In , Sweden passed a law that made it a crime to buy sexual services, but not to sell them. The Swedish government has been keen to export it. In , Norway and Iceland adopted equivalent legislation. There were more women further down the street; maybe I could try talking to them.
If you want them to stop, offer them something else to do. Roks campaigned for the law to be passed in the s. Men buy sex, they buy the right to use your body. And if they pay for you you have no option, they do what they want to your body This is a huge step forward.
The stigma, which is supposed to have shifted from sex workers to clients, seems stronger than ever. If you're a normal woman with a normal upbringing, it's not a step you take. She might be trafficked. She might have HIV. The law has its opponents, too. Some sort of evaluation was done in by Anna Skarhead, the Chancellor of Justice. The report claimed that levels of street prostitution had fallen by half between and , but it's now back to higher levels.
The Skarhead report estimated there were people in Sweden selling sex on the internet. But an RFSL investigation in found adverts from different men and trans people in two months. And the prices are the highest in Europe. Pye Jakobsson has been a sex worker activist since She co-founded the Rose Alliance , Sweden's only sex workers' rights collective.
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What would I be telling them? That I only see them as prostitutes? Sweden has a confused approach to harm reduction. It has draconian HIV disclosure laws and the highest rate of convictions for exposing other people to the risk of contracting HIV, but only recently introduced needle exchange programmes after the number of injecting drug users contracting HIV soared in one year.
