National Assembly, Paris. Copyright Maria van Dam.

On December 6^th 2011, French deputies unanimously[1] approved a non-binding motion reaffirming the country’s abolitionist position in matters of prostitution. The resolution had been put to the National Assembly in June by the members of the Parliamentary Information Commission on prostitution.^[2] Indeed, this resolution is the first step in a plan to institute a policy of criminalization of the purchase of sexual services (CPSS) that had been called for by the Commission at the outcome of its review of possible policy options.

Having traveled abroad and visited countries with a variety of prostitution policy regimes, the Commission had concluded that the Swedish model was the most successful and appropriate one to emulate. The members of the Commission jointly tabled the motion that the National Assembly “reaffirm France’s abolitionist position, the object of which is, in time, a society without prostitution […and] consider that, in light of the constraint that is most often the cause of entry into prostitution, of the violence inherent to this activity […], that prostitution cannot, in any case, be deemed a professional activity”.[3]

The vote was largely symbolic: it serves to loudly and unequivocally restate the National Assembly’s commitment to the eradication of prostitution. The emblematic and foundational purpose of this vote and motion were made apparent by Guy Geoffroy, the Commission’s principal reporter, in an interview prior to the vote: “The resolution is the first step and we decided, symbolically, that as of the moment of the adoption of this resolution, adoption which is not in doubt, to deliver a legislative proposal this will pave the way to the responsibilization of the client, which will involve, if required, penalisation.”[4] In this way the non-binding motion does not introduce any changes to existing measures aimed at prostitution. Instead, it serves to lay the foundations for the impending legislative proposal to punish clients of prostitution.

At the outset of the vote, what is clear is that there is an overwhelming consensus among French political actors that abolitionism is the only legitimate and acceptable position for the country to take in the matter of prostitution. What is less clear, however, is whether or not the same consensus will apply to the vote for the legislative bill which would make clients liable to a six-month prison sentence and a €3000 fine. One important aspect that remains to be hammered out, at the demand of certain left-wing factions[5], is whether or not the proposed criminalization of clients would be implemented in conjunction with, or in the place of, current repressive anti-soliciting measures enshrined in Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2003 Domestic Security Bill. In effect, this symbolic vote has simply been the overture to what will undoubtedly be a less consensual and more heated debate over whether or not, and how, to penalise those who purchase sexual services.

How, then, does Sweden fit into all of this? The debate, both inside the National Assembly, and outside on the streets, where opponents of CPSS were protesting, the discussion was peppered with references to “la Suède” and the “modèle Suédois”. Throughout this episode, proponents of the bill have made references to Sweden and its pioneering policy as a basis for galvanizing support with recurrent allusions to the official rates of success set out in Anna Skarhed’s 2010 official evaluation of the Swedish sex purchase ban report: a 50% decrease of street prostitution. Critics, such as sociologist and sex workers rights activist Françoise Gil, have also made frequent references to the Swedish ban, highlighting what they consider to be the negative side effects of the ban: increased isolation, violence and invisibility.[6]

Nevertheless, despite the relative omnipresence of the Swedish model, the latest episode of French prostitution policy remains an exercise in national distinction. What stands out from the numerous declarations of support presented by the leaders of the different political groups during the vote are the expressions of national and republican pride at France’s perceived shift from passive follower to potential national trendsetter in this policy matter. Overall, this debate has been animated by a common sentiment but risks yet being undermined by conflicting views over the continued form of French prostitution policy. Whilst the political position of France regarding prostitution has been reiterated and clarified, whether or not the current abolitionist project will be successfully used as a platform to criminalize clients remains to be seen.

[2] Proposition de Résolution réaffirmant la position abolitionniste de la France en matière de prostitution 9 June 2011 presented by Danielle Bousquet, Guy Geoffroy, Jean-Marc Ayrault, Christian Jacob, François Sauvadet, Yves Cochet and marie-Jo Zimmermann. Available at: http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/propositions/pion3522.asp [accessed 07/12/11].  See also: France’s newest import? Parliamentary Commission calls for “Swedish model” client criminalization

[3] Ibid. “Compte tenu de la contrainte qui est le plus souvent à l’origine de l’entrée dans la prostitution, de la violence inhérente à cette activité […], le prostitution ne saurait en aucun cas être assimilée à une activité professionelle”

[4] Guy Geoffroy (06/12/11) in  an interview with TF1 available at: http://lci.tf1.fr/france/societe/abolir-ou-encadrer-la-prostitution-les-deputes-se-penchent-sur-6858911.html [accessed 06/12/2011]

[5] Jean-Paul Lecoq, communist deputy, speaking for the Gauche démocrate et républicaine (republican and democrat left) states that: “[…] we believe that the repressive measures put in place by Nicolas Sarkozy against the victims of prostitution should be removed.” In National Assembly Ordinary Session of December 6^th 2011 available at: http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/cri/2011-2012/20120078.asp#P614_127814 [accessed 07/12/11]

[6] RFI (06/12/11) “Vers l’abolition de la prostitution en France?” http://www.rfi.fr/france/20111206-france-vers-abolition-prostitution [accessed 07/12/11]; 20Minutes (06/12/11) “Prostitution: “En Suède, ce système de pénalisation du client est inutile, inefficace et dangereux” http://www.20minutes.fr/societe/838256-prostitution-en-suede-systeme-penalisation-client-inutile-inefficace-dangereux [accessed 07/12/11]. See also: Evaluating the Swedish Ban on the Purchase of Sexual Services: The Anna Skarhed Report

Related posts:

1. France’s newest import? Parliamentary Commission calls for “Swedish model” client criminalisation
2. The impact of Finnish parliamentary election results on prostitution policy

The Commission had travelled extensively both domestically and abroad to four European states[1] in order to take stock of the available policy ideas and instruments and to establish the benefits and drawbacks of each with the aim of determining the best way forward for French prostitution policy. This initiative was undertaken in light of the perceived ineffectiveness and misguidedness of the previous policy program: the Domestic Security Bill[2] (LSI) developed only nine years before by Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior. There is a growing consensus that the measures were only ever sporadically and inconsistently implemented[3] and never led to the wide-scale dismantling of international trafficking rings and eradication of street prostitution that had been promised. As a result, this perceived failure or “collapse” of the current policy provided an opportunity for competing political actors to inject alternative policy ideas in a debate no longer monopolised by an effective and efficient dominant orthodoxy.[4] Actors pushing these alternative policy ideas were thus in a position to convince other political and institutional actors and the wider public that policy change is necessary, a process which amounts to the “social construction of the need to reform”.[5]

Prior even to the consensus that the LSI was not functioning adequately, dissatisfaction with its possible negative side effects on the safety and living conditions of women in prostitution constituted the bulk of the discourse opposing its formalization. During this time, the centre-right deputy Marie-Jo Zimmermann suggested criminalizing clients as an alternative to the punitive measures of the LSI. In fact, she was one of the first to couple a proposed French policy of client criminalization with direct references to the Swedish law[6]. Yet, whilst in 2002 she had highlighted the possible negative side-effects of the “Swedish model”, she went on 9 years later to be part of the Parliamentary Commission which showed near unconditional support for the same policy program. Moreover, Zimmermann is not the only member of the Committee to have previously expressed a wish to see clients criminalized which never really took off. Indeed, the president of the Commission, socialist deputy Danielle Bousquet, had expressed the desire to see clients penalised as early as 2003.[7] This entails that the process by which these political actors came to desire and promote a “Swedish model” of prostitution policy is not a straightforward case of policy learning or transfer.

Thus, while we are undeniably in a situation were “knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political system […] is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political system”[8], the recent evolution of French prostitution policy would point towards an adaptation in use of this knowledge to reshape the perception of an initial policy idea. Here then, it would appear that actors, who may or may not have initially transferred the policy idea of client criminalization from Sweden in the early 2000, did later use this “narrative of importation” to reframe an abolitionist discourse equating prostitution with gender inequality and men’s exploitation of female victims. As a result, the reframed policy ideas have benefited from perceived success of the Swedish law in its domestic setting.

The reason why it was possible for the Commission to capitalize on the Swedish policy program is that this latter ‘fit’ nicely into the domestic ideological, political and institutional setting. This is important because the possibility of integrating foreign policy ideas and/or instruments is predicated on their plausibility to the recipient community, in that sense the acceptability of imported idea or idea sets is dependent its similarity with familiar and acceptable idea sets held by a majority.[9] In particular, actors saw a parallel between the concerns about the wellbeing of the “victims” of prostitution that are so central to contemporary French abolitionism and the ideas of gender equality and prostitution as an exploitative system that underpinned the Swedish debate on client penalization[10]. This ideational compatibility is highlighted by the authors of the report: “[...] the ambition of an advanced democracy can only be, in the fullness of time, the disappearance of prostitution. [...] the goal, thus, is to determine which policy is respectful of the rights recognised to all human beings while allowing us to move towards this objective [...] of the disappearance of prostitution. What is more, in light of both our fundamental principles and the Swedish experience, it appears that making clients responsible is essential to this conciliation.”[11]

Whether or not the Commission’s efforts come to fruition is as yet unknown, but one thing is clear: the project to reform French prostitution policy is rooted in a complex process of framing and reframing aimed at reasserting a previously dismissed policy idea. Their repackaged suggestions also seem to have benefitted from the vacuum created by the perceived failure of the existing policy. Moreover, this new policy initiative was able to integrate elements of the Swedish model in such a way as to benefit from the latter’s perceived progressiveness and effectiveness. Overall, this new chapter in French prostitution policy looks to be centred on the redefinition of French abolitionism and the strengthening of the country’s position on the international stage as a leader and example in the domain of prostitution policy, in the same vein as Sweden. As such, future research on the topic will undoubtedly have to provide further insight as to why this year’s winning political idea is, in fact, last decade’s non-starter.

[2] Loi n°2003-239 du 18 mars 2003 pour la sécurité intérieur. This law is part of a larger legislative and political program designed to facilitate the state’s responses to what it deemed to be an important and unacceptable increase in insecurity. This wider project is entitled the Loi d’Orientation et de Programmation pour la Sécurité Intérieure and was voted on and accepted in 2002.

[3] Jean Danet and Véronique Guienne (eds.) (2006) Action publique et prostitution Rennes: Presse Universitaire de Rennes

[4] Legro, Jeffrey W. (2000) “The Transformation of Policy Ideas” in American Journal of Political Science 44(3): 419-432

[5] Cox, Robert Henry (2001) “The social construction of an imperative: why welfare reform happened in Denmark and the Netherlands but not in Germany” in World Politics 53(3): 463-498

[6] Marie-Jo Zimmermann (2002) Rapport d’information fait au nom de la delegation aux droits des femmes et à l’égalité des chances entre les hommes et les femmes sur le projet adopté par le sénat après declaration d’urgence (n. 381), pour la sécurité intérieure http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/rap-info/i0459.asp [accessed 26/08/2011]

[7] Danielle Bousquet, Christophe Caresche and Martine Lignière-Cassou (2003) “Oui, abolitionnistes!” in Le Monde 16^th January 2003

[8] Dolowitz, David P. and Marsh, David (2000) “Learning from Abroad: The Role of Policy Transfer in Contemporary Policy-Making” in Governance 13(1): 5-23

[9] Legro, Jeffrey W. (2000) “The Transformation of Policy Ideas” in American Journal of Political Science 44(3): 419-432

[10] Lilian Mathieu (2004) “The Debate on Prostitution in France: A Conflict between Abolitionism, Regulationism and Prohibition” in Journal of Contemporary European Studies 12(2): 153-163

[11] “[...] l’ambition d’une démocracie avancée ne peut être que d’envisager, à terme, la disparition de la prostitution. [...] il s’agit donc de trouver quelle est la politique qui soit respectueuse des droits reconnus à tout être human tout en permettant de s’approcher de cet objectif qu’est la disparition de la prostitution. Or, à la lumière tant de nos principes fondamentaux que de l’experience suédoise, il apparaît que la responsabiliation des cleints est essentielle à cette conciliation.” Commission des Lois Constitutionelles, de la Législation et de l’Administration Générale de la République, en conclusion des travaux d’une mission d’information sur la prostitution en France (13/04/2011) Rapport d’Information à l’Assemblée Nationale n° 3334. Page 231

Related posts:

1. French prostitution policy: France symbolically reaffirms its commitment to abolitionism
2. The impact of Finnish parliamentary election results on prostitution policy

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.

No related posts.