The Sex Economy by Monica O'Connor

Author:Monica O'Connor [O'Connor, Monica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788212076
Google: HvpIyQEACAAJ
Publisher: Agenda Publishing
Published: 2019-01-15T05:13:52+00:00

LEGALIZATION IN PRACTICE

The role of the state in relation to prostitution continues to reflect the highly charged debate discussed earlier and there are deeply conflicting views within the European Union on whether the demand to have people, primarily girls and women, available to sexually service men is a legitimate or acceptable demand that should be regulated/legalized, or whether states should criminalize this demand (Di Nicola et al. 2005; Kavemaan & Rabe 2007; Kelly et al. 2008). The issues of age of entry, individual choice and freedom, sexual consent, coercion and harm which permeate feminist discourse, continue to define who and what falls within the remit of criminal law in different member states. As Bindel (2017: 241) cogently argues, sex work academics are “hardly harmless ineffectual individuals in ivory towers publishing papers nobody reads” but rather they have actively used their “academic positions and credentials to exert influence on prostitution policy as members of national and international research bodies”. Sex work arguments cited above have been most persuasive over the past two decades in promoting the idea that the state should and can establish a legal and regulated sex market where sex workers can operate within safe, protected labour environments and where the stigma attached to sex work will disappear; an approach adopted in a number of European countries such as the Netherlands and Germany. Until recently, Sweden was the only country within the European Union to maintain a position that prostitution was incompatible with gender equality and therefore should not be legalized. Kelly et al. (2008) use the term “prostitution regime” to capture how it is not just “laws and practices which shape prostitution policy” but also “historical contexts, political and philosophical underpinnings and existing evidence bases” (5). It is a helpful term to describe the wider socio-historical context in which prostitution law policy has developed. Consequently, the Dutch and Swedish regimes have been selected for exploration, as they typify the polarities of this contested discourse and demonstrate most clearly how different perspectives bring about widely diverging legislative and policy frameworks. Furthermore, the approaches adopted in these countries have been extensively evaluated (Daalder 2007; Swedish Government Offices (SOU) 2010) and have been the subject of further scrutiny in an extensive study of gender and trafficking (which also included Germany) carried out on behalf of the European Commission (Walby et al. 2016).

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