Prostitution laws in Sweden

I

n 1998 the Swedish Parliament passed the

Prohibition of the Purchase of Sexual Services

Act. The Act does what its title suggests: it

prohibits the sale of sexual services. Most

countries have legal controls on prostitution,

which often include banning brothels, pimping,

kerb-crawling and advertising. The Swedish Act

tightened up on these aspects, but it achieved

international attention because it went much

further than other European countries: it made

it illegal to purchase, or attempt to purchase,

‘casual sexual services’. The prohibition applied

not only to street prostitution, brothels and

massage parlours, but also to escort services

or ‘any other circumstances’ in which sexual

services are sold. Obviously existing laws

covered many of these cases, but the new law

was a ‘catch-all’, and in that sense quite radical.

One important point was that the buyer rather

than the seller was criminalised.

In contrast, the Netherlands has adopted a

quite different approach: there prostitution is

defined as a profession, at least for those from

European Union (EU) countries. Prostitutes have

access to welfare services and pay taxes on their

earnings. Whereas in Sweden prostitution is

viewed primarily as violence against women, in

the Netherlands so long as coercion is not used

• and that means that the participants must be
  of the age that they are deemed capable of giving
  consent – it is a voluntary exchange.
  Both Sweden and the Netherlands have long
  histories as liberal democracies and in defending
  their respective policies they draw on liberal
  arguments, yet they come to quite different
  conclusions on the regulation of prostitution.
  How might these differences be explained and
  which policy do you prefer? (See weblinks at the
  end of this chapter for further material on the
  Swedish prostitution laws.)

© Paul Vreeker/Reuters/Corbis