Assessing Prostitution Policies in Europe

Synnøve Jahnsen, Hendrik Wagenaar, Synnøve Jahnsen, Hendrik Wagenaar, Synnøve Økland Jahnsen, Synnøve Økland Jahnsen, Hendrik Wagenaar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138224919
• eBook ISBN: 9780429637896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Once again, prostitution occupies a prominent position on public and political agendas, both nationally and internationally. A topic of concern and interest within social and academic realms, it is a highly moralised, contested issue that is at the centre of heated and drawn-out debates.

With each chapter dedicated to a separate country and written by a national authority on the subject, Assessing European Prostitution Policies seeks to explore how prostitution is regulated in 21 European countries, thus drawing out important implications for an effective and humane prostitution policy. Indeed, this innovative volume brings together systematic accounts of how national and local forms of governance influence the commercial market for sex as well as the lives of sex workers and third parties. All chapters cover the history of prostitution policy, national laws regulating prostitution, policy formulation and implementation, the national discourse on prostitution, the gap between national and local regulation, the impact of policy on the lives and rights of sex workers, and sex worker advocacy organizations. In addition to this, the authors examine and highlight how immigration, labour, fiscal and welfare law have as much impact on the sex trade as designated prostitution law.

A unique interdisciplinary title that is comprehensive in its coverage, Assessing European Prostitution Policies will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, sex worker advocacy organisations and policy makers interested in fields such as Sexuality and Prostitution, Public Policy, Criminology and Gender Studies.

1 Introduction

Prostitution policy in Europe—an overview

Hendrik Wagenaar

This book presents case studies of prostitution policy in 22 European countries. Two additional chapters discuss policy making at the European Union (EU) level, and the advocacy of the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE). There are thus 24 chapters in total about the way that governments in European countries, sex worker advocacy organizations, NGOs, and various EU bodies attempt to regulate prostitution. On the surface, such a collection of policy studies would hardly be remarkable. After all, as a brief Google search reveals, we can point to comparable collections about other comparative policy areas, such as health, education, crime, environmental policy, or even sports. Yet, on further reflection, a collection of studies on prostitution policy is a rarity indeed, as the study of public policy is markedly underrepresented in the literature on prostitution. In fact, for some of the countries represented in this book (Albania, Greece, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia), this is the first English-language publication about prostitution policy; for others (Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Austria, Finland, Portugal) access to information on the regulation of the sex trade is remarkably difficult. What makes the book unique is that national experts, in most cases the national experts, have written each chapter on prostitution policy in their country.

This introductory chapter has the following structure: I will first show that public policy, as an object of analysis, gets short shrift in the voluminous literature on prostitution. I will then discuss a number of challenges to prostitution policy, challenges to policy makers and policy analysts alike. Any theory of prostitution policy, I argue, has to acknowledge these challenges and we will see that in many countries, prostitution policy accedes to one or more of them. Third, I present the conceptual scheme that the contributors to this book used to write their case studies. While this scheme hardly represents a full-fledged theory of prostitution policy, I nevertheless argue that it is a first step toward a more comprehensive theory. Fourth, I summarize the key findings from the cases in this book. My conclusion is that, in terms of effectiveness and human rights, the regulation of prostitution is to a greater or lesser extent a failure in almost all European countries. National and local prostitution policies have hardly any effect on the prevalence of prostitution in the cities of Europe. In addition, the regulatory instruments that governments employ have done little to improve the working conditions and human rights of sex workers; in some countries authorities openly harass sex workers. With few exceptions, labor exploitation is still the default state in the sex trade, and is not even an issue on the policy agenda in most countries. As far as we can see, this has been the case for the last two centuries. Is there an alternative? In the final section of this chapter we argue that collaborative governance might offer a fruitful break from the combination of adversarial, managerial, and coalition politics that has characterized prostitution policy in Europe for so long, and might inaugurate an effective and decent regulation of sex work.

1 The primacy of policy in prostitution (and its underrepresentation in the academic literature)¹

In the advanced Western democracies, prostitution, in all its manifestations, is deeply entangled with the state. Since roughly the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the consolidation of the Western nation state, prostitution as a social phenomenon cannot be seen apart from the efforts of authorities to prohibit, contain, or regulate it (Corbin 1990; Gibson 1986; Walkowitz 1982). While trade liberalization, poverty, migration trends, education and employment opportunities, and global connectedness through the internet and affordable travel arrangements, influence the “supply” of sex workers, an array of government interventions shape the nature, organization, and location of prostitution markets, as well as the rights and position of sex workers. Zoning laws determine which urban spaces are designated for prostitution purposes; national laws determine the legal position and civil rights of sex workers; the mandate, skills, and expertise of professionals and administrators influence the health and work conditions of sex workers; police procedure impacts their security situation; and immigration law determines the work situation and mobility of sex workers (Wagenaar et al. 2017). Yet, while prostitution as a social and legal phenomenon is the subject of intense scholarly attention, it has generated considerably less attention as a topic of public policy (Wagenaar et al. 2017). Despite the ubiquity of state intervention, few scholars have analyzed the more mundane aspects of prostitution policy, such as the dynamics of agenda setting, the politics of policy implementation, the selection of policy instruments or the unintended consequences of regulatory measures.

Yet, despite the central importance of policy in shaping and articulating societal domains, relatively little attention has been paid to prostitution policy in the literature on prostitution.² Or, more precisely, much of the literature prefers to discuss prostitution either in non-policy terms or to reduce public policy toward prostitution to only one element of the policy process. Each academic field develops its own traditions; its own preferred foci of attention, problem definitions, and styles of writing. More specifically, in the academic literature, prostitution is predominantly discussed as shaped by society-wide extraneous influences; as broad (national) policy regimes; as discourse; in terms of international governance regimes and human rights; and as the outcome of broad shifts in governmentality.

Extraneous forces

Several scholars argue that the shape of the sex trade is not so much influenced by public policy, as by external determinants such as “rapid and large-scale economic and cultural transformations” (Bernstein 2007: 168; Agustín 2008). These changes then lead to “new configurations of intimate life as well as in new erotic dispositions” (Bernstein 2007: 168). These larger economic and cultural transformations are deemed to be so powerful that national responses to prostitution are hardly more than the enactment of this “postindustrial” sociological script. An important variant of the extraneous forces approach is the “transnational feminist” approach. This is the label for an important perspective on prostitution that explicitly situates the sex trade within large migration trends. These trends are themselves the result of changes in postcolonial global political economy, or, as Kempadoo puts it in: “hegemonic and local patriarchies, globalized capitalism, and the widening gaps in income and wealth, as well as ... reconfigurations of empire under late twentieth-century globalization ...” (Kempadoo 2012: xix).

Policy regimes

It is common in the literature on prostitution policy to distinguish between different national policy regimes. The term policy regime is commonly used in the policy literature to express a certain coherence and continuity of design and execution in a policy field. In the prostitution literature, the concept of a policy regime is taken in a somewhat narrower sense. Outshoorn, for example, defines a regime as “sets of laws and practices governing prostitution that shape prostitution in their respective jurisdictions in distinctive ways” (Outshoorn 2004: 6; see also Abel et al. 2010; Bernstein 2007; Chuang 2010; Weitzer 2012). As this definition illustrates, prostitution policy regimes are thought to coincide with national borders and with laws as the main vehicle for policy making. There is considerable debate about the type and proper nomenclature of the different regimes (Abel et al. 2010; Agustín 2008; Phoenix 2009; Scoular 2010). Regime indications have been criticized on several grounds. They do not necessarily coincide with national borders, they are insufficiently consistent as more than one regime can be discerned in the same country or even in one policy program or legal approach, and they ignore the complex and multi-level character of prostitution policy (Phoenix 2009; Skilbrei and Holmström 2014; Wagenaar et al. 2013).

Discourse analysis

Another common form of academic writing about prostitution focuses on discourse. These authors usually explain the shape a policy has obtained in a country by the national discourse about prostitution (Outshoorn 2004, 2012; Sauer 2004), or how the issue of trafficking has come to dominate the (inter-) national debate on prostitution (Doezema 2010; Sanghere 2012; Walkowitz 1982). Discourse analysis comes in two forms. The first reconstructs broad national debates about prostitution and how these influence political decision-making. The second form of discourse analysis is more socially constructivist. The central concepts in such analysis are myth, meaning, and power. The purpose of constructivist discourse analysis is not to confront certain myths about prostitution (in particular the myth about trafficking as an epidemic worldwide phenomenon) with the reality of sex workers’ lives or with the utter lack of reliable data, but to trace the genealogy of these images, and how they succeed in convincing the larger world of their truth claims (Doezema 2010: 10; Walkowitz 1982). This type of discourse analysis explains the naturalization of certain images and understandings through the repeated use of particular narrative tropes and the routine employment of policy instruments that are owned and supported by political, academic, and moral authorities. Discourse analysis is an important, but ultimately partial way of analyzing prostitution policy. It mostly contributes to explaining the agenda-setting phase of the policy process, where it demarcates how common metaphors and tropes suggest policy solutions and determine the limits of what is possible and permissible to say. In able hands, constructivist discourse analysis shows how ideology becomes embedded in laws, regulations, and policy programs, and how, inversely, these policy schemes bestow legitimacy on the reigning discourse (Corbin 1990; Walkowitz 1982). Discourse analysis is particularly strong on tracing the ramifications of power and authority in a particular political-administrative domain and the decisive role that professionals and academic experts play in this. For example, through their careful and detailed analysis of nineteenth century arrangements for regulating prostitution, historians who work in this Foucauldian tradition have provided suggestive insights into contemporary policy making (Corbin 1990; Walkowitz 1982). However, a similarly detailed, similarly comprehensive “history of the present” of prostitution policy has not been written yet. Discourse (in both meanings of the word) is clearly important in understanding prostitution policy. We will return to the role of discourse later in this chapter.

Human rights and international governance

The human rights literature is largely concerned with international governance regimes in prostitution, in particular the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, as adopted in Palermo in 2000. Much of the literature attempts to assess to what extent the international governance of prostitution is driven by human rights or by a concern over security issues surrounding migration, generally concluding that the former takes a back seat to the latter (Gallagher 2001). The international regime literature largely focuses on laws. However, little or no attention is paid to the translation of these laws or the UN protocol into national policy.

Governmentality

Finally, there is a group of scholars that is interested in changes in governmentality (Prior et al. 2013; Scoular and O’Neill 2007). The term governmentality depicts a style of governing in which all aspects of public life and individual conduct are in principle subject to regulation. The process of governing should not be seen as the expression of a monolithic power center or grand ideology, but instead as the accumulation of myriads of micro-practices within local programs such as schools, prisons, welfare agencies, corporations, and disability programs, that sustain, modify, and even generate what we perceive and experience as the institutions of the state (Bevir 1999: 352; Foucault 1991: 102). These regimes of government are made possible because state agencies rely on, and implicate, communities, neighborhoods, private businesses, professionals, and citizens to achieve its ends (Dean 1999: 70; Walters 2012). Governmentality analyses have a distinct critical flavor; their aim is to expose the surreptitious working of power in what superficially looks like a benign or technically neutral approach to prostitution.

Each of these five approaches provides important insights into prostitution and its regulation. Yet, they also fall short of providing a convincing account of prostitution policy and how it affects the actors in the sex trade and the wider public. All five approaches suffer from a number of shortcomings in this respect. First, the exogenous forces and governmentality approaches to prostitution amount to an exaggerated claim as an explanation of change and variation in the sex trade (John 2012: 98). The exogenous forces and governmentality approaches are important sociological descriptions of the wider social-economic and regulatory environment of prostitution. However, large trends, such as shifts in in migration patterns, labor market composition or attitudes toward sexuality are filtered through the working of political institutions, national discourse, and policy instruments before they manifest themselves as effects on the sex trade.

Second, with the exception of historical discourse analyses, all five approaches to greater or lesser extent deny agency to the actors involved in the sex trade; both the agency of political actors and officials, as that of sex workers, brothel owners, clients, and others who are involved in prostitution. Actors tend to act on the way they understand social and political phenomena. The reigning trope in much of the prostitution literature is to posit large overarching constructs—political-economic forces, discourse, governmentality, global governance regime, policy regime, law—which somehow explain the size, manifestation, and geographical distribution of prostitution. However, these constructs are not linear representations of objects “out there” in the world, which then compellingly determine people’s behavior. Rather, actors in the context of their own (working) life interpret large socioeconomic developments, trends in government regulation, shifts in public opinion, or, more general, situations in their own life circumstances.

With the exception of the historical discourse and global governance regime analysis, a related objection to the above approaches to prostitution is that they implicitly downplay the possibilities for government interventions to have a positive or negative impact on the position of sex workers. This is an interesting assumption that warrants further discussion. On the one hand, as we will argue later in this chapter, prostitution policy can hardly be called effective in terms of its own moral goals: containing, controlling, or eradicating prostitution from society and protecting and improving the social position of the sex worker. One could argue that prostitution researchers have intuitively taken this skeptical message to heart and focus instead on more promising projects such as explaining prostitution, and its place in society, as a social-historical phenomenon. On the other hand, much prostitution literature research is driven by a forensic and/or reformist impulse. This implies a belief in social betterment, either by bypassing the state altogether and betting on the power of enlightened scholarship and social activism to bring about reform, or by implicitly banking on the rule of law and persuading the state to implement more effective policies.

There are at least two reasons why the study of policy in prostitution is important. First, as the cases in this book show, every country, for better or worse, has a policy toward prostitution. Similar to sectors such as health, education, or housing, a range of different collective reactions toward prostitution exist across countries. This in itself is something that requires explanation (Cairney 2012: 3). Second, it is undeniable, as the chapters in this book again show, that there are considerable differences in the human rights and work conditions of sex workers across countries. In some countries improving the position of sex workers is an official goal of national or local regulation, in many it is not. However, in all countries the position of sex workers is an area where the intended and unintended consequences of prostitution policy are most acutely felt. What does this argum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: prostitution policy in Europe—an overview
• PART I Western and Central Europe
• PART II Nordic countries
• PART III Former Eastern Europe
• PART IV Southern Europe
• PART V European policies
• Index