Niina Vuolajärvi, PhD candidate, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and visiting researcher, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University
Governing in the Name of Caring – The Nordic Model of Prostitution and Its Punitive Consequences for Migrants
A new trend has taken place in international prostitution policies. Sweden was the first country to claim a new feminist approach to prostitution and shift its prostitution policies towards abolishing commercial sex by criminalizing the act of buying sexual services, while decriminalizing the selling of sex. Sweden adopted the Sex Purchase Act in 1999, followed by Norway in 2009. Finland adopted a partial criminalization in 2006. Many anti-trafficking activists promote the Nordic approach as the best tool to combat sex trafficking and protect women in commercial sex, and, despite the lack consensus whether the law has been successful in its goals, the model has spread globally over the last five years to Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia.
Relying on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork and around 200 interviews with sex workers, social and health care workers, the police, and policy-makers, this paper examines the Nordic prostitution model and its intersection with immigration policies in three countries that have adopted some degree of client criminalization: Finland, Norway, and Sweden. My fieldwork findings show that in a situation where the majority of people who sell sex – 60-75% – in the region are migrants, the regulation of commercial sex has shifted from prostitution to immigration policies, resulting in a double standard in the governance of national and foreign sex workers. My fieldwork reveals a tension between the stated feminist-humanitarian aims of the model, to protect and save women, and the punitivist governance of commercial sex that in practice leads to control, deportations, and women’s working conditions becoming more difficult. The paper concludes that when examined in action the Nordic model is a form of humanitarian governance that I call punitivist humanitarianism, or governing in the name of caring.
Niina Vuolajärvi is a doctoral student at Rutgers University, Department of Sociology. In her ethnographic PhD research "Precarious Intimacies – Migration and Sex Work in the Nordic Region", she combines migration and precarization research perspectives to the inquiries of intimacies and commercial sex. Her PhD project focuses the so-called Nordic prostitution model and its intersection with immigration policies in three countries that have adopted some degree of client criminalization: Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The broader theoretical question of the thesis explores the role of law in shaping intimacies. For more information on her work see: https://rutgers.academia.edu/NiinaVuolajarvi.
See also information about lectures and seminars at Forum for Transnational Migration.
