of their own movement. While they sought to engage women across the country and to build a mass movement, they were surprised to see militant actions, such as book burnings, draw such a broad appeal among the most different groups of women and men. Naturally, this is history seen from the perspective of radical feminists. Were the militant measures accepted in other parts of the movement against pornography and prostitution?
• Why did the Joint Action fail in reforming prostitution policy? Given the broad, cross-political coalition of organisations representing hundreds of thousands of Norwegians, given the combination of elite and mass action which drew, at times, intense media attention, and given that criminalisation seems to have been considered by the Justice Ministry several times – why did the campaign fail? Who provided resistance and with what arguments?

Footnotes

1. Unni Rustad: Nytter det å slåss mot porno?, excerpt from “Vad tjänar vi på att föra kampen mot pornografi?”, in Pornografi – verklighet eller fantasi, ROKS, 1991.
2. Unni Rustad, 2007: Kampen mot pornografi på 1970-tallet.
3. For instance, having published the novel The Song of the Red Ruby in 1956, Agnar Mykle and his publisher were charged with publishing immoral, obscene material because of the novel’s allegedly pornographic contents. The book was withdrawn from the market, although Mykle and his publisher were eventually acquitted. In 1967, author Jens Bjørneboe and his publisher were similarly put on trial – and found guilty of violating the pornography law – for publishing the erotic novel Uten en tråd. At the peak of the porn debate of the 1960s, evangelical preacher Arild Edvardsen gathered 12,000 people in 1969 in a march under mottos such as “Get rid of the porn plague – love is pure”, “Norway needs old-fashioned child rearing” and “Norway! Remember Sodom and Gomorra”. In the 1970s, Leif Hagen started selling illegal hardcore pornography via post-order and founded the softcore men’s magazine Aktuell Rapport in 1976 – and reportedly drew a lot of controversy in the media. And in 1976, the Norwegian Housewives’ Union, which had campaigned against porn already in the 1960s, demanded a ban against putting porn magazines on display in grocery stores and kiosks.
4. Unni Rustad, 2007: Kampen mot pornografi på 1970-tallet.
5. Unni Rustad, 2007: Kampen mot pornografi på 1970-tallet.
6. Magnhild Nilsen, 2008: “‘Når man gir seg ut for horekunde, får man finne seg i karakteristikken’: Kampar mot prostitusjon 1981–1991“, Rödt! Marxistisk Tidsskrift 2008:1.
7. For an extensive, critical analysis of the Malmö Project, see Susanne Dodillet‘s dissertation Är sex arbete? Svensk och tysk prostitutionspolitik sedan 1970-talet (Vertigo Akademi, 2009).
8. Synnøve Økland Jahnsen, Bergens Tidende 2008-11-04.
9. Strøm, Agnete. “A glimpse into 30 years of struggle against prostitution by the women’s liberation movement in Norway.” Reproductive Health Matters 17, no. 34 (November 2009): 29-37.
10. Five years later, Unni Rustad commented sarcastically on this anticlimax:

    “Since 1985, activity has decreased. In that year, there was an election, and we had grown big, strong and numerous. … Suddenly, Norwegian politicians became very engaged against pornography. There was competition in Parliament who could run fastest with a law proposal in hand, who could be in the biggest photos in the newspapers and make the most serious face, the biggest tears and say that ‘this is horrible’. When this competition had been running for a while, a law was elaborated, even though that had never been our most important demand. Norway already had a law [against pornography]. But a new law was produced, and many people around the country thought that we had finally been heard, after so many years. … And then there was an election, and there was a law, and the law was thrown in the dust bin together with all the speeches that had been held during the election campaign, and then the law was forgotten. One of the activists said that the purpose had never been to stop the porn industry, but to stop us.” (Unni Rustad: Nytter det å slåss mot porno?)

11. Nilsen, 2008. One suspects, though, that the decision not to sell porn magazines coincided conveniently with pornography shifting to video, satellite, and eventually Internet distribution.
12. In Nilsen, 2008.
13. Unni Rustad: Nytter det å slåss mot porno?
14. Asta Håland & Ane Stø, “Kampen fortsetter”, Klassekampen 2005-05-14, cited in Nilsen, 2008. My translation.
15. In Nilsen, 2008. The left radical, activist and militant feminist group Ottar, named after socialist agitator Elise “Ottar” Ottesen-Jensen, was formed in 1991, and it seems that its militant methods still stir up controversy.
16. Four publications seem to have been especially influential:
    • Liv Finstad, Lita Fougner & Vivi-Lill Holter (1982): Prostitusjon i Oslo. Pax Forlag. The book summarised a research project in 1979–81 on young prostitutes in Oslo.
    • Ida Halvorsen (1982): Hard asfalt. Pax Forlag.
    • Liv Finstad & Cecilie Høygård (1986): Bakgater: Om prostitusjon, penger og kjærlighet. Pax Forlag.
    • Annick Prieur & Arnhild Taksdal (1989): Å sette pris på kvinner. Menn som kjøper sex. Pax Forlag.

Related posts:

1. Legitimate and illegitimate sex work – the role of identities in the Swedish pornography debate
2. Contra bonos mores and the sex purchase ban in Norway
3. Race and prostitution in Norway

In 2006, Finland's Riksdag rejected a bill proposing the criminalisation of sex purchases. Photo: Timo Kirkkala.

In 2006, Finland’s parliament rejected a governmental bill proposing a sex-purchase ban modeled on the 1999 Swedish law, which prohibits the purchase of sexual services. Thus, while buying sexual services remains legal in Finland, the country is sometimes included as an example of Nordic convergence in the field of prostitution regulation, with Sweden, Norway and Iceland — and eventually Denmark, perhaps — as the other pillars of this unanimous Nordic stance.

• A recent issue of Nikk Magasin seems to imply that Finland has joined forces with Sweden and Norway in criminalising the purchase of sexual services: “Finland has its own version of the sex-purchase law, which has been in force since 1 October 2006. It is only forbidden to buy sexual services from victims of human trafficking or procuring.” (43) According to the magazine, the 2006 law signifies increasing convergence among the Nordic countries, mainly due to “the increased trafficking in humans to the region during the last few years [which] has provided a new and shared point of reference.” (24f) This re-emerging consensus shapes a united front against other countries. In the words of editor Bosse Parbring: “the Nordic countries all want to limit prostitution, while several other European countries regard prostitution as a legitimate occupation.” (31)
• Former law professor Madeleine Leijonhufvud suggests that “Norway is about to follow the Swedish example, Finland has criminalised sex purchase in circumstances of human trafficking. [...] Will Denmark follow the example of the other Nordic countries, in order not to become a brothel of Norden?” (SvD 2008-06-11)

While correctly describing the Finnish law as criminalising only the purchase of sex from persons subject to trafficking or procuring, these sample quotes may also give the impression of an emerging Nordic front in prohibiting the purchase of sexual services.

Other commenters disagree. Instead, they claim that Finland has legalised prostitution, thus breaking off from an earlier Nordic consensus on prostitution policy:

• In a column in Aftonbladet (2006-07-17), Louise Eek argues that Finland’s Riksdag in 2006 “voted against the previously prevailing consensus between our neighbouring countries on the issue of prostitution” and, like Germany and the Netherlands, has legalised prostitution, in Eek’s opinion under a false distinction between voluntary and involuntary prostitution.
• Similarly, while calling the Finnish law a “sexköpslag” (Sex Purchase Act), MEP Maria Carlshamre comments in Expressen (2006-06-18) that the Finnish law, by distinguishing between forced and voluntary prostitution, “leads to the legalisation of all prostitution”.

Interestingly, this disagreement does not concern the normative issue of whether Finland ought to criminalise the purchase of sexual services, but how to accurately describe its existing prostitution laws.

So what does Finnish law say on prostitution?

• By 1999, the Foreigner Act (378/1991) had been changed so as to allow the deportation of foreigners who can be reasonably assumed to sell sexual services, with an exemption for citizens of European Union or Schengen member states.
• In 2003, the Riksdag adopted the Public Order Act (proposed in Bill RP 20/2002), which among other things prohibits the selling and buying of sexual services in public places (612/2003 §7) and replaces earlier local ordinances on public order. Prostitution is included under the rubric of “Other activities causing disturbance”, but while the other activities mentioned (urinating and defecating and arranging public performances) are prohibited only to the extent that they disturb public order or cause health risks, etc, prostitution as such is considered a disturbance of public order and thus generally prohibited in public places. Moreover, the Public Order Act defines public places rather widely, including restaurants and business premises.
• In 2004, prohibitions against procuring were reinforced, and trafficking in human beings introduced in the Criminal Code.
• In 2005, a government bill proposes the criminalisation of the purchase of sexual services (RP 221/2005). However, after heated debate, criminalisation was rejected. Instead, parliament adopted a modified bill, stating that a person who pays for sexual services from someone who is a victim of trafficking or procuring can be fined or sentenced to prison up to six months. The law became effective in October 2006; two years later, nobody had been convicted according to the new law.¹
• Buying or attempting to buy sexual services from a minor is a criminal offence (Criminal Code, 20 kap, §8).

So, what does this mean?

• Unlike Sweden and Norway, Finland has not criminalised sex purchases in general. Prostitution is not outlawed as such, neither the selling nor the buying of sexual services. The 2006 law only criminalises a special category of sex purchases: from minors or trafficking victims. But that does not amount to a full sex purchase law (if that were the case, Germany would also have a sex purchase law, as paying minors for sex is illegal there as well).
• The ban against prostitution in public places under the 2003 Public Order Act is also peculiar to Finland, compared to its Nordic neighbours.
• On the other hand, unlike Germany and the Netherlands, Finland has not legalised prostitution fully. Proponents and opponents agreed that rejecting the 2005 bill would imply tolerating prostitution as a legal activity, by and large (if not in public places). However, procuring remains illegal, which prohibits advertising sexual services, brothels and other organised forms of prostitution. Moreover, prostitution is not officially or legally recognised as a legitimate profession. To the contrary, in connection with the 2006 law, Riksdagen stated that it presupposes that “adequate support services will be arranged for prostitutes in order to give them better chances of leaving prostitution and entering work life.”

Thus, it is incorrect to claim that Finland has joined forces with Sweden (and later Norway) in criminalising sex purchases, but it is also wrong to suggest that Finland has legalised prostitution. There are considerable differences between Finland and, on the one hand, Sweden and Norway, and, on the other hand, Germany and the Netherlands. Finland regulates prostitution in a way similar to most West European countries, rather than to either of the outliers.

Now, why have Swedish proponents of criminalising sex purchases arrived at such contradictory understandings of the Finnish law?

For radical feminists, the outcome was obviously disappointing, as witnessed by Eek and Carlshamre. Thus, they chose to emphasise the differences between the Swedish stance and the Finnish law. In accordance with dominant discourse on prostitution in Sweden, prostitution as such is seen as an expression of violence against women and one cannot really separate forced prostitution or trafficking from voluntary forms of prostitution. Under those binary premises, rejecting the Swedish model implies being in favour of prostitution.

For moderates, on the other hand, understanding the Finnish law as a partial sex purchase ban opens up the possibility of re-crafting Nordic unity by keeping Finland as an ally in the campaign to spread the Swedish (and Norwegian) model internationally. Obviously, though, this is just as much a misrepresentation of the Finnish prostitution laws as is the radicals’ claim that Finland has sided with the Netherlands and Germany. Both accounts exclude the possibility that Finland has taken a different, intermediate position.

One might even dispute whether Sweden and Norway represent a (re-)emerging Nordic consensus on prostitution policy. Not only its extraterritorial dimension distinguishes the Norwegian ban from the Swedish ban a decade earlier; the ban was also adopted for quite different reasons. Whereas the Swedish law was largely framed in terms of gender equality, the Norwegian ban achieved legislative success only once it was grafted onto public discourses identifying prostitution with Nigerian women soliciting in the streets of Oslo. In that way, a similar ban became a solution to a problem quite different. (On the other hand, justifications of the Swedish law have mutated successfully over time.)

Ole Waever suggests that during the Cold War, Nordic identity was defined as being enlightened and morally superior to the rest of Europe. Photo: Olemiswebs.

Still, it’s interesting to see actors fall back on the notion of Nordic unity in seeking to mobilise support for their preferred policy stances.

Ole Waever has characterised the idea of Nordic identity as being different from the rest of Europe: Enlightened and morally superior. Whether in terms of its foreign policies or welfare state regimes, the Nordic countries, this narrative claimed, had found a viable solution to the conflict between capitalism and communism which divided the continent.² As the end of the Cold War dissolved the division of Europe, which Norden claimed to stand outside and above, Waever predicted that Nordic identity would disintegrate.

However, there is still some force in the norm of Nordic unity, as indicated by the struggle over defining the Finland’s prostitution laws. While different commenters disagree as to whether or not Finland is on the inside or the outside of Nordic unity, both sides share a deeper ideational framework in which Nordic unity is laden with normative salience.

Footnotes

1. Prostitution i Norden, p. 20, 140
2. Ole Waever: ”Nordic nostalgia: Northern Europe after the Cold War”, International Affairs 68:1, 1992

Related posts:

1. The impact of Finnish parliamentary election results on prostitution policy
2. The Happy Whore and the Victim of Human Trafficking – Stereotypes Prevail in Finnish Debate on Sex Work

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

As I recently traveled through Denmark, I grabbed a copy of the Danish edition of the for-free newspaper Metro, where the front page lead story covered the recent law in Norway prohibiting the purchase of sexual services. “Prostitutes warn against prohibition in Denmark”, the headline reads. And in less than 430 words, the word “prohibit” is used another 13 times, including the subhead.

Front page of Metro Denmark, 19 November 2008.

Compare that to the story that the Swedish edition of Metro ran a few days later: While this article, too, describes the Norwegian and Swedish law in terms of a prohibition, the chosen angle is whether Sweden should follow the example set by Norway and prohibit its citizens from purchasing sexual services abroad too.

While two random articles have little analytical value, they say something interesting about the terms in which prostitution is discussed in Denmark and Sweden.

First, note that while Metro Denmark spends roughly half the space interviewing what is described as organised “sex workers”, Metro Sweden instead focuses on politicians’ view of the Norwegian law. This might indicate a difference in terms of whose views are counted as relevant and valid input in a discussion of prostitution policy.

Secondly, the term prohibition has very different connotations in the two national contexts. Danes cultivate an identity of being a bit more easy-going than the stiff Swedes, Norwegians and Finns. Especially, Danish public debate often alludes to Sweden as a horrific example of state intervention and regulation. The 1983 book Tilfældet Sverige established the image of “Prohibitionist Sweden” as an anti-utopia, regulating and outlawing anything that makes life worth living. Denmark, by contrast, is more liberal, more continental, more free-spirited, this story goes.

This national narrative, however, is not necessarily a depiction of reality in Denmark, or, for that matter, in Sweden. In fact, in many areas, Sweden is considerably less regulated than Denmark. While Swedes go to Denmark to buy beer, escaping taxes and the state-run liquour monopoly, Danes have crossed the Øresund to buy cheap fashion from Swedish outlets, because unlike in Sweden, zoning laws in Denmark prohibit shopping malls on city outskirts.

And if you happen to live in Denmark and have forgotten to buy your Sunday breakfast, you’d better check the Lukkeloven (Opening Hours Act). Yes, unlike overregulated Sweden, liberal Denmark has a law which states, among other things, that shops must be closed from 5 pm on Saturdays to 6 am on Mondays, except for eight Sundays a year, while tractors, pets, tents and plants may be sold every Sunday, and bread, milk, and newspapers may also be sold on Sundays and national holidays from 7 to 11 pm, but only in shops which sell newspapers and dairy products in the weekdays too.

Yet, true or false, this Danish self-image provides the deeper ideational framework in terms of which prostitution policy is cast in Denmark, so aptly caught in the Metro story: We Danes don’t like prohibitionism.

However, this is just one piece of the puzzle. From our ideational approach to policy change, the bigger question is how Danish policy makers have successfully employed this framing of prohibitions as something intrinsically bad and un-Danish, in order to discredit alternatives to the current prostitution policy – and why norm entrepreneurs in Denmark advocating the Swedish and Norwegian models have failed to graft their policy proposals onto these underlying discursive frames.

Related posts:

1. The Danish election: a new government – and towards a new prostitution regime?