A new bill which would make buying sex a criminal offence is to be discussed in Scottish Parliament this month. The Prostitution (Offences and Support) Bill, put forward by independent MSP Ash Regan, would bring in the model followed by Nordic countries, which criminalises the buying of sex rather than the individual selling it. Our writer Kate Lister gives her view.
Imagine if the Government announced it was going to make being paid for your job a criminal offence, but reassured you that this was a good thing because you wouldn’t be prosecuted – just the people paying you. There isn’t any kind of clear funding plan in place to give you money or state support to help you once you can no longer legally earn money, you understand, only vague gestures to various charities. So, you’ll have to figure that bit out on your own.
Now imagine that you, and those advocating for your rights, were not directly consulted before the bill proposing this change in the law was submitted to Parliament, and that those pushing for the change refused to meet with you directly to talk about it. They won’t talk to your representatives or support groups either. And finally, imagine that those pushing for the change not only won’t engage with you, but are telling everyone that this is all for your own good.
Do you feel safer? Supported? Or do you feel belittled, patronised, and very scared for your future?
MSP Ash Regan has introduced a bill to the Scottish Parliament that aims to criminalise clients paying for sex in Scotland – an approach known as the “Nordic Model”. MSPs are due to vote on the general principles of the bill within the next few weeks. If it is made law in Scotland, selling sex would remain legal, as it is at the moment, but paying for sex would become punishable by fines of up to £10,000 or a prison sentence.
According to representatives of Scotland for Decrim, a grassroots organisation made up of sex workers and allies who campaign for the decriminalisation of sex work, this bill has been brought forward without direct consultation with either them or their members, the very people the law will impact. The goal of the legislation is to “reduce the amount of prostitution in Scotland because of the evidence of exploitation and the harms that it is causing”.
I have campaigned against exploitation and violence against women my entire life. I have researched the history of sex work throughout my academic career. Believe me, if making it illegal to pay for sex reduced either of those things, I would fully support it, but it doesn’t. The Nordic model actually hurts the very people it claims to protect. It doesn’t reduce harms against sex workers, or reduce trafficking, because criminalising the client only forces sex work further underground and increases stigma. It also does nothing to tackle poverty or the many reasons people turn to sex work in the first place.
According to Regan’s policy memorandum, “prostitution is commercialised, systematic rape”. I fully acknowledge that people are trafficked into prostitution the world over and horrible abuses do occur, but to remove any possibility that someone could have agency over choosing to sell sex is patronising and paternalistic.
I am not here to pretend sex work is glamorous or liberating, but there is a clear difference between sex work and sexual exploitation. Even if you buy into the idea that sex work is always abusive, criminalising either the seller or the buyer does not actually reduce the harms that do occur. In fact, it makes them worse and disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable sex workers.
Amelia* is a chair of Scotland for Decrim and she is deeply concerned that Regan’s bill could pass in Scotland and what that will mean for those already selling sex in poverty. I asked her how she felt about the Nordic model being described as a feminist solution to the management of sex work. “I feel offended that these so-called feminists are using the word feminism to describe what they are doing. If they are feminists, they are the kind that have zero working-class solidarity. Without working-class solidarity, your feminism is empty.”
The Nordic model was introduced in Northern Ireland in 2015. Two years later, a review funded by Northern Ireland’s Department of Justice found that “the supply of commercial sexual services appears to have actually increased in the period following the implementation of the legislation”. The report also found that demand for commercial sex was not significantly reduced by the law for the simple reason a third of clients already thought paying for sex was illegal and the rest didn’t believe they would ever be arrested.
However, an “increase in anti-social, nuisance and abusive behaviours directed to sex workers” was observed. Why would this be the case? Because the Nordic model does nothing to challenge the stigma sex workers experience, it only reinforces the belief that they need to be removed from society altogether. It was concluded that the law had “minimal to no effect on the demand for prostitution, the number of active sex workers in the jurisdiction and on levels of human trafficking for sexual exploitation.”
Making clients illegal doesn’t make them go away, but it does make them far more reluctant to provide references or submit to any kind of online vetting process, and ultimately contributes to a “riskier environment for sex work” where they are “being asked and forced to perform sexual practices that they would not ordinarily do”.
As Amelia explained: “[The Nordic model] is not a harm-reduction model, it increases violence because we can’t screen our clients. Clients won’t give personal information which could be passed onto the police. So, I can’t figure out who my clients are, if I went to the police after being assaulted by a client, I wouldn’t have any information to give them.”
France has had the Nordic model since 2016 and again, the evidence shows it is not keeping people safe. A 2019 report by Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), a humanitarian charity, found that client numbers were reduced, but that this “had a detrimental effect on sex workers’ safety, health and overall living conditions.” Simply put, the law-abiding clients stayed away, leading to a smaller pool of dodgy clients, which in turn led to clients “feel[ing] more entitled to impose their conditions (ie unprotected sexual practices, reduced prices, unwillingness to pay, etc), seeing themselves as the ones taking the risk with regards to the law”.
The law also had the effect of impoverishing already vulnerable people, leading to 62.9 per cent of the sex workers interviewed attesting that that their overall quality of life had deteriorated.
Proponents of the Nordic model often claim that it “decriminalises the seller”, but it doesn’t, because it forces them to work in criminalised conditions. If the police want to find clients, they will do it by targeting those selling sex, so an increase in raids and surveillance is inevitable.
What sex workers like Amelia want is decriminalisation. This means the removal of all laws pertaining to the sale or purchase of sexual labour. This is not the same as legalisation, which means selling sex is only legal in certain conditions – legalised brothels or zoning, for example.
Decriminalisation means that sex workers will be protected by employment law, just like other workers, with access to employment contracts, maternity leave, health benefits, pensions and more. It means they can unionise and safely report crimes against them. Sexual exploitation and abuse are already illegal and would remain so if sex work were decriminalised. In fact, decriminalisation draws a vital distinction between sexual labour and sexual slavery. And we know that decriminalisation works because other countries have implemented it.
Belgium decriminalised sex work in 2022, and in 2024, the government introduced employment contracts, granting full labour rights (social security, pensions, healthcare) and specific protections (panic buttons, refusal rights) for contracted workers, making it the first country with such a framework.
In 2003, New Zealand decriminalised sex work. According to research carried out by the University of Otago four years later, 60 per cent of New Zealand sex workers felt empowered to refuse to see certain clients, and 95 per cent said they felt they had rights after decriminalisation.
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It is for all these reasons that Amnesty International, The World Health Organisation, Human Rights Watch, The British Medical Journal, and The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women all advocate for full decriminalisation, not the Nordic model.
It is also the model advocated for by every sex worker rights organisation in the UK. I will never understand why sex workers are so often excluded from these discussions when they are the ones who will have to live with the repercussions. I asked Amelia how sex workers in Scotland are feeling knowing Regan’s bill is about to be discussed in Parliament.
“Sex workers in Scotland are scared,” she said. “This is the fourth time we’ve had to fight this bill. We’re tired and we want politicians to speak to us and draft a bill with us involved in the decision-making process. There’s been a lack of support from MSP’s towards us for a long time.”
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