What’s red light got to do with it
A legal red light district is set to be scrapped after a “significant” reduction of sex workers in the area.
Why is it called a “red light district”? That’s a euphemism. Who is shielded by that euphemism? The men who pay to rape women. “Red light district” conveys zero information. It’s a district where men pay women to be sexual toilets for them.
The Managed Approach (MA) area in Holbeck, Leeds, allowed sex workers to operate without fear of prosecution, but was paused in March 2020.
Ah yes it was all about compassion for the “sex workers,” wasn’t it, nothing to do with compassion for the johns. There’s another way to spare “sex workers” the fear of prosecution, and that’s the Nordic model. Prosecute the punters, not the women.
Getting folks onboard with the Nordic Model invariably requires more than a quick description, I’ve found. Most people (especially men) have difficulty grasping how only one side of a transaction could be punished. You have to go deep in the weeds to show how the two sides of that transaction are not, in fact, equal in the first place, neither in purpose, practice, nor effect.
Kind of all of feminism writ large, isn’t it. You have to explain the whole thing from scratch, over and over again, to show how the two sides of human beings are not, in fact, equal in the first place.
Does the Nordic model punish the pimps at all?
People seem to deliberately misunderstand the Nordic model. I can’t think of any reason why there’s so much hostility toward it from people who should know better. More than once, I’ve had to check that my understanding is the right one and that I’m not missing some huge defect.
Nordic Model Now! has a lot of information about it.
https://nordicmodelnow.org/what-is-the-nordic-model/
“The Nordic Model approach to prostitution (sometimes also known as the Sex Buyer Law, or the Swedish, Abolitionist, or Equality Model) decriminalises all those who are prostituted, provides support services to help them exit, and makes buying people for sex a criminal offence, in order to reduce the demand that drives sex trafficking.”
Part of the impetus for the Nordic Model versus legalization is that legalization also makes pimping legal. The Nordic Model does not do that, it decriminalizes only the selling, not the facilitation of selling. The page linked above calls for strengthening of British anti-pimping and anti-trafficking laws.
The site linked above has tons of articles and analyses that might be of interest.
latsot, could it be that those who “misunderstand” are afraid they will be the losers under the Nordic model? Are they men who prey on women?
I am a man who has, to my shame, used prostitutes in the distant past and would have no problem with the Nordic model being followed. To protect women we must remove the men who prey upon them.
GW: It does, indeed, punish pimps and brothel-operators. There are some issues with enforcement on the latter, particularly where it intersects with race/ethnicity.
These arise from the fact that it’s very tough to draw a hard line between, “Landlord who doesn’t immediately evict any prostitutes working out of their apartment,” and “Brothel owner taking a cut of the action in exchange for giving them a place to work.” Landlords fearful of being mistaken for the latter will therefore evict prostitutes as quickly as they learn of their activities.
Also, while ‘Managed” zones like the one in the article are an obvious atrocity, many non-pimped prostitutes will tell you that working as a group offers increased safety. But if your group is mostly women of color in a country like Sweden, for instance, you end up standing out and being immediately identified by the cops–and while they won’t arrest you, they WILL make it very obvious that they’re watching the scene, so that the punters won’t go near you. (And, of course, since many prostitutes are also illegal immigrants, being easily identified makes police harassment an issue there, too.)
So the NM isn’t perfect–but it’s still a damn sight better than any of the other options on the table, and is amenable, I think, to being tweaked and experimented with for the purposes of improvement.