Earlier this year, sex workers in Scotland secured a hard-won victory. Ash Regan’s “Unbuyable” bill was voted down in the first stage, although by a margin of just ten votes. The bill was the latest effort by a left-leaning politician to introduce client and third party criminalisation laws – also known as the Nordic Model – across Britain, Northern Ireland having already adopted it in 2015.
Sex work – and which laws should govern it – is a divisive issue among Anarchists and the broader left. Support for the Nordic Model is widespread, including among those who identify as communists. Sex workers find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to battle against those who should be our allies, and who suddenly abandon anti-carceral and borderless ideals to support a model that represents a massive expansion of repressive policing and state surveillance.
Communist opposition to sex work is generally linked to a fundamental opposition to commodification – the process of turning human life and activity into objects to be bought and sold. This is something we can all get behind. We all experience the profound dehumanisation of a culture that treats us as consumers and labourers rather than human beings, not to mention the soul-destroying process of monetising what might once have simply been a treasured skill or hobby.
Obscenely rich people aside, engaging in any kind of labour for profit can never be a free choice under capitalism. This is not unique to sex work; none of us have full agency when the alternative is not having a roof over our heads or food on the table. Ask any commuter on the tube at 7:30am whether they’re headed to their office cubicle out of sheer free will, and I think we all know the answer.
Where I get lost is casting sex work as somehow unique; the ultimate frontier of capitalist intrusion, where the most intimate parts of human existence are turned into a market product. “Labour Power” and “Personhood”, believed to be separate in other areas of work, are here deemed indistinguishable, making sex work a particular violation of human life and dignity. These strangely romanticised depictions of sex are at odds with the reality of human behaviour – people regularly have sex for deeply unromantic reasons, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The naivety of this perspective hints at a lack of much lived experience here, and I struggle to engage with it seriously.
Regardless, this shouldn’t matter. Even if you insist on holding sex work to a unique standard here, anyone on the left should still oppose the Nordic Model for what it actually does. It may claim to be about abolishing sex work. However, it does not address any of the key drivers of sex work – primarily poverty and financial need, as well as discrimination against queer and trans people, inaccessible workplaces, insufficient welfare support, and those with no recourse to public funds. Instead, it simply aims to punish and disrupt people’s lives enough that they’ll stop doing it.
For obvious reasons, this doesn’t work. No one can ever be criminalised enough that they will stop needing money to survive. But the Nordic Model is so much worse than ineffective; it’s cruel. The repercussions will affect sex workers and non-sex workers alike. Here’s the reality of what these forms of criminalisation mean.
The systems required to enforce client and third party criminalisation laws are inherently those of mass-surveillance. As such, the introduction of the Nordic Model would herald an enormous rise in digital monitoring and surveillance of private communications, as police attempt to ascertain where paid transactional sex is being arranged. This means all of us will face greater online intrusion than ever into our private correspondence and online activities.
It won’t just be online. Police will stake out the locations from which people are suspected of selling sex, while they wait to catch and fine those involved. This means increased resources for undercover policing, CCTV and other covert filming or recording, and general mass intrusion into people’s personal lives. And tools built ostensibly to catch clients are easily repurposed for monitoring any other activities that law enforcement doesn’t like. Once the state has the power to monitor your movements, private transactions and messages for the crime of purchasing sex, they can also monitor them for political dissent or “illegal” protests.
This surveillance will also be applied at the border, where individuals even suspected of sex work can be barred from entering the country – essentially providing a gift-wrapped excuse for those who want to see borders policed more aggressively. In Norway, Nordic Model laws were used to deport migrant sex workers after they approached the police to report assault. In Sweden – which pioneered these laws – sex workers are deported on vague and unsubstantiated claims of “public order”, and new amendments to the Aliens Act are set to remove settled status from those not supporting themselves by “honest means”.
Perhaps the most cynical aspect of the Nordic Model is its calculated destruction of collective safety. The criminalisation of third parties sees peer support treated as criminal conspiracy. If a sex worker shares their earnings with a partner, a parent, or a child, those loved ones are viewed as profiting off of sex work. If a worker shares the details of their booking with a support network or a safety buddy, that person is criminalised as facilitating her sex work. This is a state-mandated dismantling of mutual aid and collective care. By criminalising the networks we build to protect ourselves, the Nordic Model effectively mandates isolation – the most dangerous condition for any worker.
In short, the Nordic Model is a massive expansion of police powers, creating a perpetual state of surveillance and intervention to enforce these laws. This will affect all of us, but will be disproportionately used against already marginalised communities: those who are racialised, queer, trans, migrants and disabled. No one should claim to be on the left while supporting this.
If you don’t like people selling sex, fine. Plenty of sex workers don’t really like it either. And if you want to talk about fewer people doing sex work, then great – let’s talk about an actual living wage. Let’s talk about affordable housing. Let’s talk about tackling soaring energy prices and food costs. Let’s talk about giving migrants full working rights and recourse to public funds. Let’s talk about better support for mothers and people with disabilities.
Not liking sex work or wanting to see fewer people doing sex work should never be grounds to support the Nordic Model. We are all doing our best to survive capitalism. Sex work and sex workers are not unique in this regard and our ranks are comprised of society’s poorest and most vulnerable, sometimes acting in desperation to survive. The response should never be criminalisation. The Nordic model is breathtaking not just in its scope, but in its cruelty.
Victory in Scotland has for now been won, and I hope Scotland for Decrim’s members are taking time to rest and heal after an inspiring but no doubt draining campaign. Unfortunately, this won’t be the last battle against the Nordic Model that sex workers in the UK have to fight. Anarchists and the entire political left wing need to get on board, before we all find ourselves at the mercy of an ever expanding police state.
Marin Scarlett
Marin is a sex workers’ rights activist and can be found on social media here @marinscarlett_.
The featured artwork is by Krime an anarchist artist and propagandist based in the South West of England, you can find more of their work on krime.uk.
Both Marin and Krime donated their commissions to S.A.F.E. (who work to to ensure abortion access to the people across Europe who have been abandoned by governments and healthcare systems) and SWARM (a sex worker led collective based in the UK) respectively. You can support these organisations directly here:
supportingabortions.eu/donate
swarmcollective.org/get-involved
