New report vindicates ‘Swedish model’

By Anthony Barich
The Swedish model of reforming prostitution laws written off by WA Attorney General Christian Porter has been declared an outstanding success following a review of its first 10 years of operation in the Scandinavian country.

Street prostitution has been halved in Sweden since it criminalised the purchase of sex in 1999, and the law has also proven a barrier to human traffickers setting up shop in the country, a major Swedish government inquiry found.
The evaluation of the prohibition of the purchase of sexual services from 1999 to 2008, led by Chancellor of Justice Anna Skarhed and submitted to Sweden’s Government on 2 July 2010, throws a fascinating new light on the effectiveness of the country’s highly original approach to solving the exploitation of women and girls in prostitution.
At a Belmont community forum in June 2010, Mr Porter sought to debunk evidence presented by Gunilla Ekberg, the Swedish Government’s expert adviser in the development and implementation of its law.
She had been brought to Perth by the Catholic men’s organisation, the Knights of the Southern Cross, when the-then Attorney General Jim McGinty tried to decriminalise prostitution completely.
At the Belmont forum on 8 June 2010, Mr Porter challenged the WA anti-prostitution lobby to come up with a better solution than his planned legislation to restrict brothels to “entertainment zones”.
However, the Swedish Government’s evaluation has declared its model, which decriminalises women and girls and criminalises the purchases, so successful it has proposed expanding it, raising the maximum penalty for purchasers of sexual acts from six months’ jail to one year imprisonment and applying it to men who buy sex outside the country.
“According to the National Criminal Police, it is clear that the prohibition of the purchase of sexual services acts as a barrier to human traffickers and procurers considering establishing themselves in Sweden,” the report said.
The evaluation, set up to investigate how the prohibition works in practice and what effects it has had on the incidence of domestic prostitution and human trafficking into Sweden for sexual purposes, shows that the ban on the purchase of sex has “had the intended effect”. The investigation of the application of the ban shows that, after an initial period of “some uncertainty”, police officers and prosecutors now consider that, “in general, the application works well”.
“However, it is clear that the effectiveness of application depends on the resources deployed and the priorities made within the judicial system,” it added.
The Swedish report also said that while prostitution where first contact is made via the Internet is more prevalent in neighbouring countries, “there is nothing to indicate that there has been a greater increase in prostitution via the Internet in Sweden than in these comparable countries”.
“This indicates that the prohibition has not led to street prostitution in Sweden shifting arenas to the Internet,” the report said.
It also recommended the establishment of a National Centre tasked with coordinating efforts against prostitution and human trafficking.
It also proposed that “there is a need to be able to make a more nuanced assessment in more serious cases of the purchase of sexual services than is possible within the current penalty scale for the offence”.
“In the opinion of the inquiry, a person exploited through prostitution may be regarded as the injured party in purchases of sexual services,” the report said. However, whether the person exploited is to be regarded as the injured party must be determined on a case-by-case basis.
Stressing that it is “important for society to fight against prostitution”, the report said prostitution is considered to cause serious harm both to individuals and to society as a whole.
“Large-scale crime, including human trafficking for sexual purposes, assault, procuring and drug-dealing, is also commonly associated with prostitution,” it said.
Porter said that Ms Ekberg’s statistics are “not a verifiably massive improvement in its ability to control prostitution in Sweden”. However, the UK newspaper The Guardian reported that in 2008 Britain’s House Minister visited Sweden as it was considering adopting the Swedish Model.
Having researched Ms Ekberg’s original documents, Mr Porter said she sources herself, her own anecdotes of conversations she’s had with people and newspaper articles “which themselves do not have proper sources”.
He claimed she also quotes reports issued by County Police of Stockholm, which say that in Sweden there has been some success in reducing street prostitution but “on the other hand, we do not know whether it has had any effect on prostitution overall”.
He quoted the Swedish Government’s National Board of Health and Welfare: “We cannot give any unambiguous answer (prostitution has increased or decreased). At most we can discern that street prostitution is slowly returning after swiftly disappearing in the wake of the law against purchasing sexual services, but that refers to street prostitution, the most obvious manifestation. In regards to other areas, ‘hidden’ prostitution, we are even less able to make any statement”.
From this, Mr Porter concluded: “So I would counsel caution against believing on face value some of the quite expansive and, in my view, unsubstantiated, positives that people have attached to the Swedish model.”
The Swedish Government website summarising the report, including a downloadable PDF of the English language Summary of the Evaluation of the ban on purchase of sexual services can be found online at: www.sweden.gov.se.