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Gender Policy Models and Calls to “Tackle Demand” for Sex Workers

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Carol Harrington at Victoria University of Wellington
Carol Harrington
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Abstract

Why have proposals to “tackle demand” for sex workers by criminalizing their clients gained political traction in the UK? This article treats sex work policy debates as a site of contested norms concerning gender, sexuality, individual agency and the market. I argue that recent shifts away from a male breadwinner/female homemaker model of family life have disrupted established policy visions of desirable family and employment patterns. Calls to “tackle demand” for sex workers provide terrain to construct norms of gendered, sexual and market conduct which align with new policy visions of the dual earner family, nurturing fathers and employed mothers. Analysing recent policy documents, this article shows that governmental arguments in favour of “tackling demand” claim the policy will promote both women’s employment and gender equality in personal relationships. Furthermore, end demand discourse individualizes responsibility for continued gender inequality to the deviant sexual desires of a few bad men. The article concludes that end demand discourse deflects tensions inherent in policies which promote gender equality while reducing support for at-home mothers and thus exacerbating feminized poverty.
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Gender Policy Models and Calls to BTackle Demand^
for Sex Workers
Carol Harrington
1
Published online: 12 April 2017
#Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017
Abstract Why have proposals to Btackle demand^for sex
workers by criminalizing their clients gained political traction
in the UK? This article treats sex work policy debates as a site
of contested norms concerning gender, sexuality, individual
agency and the market. I argue that recent shifts away from
a male breadwinner/female homemaker model of family life
have disrupted established policy visions of desirable family
and employment patterns. Calls to Btackle demand^for sex
workers provide terrain to construct norms of gendered, sex-
ual and market conduct which align with new policy visions
of the dual earner family, nurturing fathers and employed
mothers. Analysing recent policy documents, this article
shows that governmental arguments in favour of Btackling
demand^claim the policy will promote both women’sem-
ployment and gender equality in personal relationships.
Furthermore, end demand discourse individualizes responsi-
bility for continued gender inequality to the deviant sexual
desires of a few bad men. The article concludes that end de-
mand discourse deflects tensions inherent in policies which
promote gender equality while reducing support for at-home
mothers and thus exacerbating feminized poverty.
Keywords Adult worker model .Activation policy .
Sex-buyers .Criminalizing clients .Prostitution .Sex work
policy
Introduction
The notion of Btackling demand^for prostitution by criminal-
izing clients but not sex workers has gained credibility across
Europe, provoking fierce policy debate in the UK. Sweden
introduced a law that criminalized paying for sex but not sell-
ing sex in 1999. Since then, the Swedish government has
strongly advocated for other countries to adopt their model.
Norway and Iceland passed similar laws in 2009 and after
much debate France criminalized paying for sex in 2016. In
2008, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Prostitution and
the Global Sex Trade (APPG) formedto develop proposals for
Btackling demand^in England and Wales. In June 2015,
Northern Ireland criminalized paying for sex. However,
Scotland, England and Wales have not yet followed. The
Home Affairs Committee’s on-going Prostitution Inquiry is-
sued an interim report in 2016 stating they needed more time
to investigate the merits of criminalizing clients and would be
closely monitoring the situation following criminalization in
France and Northern Ireland (Home Affairs Committee,
2016).
Why has criminalizing paying for sex become a reasonable
political proposition in the UK at this point in history? The
notion of criminalizing clients first appeared at least as far
back as the early twentieth century within social hygiene
movements (Mackey, 2005). However, for the most part, pol-
icy in the UK has long reflected a sexual double standard that
punished and attempted to rehabilitate sex workers but not
their clients. Scholars have traced contemporary arguments
in favour of criminalizing clients and decriminalizing sex
workers to Bradical feminist^analyses of pornography, pros-
titution and heterosexuality (Scoular, 2004;Scoular&
O’Neill, 2008; Serughetti, 2013, p. 41). Much of this literature
contests radical feminism for failing Bto move outside the
hetero-normative order which separates work from sex^and
*Carol Harrington
Carol.Harrington@vuw.ac.nz
1
School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of
Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand
Sex Res Soc Policy (2018) 15:249–258
DOI 10.1007/s13178-017-0286-9
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... End demand legislation has been at the center of heated feminist debates, in Israel as in other countries (Harrington, 2018;Lahav-Raz, 2020). Though actors may hold varied, nuanced, and complex positions (Shamir, 2019), much of the debate centers on two polarized core views. ...
... Therefore, they argue, a new policy response is required-one that will criminalize clients and "rehabilitate" both victims (WSS) and perpetrators (MPS). 4 Proponents of end demand legislation contend that such policy will reduce the magnitude of the sex industry and improve the lives of "survivors" of prostitution (Harrington, 2018;Matthews, 2018;Shamir, 2019;Tomlinson et al., 2022). Moreover, they argue that the societal acceptance of the sex trade has a detrimental impact on all women. ...
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... Additionally, the proliferation of end-demand policy models, which emphasize the criminalization of sex buyers in an effort to reduce sexual exploitation (Bender et al., 2019;Huschke & Schubotz, 2016), necessitates an examination of evidence linking sex buying to sexual violence to evaluate the degree to which such policies are well founded. The criminalization of sex buying has been successfully argued on the basis of its inherently violent nature (Dodillet & Östergren, 2011), justifying the punishment of buyers by framing them as sexual predators and perpetuators of gender inequality (Harrington, 2018;Huschke & Schubotz, 2016;Weitzer, 2007). As this reasoning provides the foundation for buyer criminalization and education programs, dissecting the relationship between commercial sex consumption and violence would have implications for future policy directions on the regulation of sex work. ...
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... Several European countries have embraced the "end-demand" policy approach involving the banning of sexual purchase and most other prostitution-related activities (sometimes referred to as the "Swedish model" or "Nordic model") (Benoit et al. 2019). This includes Norway and Iceland in 2009, Northern Ireland in 2015, France in 2016, and the Republic of Ireland in 2017 (Harrington 2017). Canada has followed suit, whereby its 2014 Bill C-36 contends, "prostitution [is] a form of sexual exploitation that disproportionately and negatively impacts women and girls" (Department of Justice Canada 2014). ...
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In the last decades of the twentieth century, a major change has occurred in the public understanding of prostitution, with the focus shifting from the sex worker to the client. On the social scientific side, studies on clients have growingly shed light on motivations and behaviors of men who buy sex. On the juridical-political side, in many countries across the globe a trend has emerged towards the criminalization of clients, represented as responsible for the perpetuation and proliferation of the sex market and for its oppressive and victimizing effects on sex workers. The aim of this paper is to retrace this turn and to discuss its political and cultural meaning, showing how the discourse on male responsibility in prostitution involves the risk of unilateral stances and partial views on the sex market. What I argue is that new gender-sensitive thinking on prostitution is needed, context-rooted and free from prejudicial understandings.
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Pursuing johns: Criminal law reform, defending character, and New York city’s committee of fourteen, 1920-1930
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In Pursuing Johns, Thomas C. Mackey studies the New York Committee of Fourteen and its members’ attempts to influence vagrancy laws in early-20th-century New York City as a way to criminalize men’s patronizing of female prostitutes. It sought out and prosecuted the city’s immoral hotels, unlicensed bars, opium dens, disorderly houses, and prostitutes. It did so because of the threats to individual "character" such places presented. In the early 1920s led by Frederick Whitin, the Committee thought that the time had arrived to prosecute the men who patronized prostitutes through what modern parlance calls a "john’s law." After a notorious test case failed to convict a philandering millionaire for vagrancy, the only statutory crime available to punish men who patronized prostitutes, the Committee lobbied for a change in the state’s criminal law. In the process, this representative of traditional 19th-century purity reform allied with the National Women’s Party, the advanced feminists of the 1920s. Their proposed "Customer Amendment" united the moral Right and the feminist Left in an effort to alter and use the state’s criminal law to make men moral, defend their character, and improve New York City’s overall morality. Mackey’s contribution to the literature is unique. Instead of looking at how vice commissions targeted female prostitutes or the commerce supporting and surrounding them, Mackey concentrates on how men were scrutinized.
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Saving Fallen Women Now? Critical Perspectives on Engagement and Support Orders and their Policy of Forced Welfarism
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The UK seems set to follow the increasingly abolitionist trend that is taking hold in Europe in response to the issue of prostitution. While some argue that an abolitionist approach signals a serious attempt to tackle the injustices and gendered aspects of commercial sex, we are less optimistic. Drawing upon the findings of the first study to evaluate Engagement and Support Orders, we argue that any focus on women's needs is distorted by the continued zero tolerance approach to street sex work and the criminal justice setting it takes place in. New revolving doors have been created for those involved in the most visible sectors of the industry and support agencies have been made to take on an increased policing role. This narrow focus individualises the causes of poverty and prostitution, elides the wider structural factors that shape sex work and does little to address the real needs of this vulnerable group. In conclusion, we argue that future policy should engage more productively with the rich cultural study of sex work. This will enable the development of ground-up responses and allow for a more effective role for the criminal law.
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Current developments
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A comprehensive review of law and policy in relation to prostitution has recently begun in the UK, marking the first major re-examination of the issue since the Wolfenden Report in the 1950s ('Sex law to get major overhaul' The Guardian, December 30th 2003). A Home Office consultation paper on the subject was due to be published in the summer of 2004. In Scotland, an expert panel has already been meeting to review the law in the light of the issues arising from MSP Margo McDonald's defeated and re-introduced private members bill intended to enable local authorities to create tolerance zones (Scottish Parliament, 27th February 2003). Not before time, the effectiveness of the current legal model will be examined and, in contrast to Wolfenden, where the focus of the Committee's work was on resolving the issue of public morality, the focus of current law reform is increasingly on the harms associated with prostitution. A number of options require to be considered, as opinion is divided across Europe on the most appropriate regulatory model; from legal regulation in Germany and the Netherlands to the recent Swedish law criminalising those who buy sexual services. This article, based on research carried out during a short study break in Sweden1, critically examines the Swedish position with the aim of providing a theoretically informed context in which comparative assessments can be made.
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