Prostitution Policy in Sweden

In 1999, Sweden became the first country in the world to adopt a law that criminalizes the client in prostitution – but not the person offering sexual services. Since then, Finland, Iceland and Norway have adopted similar legislation, making it illegal to purchase sexual services but not to sell them. The wording of the Swedish Sex Purchase Act is gender neutral. However, the law was politically motivated, discussed and enforced from a gender equality perspective in the context of women selling sex to men, and prostitution was constructed as a part of the patriarchal oppression of women. In contemporary time, the law is largely uncontroversial and has been officially accepted across the political spectrum. However, questions regarding the effectiveness of the law remain somehow unanswered.

In this paper, the “language of prostitution” in a Swedish context is put under scrutiny and is analysed in relation to gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Drawing on empirical data consisting of interviews with Swedish police officers and social workers, my analysis indicates that the implementation of the Sex Purchase Act differs from the explicit intentions in the draft works. Firstly, practitioners do not seem to perceive the law as a mean to achieve gender equality. Instead, they cast prostitution as a ‘human problem’ and how they apply the law is largely dependent on stereotype notions that exist on certain groups involved in prostitution. Secondly, analysis shows that the enforcement of the law is highly gendered, racialised and sexualised. On a practical level, the law is used in a much lager extent in relation to men buying sex from foreign women working in Sweden, and used as a strategy for border control. In relation to men buying sex from men, however, the practitioners do not comprehend the law as applicable at all.