Sweden’s parliament has passed a law banning the purchase of sexual performances for viewing online, including those on platforms like OnlyFans, marking a major update to the country’s sex purchase legislation.
Sweden’s parliament has passed a law banning the purchase of sexual performances for viewing online, including those on platforms like OnlyFans, marking a major update to the country’s sex purchase legislation.
The title doesn’t convey the actual law, thanks for adding description op.
Feels out of character for a Scandinavian country to pass such conservative law.
Belgium actually got social benefits like insurance for people doing sex work (which if you ask me, is work), if I remember correctly.
The Nordics generally fall on the line that sex work is inherently exploitative, which is why buying is illegal but selling sex work is not. This isn’t particularily conservative, but is just extending the existing laws surrounding prostitution and sex work to Onlyfans commissions.
In Sweden, a bottle of Vodka costs you 18 Euros in alcohol taxes. Plus VAT, plus the actual cost of the vodka. Also you can only buy it at state-run shops.
They’re abolitionists and wannabe social engineers up there which is why Swedes go to Denmark to buy booze while Danes go to Germany. And Germans, very occasionally, to Luxembourg but only if you need 98% stuff to make your own liqueur. Luxembourg I think is the odd one out EU-wide when it comes to levying the same tax per ml of ethanol no matter whether it’s 40% or pure.
It’s conservative under a certain pov, or progressive for others.
From a femministic pov is a step forward. Sweden started in '99 to criminalize the sex customers and it’s been followed from the other Scandinavians and France.
On the other end we’ve countries like Germany, Switzerland, Nederland or Belgium which works in kinda opposite direction and allow sex workers to the point of being guaranteed social services.
In Sweden they believe that prostitution always happens due to an abuse of power. The prostitute is somehow always forced to sell sex. It’s kinda tricky point, it never convinced me 100%.
I believe more that people should be allowed to do what they want with their body, so if someone wants to sell sex, the only things to do is to offer some rules and makes it safe for everyone. It’s not surprisingly that countries who cares about safe worker’s safety also allow euthanasia.
I agree from a bodily autonomy perspective that everyone should have the right to do what they wish with their bodies. If the sex industry was primarily individuals or small scale brothels, with everything voluntary, then legalising prostitution would make sense. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
The sex industry is huge, with large crime syndicates involved, so legalising prostitution in the Netherlands resulted in higher sex trafficking. Once prostitution was normalised, the demand for services increased but the supply didn’t. Human traffickers bring in women to meet the demand and the Netherlands government haven’t been able to stop it.
There are a lot of online sources confirming this, including this recent (long) report: Failed Promises: The history of legal prostitution and sex trafficking in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
From a SWERF POV. By far not all the feminisms are sex negative or exclude sex workers.
That laws exists cause femministic pov is strong in the country (we should talk about genders, it’s said F just to make things shorter in this discussion). We all knows not all femminists thinks exactly the same stuff, as all the people about all the things in the world.
IMO it’s fairly understandable for in-person sex work, it has to be fairly hard to navigate that business while avoiding abuse even if you start doing it out of your own free will. But online sex work removes a huge component of what makes in-person sex work so risky, i.e. the physical in-person interaction. IMO, forbidding that as well suggests that the lawmakers not only view sex work as dangerous, but also as immoral.
Yep.
They don’t talk on a practical, physical level, it’s a matter of power and social acceptance. Sweden refuse the idea of a gender who’s subordinate, which is right but creates some turbulences, as you pointed out.
It sounds to me like wanting to fix next year problems other then todays ones. Kinda a long time program.
It is not the physical danger, but the risk of people being manipulated, pressured, or straight up forced into doing it. That can certainly still happen with online content. It may not be the image you have of Onlyfans, but I can’t imagine it not happening to some degree.
Exploitation also happens with foreign workers in the farming and logistics industries though. So under the argument they are making, I recommend also closing the entire farming and logistics industries.
Definitely. It’s just a lot less likely.
Wasn’t there multiple popular porn formats where it turned out they were human trafficking rings and raped the women for millions of people to view?
Interesting there possibly being a correlation between euthanasia and legal sex work. But it makes sense, as it is both about supporting people to make their own choice. I’ve always found the people who want to ban things that are dangerous a bit condescending, as if people aren’t able to bare the consequences of their choices. But is true that if people have no good options, they will start considering bad options. But by making something illegal, they are not getting better options. Also I don’t think making it illegal will stop the people who are willing to force someone into prostitution. Signing some law to prevent unwanted behaviour seems like a easy choice from a political pov. Real problems need real solutions.
And Germany became a haven for human trafficking and organized rape, which forced prostitution is.
Among other things when Ukrainians started arriving in Germany there were cases of people disguising to help to snatch women and girls and force them into prostitution as the enforcement of protection against human trafficking remains lackluster in Germany.
Do you have a source on that second statement?
Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_Germany
https://www.institut-fuer-menschenrechte.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/Publikationen/Weitere_Publikationen/Summary_Monitoring_Report_Human_Trafficking_in_Germany.pdf
Page 19, 7 Recommendations:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2024-001766_EN.html
That references an article from 2013, the whole article is generally out of date. What’s absolutely true is that Germany is a hub for trafficking in Europe, for the simple reason that it’s a hub for anything in Europe that involves transportation: You can hardly go east to west, north to south, without crossing through Germany.
The article also isn’t particularily good at distinguishing between sex trafficking and for other purposes. Most of the dates (2009) refer to a time barely past regularisation of prostitution, the criminal statistics in the years following 2002 are full of cases that were only brought to light because operating shady brothels became financially untenable.
Then, important to keep in mind about statistics: German law says that it’s illegal to recruit under 21yolds into prostitution. I think it’s a good thing, but OTOH someone driving around in the Romanian countryside asking gals whether they want to make money in Germany shouldn’t be confused, much less equated, with chained to the radiator type of trafficking, but that’s exactly what happens when you just take the “human trafficking” numbers out of the police statistics, both types have the same subheading.
The revisions were done July of 2024, the report is from October. No shit Sherlock it can take a couple of months to implement legislation.
The whole thing, the wikipedia article that is not the report, reads like a hitpiece with an agenda… in particular, SWERF. SWERFs also like to ignore any- and everything sex worker unions have to say about this topic (which isn’t kind towards the Nordic model), up to including slandering them as “pimp-run”.
Most of the sources in the article are also before 2017, which saw a law reform, in particular now there’s licensing. Sex worker unions really didn’t like that, I don’t think it’s doing much but OTOH is also not terribly damaging – lots of professions have some kind of licensing regime. I would have rather seen more investment in street work.
The Wikipedia article refers to the decades after legalisation of prostitution. The recent report from 2024 shows that Germany is still behind the EU standards. I don’t know what you mean with “SWERFs”. It is a simple matter of fact that in Germany legalisation of prostitution did not come with proper safeguards and helped enable human trafficking.
Also it remains clear that Germany is still lacking behind EU standards. While it is true that it takes time to implement new standards, the EU processes to establish them take years, so the German governments know about these standards since much longer. There is also no prohibition on implementing these before they become official EU standards.
And this brings us back to the problems with digital sex work. While countries can enforce protections against human trafficking in analog spaces, it is much more difficult in digital spaces. The “onlyfans model” in some other country could have traffickers standing outside the video with a gun pointed at them and there is hardly any way to find out. There is no access for street workers or investigators to talk with the people involved. They could be kept in some basement and never see the light of day and the consumers seem rather willfully ignorant to that possibility. As in the example with the “casting couch” trafficker ring, human trafficking is rather happily ignored by the consumers, who ultimately make themselves complicit in heinous crimes.
Sweden is doing the right thing here. It is impossible to regulate that “market” to prevent human trafficking. Thereby the only option is to shut that market down.
Sex-worker exclusionary radical feminist. TBH not knowing that acronym disqualifies you from discussing the issue.
And that doesn’t also apply to call centre employees, youtube hosts, news anchors, whatnot?
Ignoring requires knowledge. Consumers are happily unaware of issues, sure, but so are you when it comes to who picked the coffee you’re drinking.
I’m all for throwing the book at anyone who traffics people, for whatever reason, sex work included. And the only way to do that, that has actually data behind it and not just “sex work inherently bad” type of ideology, is regulation.
Read this.
Does this apply to people who are voluntarily or by force engaged in sex work too? This seems more like academic leftists gatekeeping.
Who are at a much lower risk of human trafficking, have access to labor unions and workplace protections…
While not perfect, i buy fair trade coffee, which means at least some level of oversight. And picking coffee under exploitative circumstances is terrible, but a different level than being raped for the entertainment of millions of people, where the recordings remain even decades after, if the exploitation can be stopped.
Which is much harder in the digital space and cannot be enforced realistically by Sweden. Even if they would create a certification process and do regular workspace inspections, these could only be enforced inside Sweden. And even that is limited by the trivial ease of using VPNs to claim a different location. So the only option is to prohibit that market.
Earlier you criticized that i provided a source discussion the situation multiple years ago. Now you provide a source that is from the same time and does not address nor distinguish between analog and digital.
There is a fundamental difference between digital and analog. So the criticism needs to distinguish between these two. You gave the example of street workers yourself.
If you criticise the Swedish ban on buying digital sex work, how do you envision to protect digital sex work from human trafficking, provide access to social work and the like? What is the better alternative?
Just listened to the episodes about Andrew Tate on behind the bastards and it seems like there’s a huge potential for ruined lives, so I see why Sweden has taken this step. If they can guarantee a well paid job aside from this and other things that hurt society, I can see why this is a progressive move
Not for Sweden in the context of sex work.