Legal Prostitution Systems in Europe (2021)

Sexuality and Culture, 2020

Prostitution is a standard case of morality politics (MP), defined as a particular type of politics that engages issues closely related to religious and/or moral values, giving way to strong and uncompromising value conflicts in both societal and political spheres. This kind of issues have increasingly become a European policy matter due to their transnational nature and the tensions they create between different legal principles. Our hypothesis is that this leads to the emergence of a specific type of European morality politics (EMP) reflecting the particular constraints of the policy-making of the European Union (EU). The purpose of this article is to understand to which extent the rise of prostitution on the EU agenda alters usual patterns of MP to shape a distinctive type of EMP. Our findings suggest that prostitution characterizes EMP albeit with a significant difference, namely the challenge to regulatory inertia through the successful mobilisation of European values by some policy entrepreneurs to promote a neo-abolitionist approach.

International Review of Law and Economics, 2011

The question of whether laws affect attitudes has inspired scholars across many disciplines, but empirical knowledge is sparse. Using longitudinal survey data from Norway and Sweden, collected before and after the implementation of a Norwegian law criminalizing the purchase of sexual services, we assess the short-run effects on attitudes using a difference-indifferences approach. In the general population, the law did not affect moral attitudes toward prostitution. However, in the Norwegian capital, where prostitution was more visible before the reform, the law made people more negative toward buying sex. This supports the claim that proximity and visibility are important factors for the internalization of legal norms.

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research

This paper focuses on the regulation of prostitution in the Netherlands from the twentieth century onward. It aims to provide a full description of the Dutch position on prostitution through the interpretation and explanation of current Dutch prostitution policy. This will be achieved by analyzing the legal narratives that substantiate the legal rules provided in both Dutch criminal and administrative law concerning the regulation of prostitution. We analyze the Dutch prostitution legislation of the past, present, and future, using a newly developed analytical framework. Using this framework, we reconstruct the legislator's attitude towards prostitution using insights from previous theoretical work on prostitution and using models aimed at regulating this phenomenon that range from a total ban to full decriminalization. In our analysis, we also use the legitimating grounds for application of criminal law developed by Feinberg. These grounds are also used in this paper to interpret the administrative intervention in prostitution. This paper reveals a paradox: The idea of a liberal dream goes hand-in-hand with growing repression of freedom in the Dutch prostitution sector.

Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 2018

In this contribution we reflect on our experiences of co-designing and coordinating two comparative projects on prostitution policies in Europe by focusing in particular on the epistemological workings underpinning their design and execution. We set out two main goals. The first is to shed light on what the epistemological and methodological issues we encountered reveal about the field of prostitution policy studies, an endeavour which can contribute to better comparative research in the field. The second goal is to relate the scope, developments, outcomes and expectations of the two projects to recent attempts to identify a 'one-size-fits-all' model of prostitution regulation, and to interrogate whether transplanting it across Europe is a desirable outcome. Building on the lessons learned from the projects, we propose an approach to prostitution policy development that is reflective of the specific contexts within which the policies are meant to be applied.

The paper aims at analyzing the problematic and discussed issue of prostitution. In particular it seeks to establish whether the grade of justification of prostitution is associated with nationality. Concretely, it will look at Lithuania, Netherlands and Sweden because each country deals with the phenomenon by adopting a different legislation. Furthermore, it is analyzed its association with other aspects of the European society, such as religion and the affiliation or not to voluntary organizations and activities, such as religious and church organizations and third world development and human rights' groups. The results of the analysis will reveal that perception of prostitution may depend on the type of legal policy embraced by the country in which repondents live. In contrast, outcomes will indicate that justification of prostituton is not associated with religion. Regarding the discussion about prostitution within the context of human rights, results may suggest a lack of awareness among European citizens.

In 2002, Germany legalised prostitution through the enactment of the Prostitution Act, thereby following one of the most liberal regulationist approaches to date. The following year, New Zealand enacted the Prostitution Reform Act 2003, which has become an often-referenced example of decriminalisation. Despite both jurisdictions following a regulationist approach, New Zealand?s model has attracted much positive international attention, whereas the German approach is used as an example of the shortcomings within regulationism. Drawing on the findings of the governmental evaluations of both New Zealand?s and Germany?s prostitution legislation, this article argues that the significant differences between the New Zealand and German models of regulating prostitution are not to be found within the legislation, but rather in the evaluation thereof. This finding calls into question the evidence presented within the evaluation of approaches to prostitution, and suggests that there may be other societal factors which decide how the success of legislation is determined. In Germany, the evaluation of the 2002 Prostitution Act (Prostitutionsgesetz) resulted in a move towards stricter regulation of prostitution. This article examines the changes to the law that will enter into force in July 2017, which are aimed at ensuring that the rights of sex workers in Germany will not just be protected in theory, but also in practice.

Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 2012

The Netherlands legalized prostitution in 1999 and is currently debating a new bill, the 'Law regulating prostitution and suppressing abuse in the sex industry'. The legalization made a distinction between voluntary sex work, which is legal, and forced prostitution, which remains a criminal offence. In the 2000s, evaluations showed that, while there is a reasonably working legal prostitution sector, abuse, bad working conditions and trafficking still occur. The media have played an important role in reframing the issue, and politicians have successfully set the revision of the legalization on the agenda, resulting in a new bill at the end of the decade. With this proposal and its framing of fighting human trafficking and organized crime, the Netherlands is reneging on its original progressive legalization by adopting a strict regulation of all prostitution. Sex workers will have to register with the authorities; the age to work in the sex industry will be raised to 21 years and clients have to check whether the sex worker is registered and not an undocumented worker. This article accounts for these two major shifts in prostitution policy in the Netherlands and discusses the consequences for sex workers.

2007

It is evident that the issue of sex trafficking has undergone a tremendous development from being a largely ignored issue to a widely accepted and serious policy-issue. The debates surrounding the issue of trafficking and prostitution have been around for decades, then how was the issue brought to the forefront in the 1990s? What led to the discursive shift in policies, not only on the European level, but in Sweden as well? What factors became key players in galvanizing the need and urgency to address this issue? These are some of the questions that shall be tackled in the paper through the assistance of global movements as anchors in some form or another that helped in the mobilisation of these issues. Through this paper, I argue that the reasons for this sudden rise in the issues and the shift in policies was a result of the [then] ongoing wave of global norms that spread in this region. And, simultaneous grassroots activism caught hold of this opportunity to frame issues accordingly and reach out on a larger scale.