Sweden’s innovative sex-trade laws criminalise clients, not prostitutes. The result: a huge per cent drop in business. Joan Smith jumps in a squad car with local police to find out how it works – and whether Britain could follow suit

The Independent, Tuesday 26 March 2013

I am sitting in the back of an unmarked police car on the small island of Skeppsholmen, to the east of Stockholm’s picturesque old town. Above us is the city’s modern art museum but it’s a dark February night and we’re not here to appreciate culture. “They park up there,” says the detective in the front passenger seat, pointing to a car park at the top of the hill. “We wait a few minutes and then we leap out, run up the hill and pull open the doors.”

What happens next is a textbook example of the way Sweden’s law banning the purchase of sex works in practice. The driver of the car, who’s brought a prostituted woman to the island to have sex, is arrested on the spot. He’s given a choice: admit the offence and pay a fine, based on income, or go to court and risk publicity. The woman, who hasn’t broken any law, is offered help from social services if she wants to leave prostitution. Otherwise, she’s allowed to go.

“Buying sex is one of the most shameful crimes you can be arrested for,” explains the detective, Simon Haggstrom. He’s young, black, and his appearance – shaved head, baggy jeans – suggests a music industry executive rather than a cop. But he’s in charge of the prostitution unit of Stockholm county police and he’s proud of the fact that he’s arrested more than 600 men under the Swedish law: “We’ve arrested everyone from drug addicts to politicians. Once I arrested a priest and he told me I’d ruined his life. I told him, ‘I haven’t ruined your life, you have.’”

Sweden’s decision to reverse centuries of assumptions about prostitution and criminalise buyers of sex caused astonishment when the law came into force in 1999. As arguments raged elsewhere about whether prostitution should be legalised, the Swedish government’s simple idea – that the wrong people were being arrested – was new and controversial. Detective Superintendent Kajsa Wahlberg is Sweden’s national rapporteur on trafficking in human beings. When I meet her at her office in Stockholm, she recalls that one police officer from another country actually accused the Swedes of “Nazi methods”. Wahlberg acknowledges that many Swedish officers were sceptical as well. “There was frustration and anger within the police. People were chewing on lemons,” she says with a wry laugh.

All of that’s changed dramatically since the law came into effect. “The main change I can see when I look back is we got the men on board,” says Wahlberg. “The problem is gender-specific. Men buy women. One of the keys is to train police officers. When they have understood the background, they get the picture.” She talks about why women end up in prostitution, citing research that shows a history of childhood sexual abuse, compounded by problems with drugs and alcohol.

“They have no confidence in themselves. They’ve been left out and neglected and try to get all kinds of attention. This is not about an adult woman’s choice.” In the 1990s, the Swedish government accepted the arguments of women’s groups that prostitution is a barrier to gender equality and a form of violence against women. What’s remarkable is that public opinion, which was initially hostile, has swung round to this view; these days, 70 per cent of the public support the law. “We’ve changed the mindset of the Swedish population,” Haggstrom tells me. The change is visible among the older members of his unit.

One undercover cop, who’s been a police officer for 37 years, reveals a lingering sense of surprise when he remembers what happened 14 years ago. “When the law came into force, the streets were empty for six months,” he says. These days he’s one of its most enthusiastic supporters, having seen for himself how the number of women in street prostitution in Stockholm has declined. Where 70 or 80 women used to sell sex outdoors, these days it’s between five and 10 in winter, 25 in summer. A small number of women work on the streets of Malmö and Gothenburg but the Swedish figures are nothing like those for Denmark, where prostitution has been decriminalised. Denmark has just over half the population of Sweden but one study suggested there were more than 1,400 women selling sex on Danish streets.

The law has brought about other changes as well. Before 1999, most women in street prostitution in Stockholm were Swedish. Now they’re from the Baltic states or Africa, and have sold sex in other countries as well. They tell Haggstrom’s officers they’re much more likely to be subjected to violence in countries where prostitution has been legalised. “Swedish men want oral sex and intercourse, nothing more than that,” the undercover cop tells me. “They know they have to behave or they may be arrested. They don’t want to use violence.”

It’s a fascinating observation because one of the criticisms of the law was that it would make prostitution more dangerous. All the Swedish police officers I spoke to insisted this was a myth, along with the notion that prostitution would go underground. “If a sex buyer can find a prostituted woman in a hotel or apartment, the police can do it,” Haggstrom observes sardonically. “Pimps have to advertise.”

Specialist officers have been trained to monitor the internet and the police also have access to telephone intercepts, which suggest that traffickers no longer regard Sweden as a worthwhile market. “We’ve had wiretapping cases where pimps say they don’t findsSweden attractive,” Haggstrom continues. “Even if they don’t get arrested, we arrest the clients. They’re in it for the money. For me, this is not an advanced equation to understand.”

Swedish crime statistics seem to support his argument. In 2011, only two people were convicted of sex trafficking and another 11 for pimping connected to trafficking. (At the same time, 450 men were convicted and fined for buying sex, including a number of foreign tourists). Last year the figures were slightly higher: three convictions for sex trafficking and 32 for the related offence. But 40 women, mostly from Romania, had sufficient confidence in the Swedish criminal justice system to testify against the men exploiting them.

Could the Swedish law work in other countries? Norway and Iceland have brought in laws banning the purchase of sex and the UK has taken tentative steps towards criminalising clients; it’s already a criminal offence to buy sex from anyone under the age of 18 or an adult who’s being exploited by pimps or traffickers. But there have been few convictions, suggesting that British police officers don’t share the robust attitudes of their Swedish counterparts. Haggstrom agrees with Wahlberg that legislation on its own isn’t enough: “You have to have enforcement resources. You have to have police officers who go out and make arrests.”

In the police car, something happens which reveals the full extent of the philosophical shift that has affected men and women in Sweden. In a brightly lit street, Haggstrom points out a couple of Romanian women who work as prostitutes. As I think about them making the journey over the bridge with a total stranger to the desolate car park on Skeppsholmen, Haggstrom turns to me. “Having sex is not a human right,” he says quietly.

Independent on Sunday, 24 March 2013

It’s a giveaway that senior clerics aren’t much interested in lesbians, while presiding over institutions that struggle with the notion of treating women as equals

There are many things to worry about in the modern world, so I try to follow a simple rule: don’t fret about gay sex. I have to say it works for me; I’ve spent many pleasant evenings with gay and lesbian friends without giving a moment’s thought to what they do in bed. In the admittedly unlikely circumstances that I ever find myself giving a pre-enthronement interview, I promise I won’t even mention it. And if the new Archbishop of Canterbury had any sense, he would have avoided the subject last week, instead of sounding like a Private Eye parody of an agonised Anglican cleric.

Justin Welby offered his views on gay sex to the BBC a few hours before he dressed up in floor-length yellow, white and turquoise robes – how camp is that? – and banged on the doors of Canterbury cathedral with a stick. (No one could accuse the Anglican church, or indeed the Vatican, of trying to pass itself off as a cool, modern institution.) “You see gay relationships that are just stunning in the quality of the relationship,” Welby declared, managing to patronise gay couples while continuing to deny them the right to get married.

Does he have a “stunning” relationship with his wife? And who is entitled to judge? I don’t think it’s any of his business who takes advantage of what is more often than not a civil ceremony, and should certainly be open to gay people. Even David Cameron agrees with that, and he’s hardly a radical.

It’s also a bit rich of the Anglican church, which has had its own share of paedophile scandals, to stand in judgement on consenting relationships between adults. They aren’t what religious leaders need to worry about in a society where some men have got away with abusing children for decades, thousands of women and girls are raped each year and domestic violence accounts for around one in six recorded crimes. The conjunction of sex and violence is a significant social problem although it gets much less attention, in clerical circles, than the perennially fascinating subject of what gay men do with each other. Even Scotland’s most senior Catholic, the recently disgraced Cardinal Keith O’Brien – accused last week of having been in a long-term relationship with a priest while he publicly excoriated gay marriage – couldn’t keep off the subject of homosexuality.

It’s a giveaway that senior clerics aren’t much interested in lesbians, while presiding over institutions that struggle with the notion of treating women as equals. The popular press struggles too, going through a mystifying daily ritual of discovering that women have breasts. But the clerical obsession is with male anatomy. That’s no mystery when you look at photographs of Welby’s enthronement, where the queuing Anglican primates look as though they’ve stepped out of a Renaissance painting. It’s my old friend phallocentric discourse! Call me a feminist, but these guys need to get over the (ahem) amazing exploits of the penis.

Independent on Sunday, 17 March 2013

We all believe in a free press, don’t we? But if I’ve learned anything over the course of the Leveson inquiry, it’s that it means different things to different people. Take the former editor of The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, who boasted that it meant doing what he liked and not checking sources. He used his freedom to produce an untrue front-page story which claimed that Liverpool fans urinated on police officers and picked the pockets of dying fellow supporters during the Hillsborough disaster. “The Truth”, MacKenzie called it in a brazen headline.

Another Sun luminary, associate editor Trevor Kavanagh, offered a dire warning after the Prime Minister abruptly withdrew from cross-party talks on press regulation last week. “Without a free press, we will suffer ever more suffocating bureaucracy and more undiscovered corruption in our public life,” he thundered. Could he offer an example? Indeed her could: “Think of the Hillsborough cover-up.” Consistency? How are you spelling that?

Here’s another example of press freedom, courtesy of the Daily Mail. Banner headlines about men falsely accused of rape have created the impression that it’s a common occurrence. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the Director of Public Prosecutions pointed out last week, but the myth gets in the way of successful prosecutions. That’s why third-party complaints are essential in any new scheme of press regulation, and a key Leveson recommendation. They would also allow members of the public to challenge exploitative images of women, such as the Sun‘s notorious front-page picture of Reeva Steenkamp after she was killed by Oscar Pistorius.

The impact of this material appearing in newspapers every day is a serious social issue, but Cameron’s royal charter would allow very few third-party complaints to get to the new regulator. He would leave ethics to right-wing editors who have failed to enforce standards in the industry, allowing the phone-hacking scandal to scar its reputation. What he’s proposing is a regulatory system so weak and industry-friendly that it’s a close relation of the discredited Press Complaints Commission.

There’s apoplexy in some parts of the industry at the notion that anyone else, whether working journalist or victim of intrusion, be involved in a debate about biased reporting, misogyny and attacks on asylum seekers. But if papers want to continue publishing this stuff, why shouldn’t they expect to be challenged, like any other vested interest? Their biggest defender is a weak PM who seems to have forgotten the public interest and devoted himself to watering down Leveson’s quite modest proposals.

We both know how powerful the right-wing press is, and I knew the risk I was taking when I decided to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry. But I believe in a free press that holds the powerful to account, and is not merely a slogan to deflect criticism of  inexcusable behaviour. I hope MPs will bear that in mind when they vote tomorrow night.

Independent on Sunday, 3 March 2013

If someone agrees to an intimate relationship on the basis of lies, can they really be said to have given meaningful consent to sex?

Almost 20 years ago, a woman known as Alison began a relationship with a man she met via an anti-racist organisation in east London. Mark moved in with Alison and even  appeared in family wedding photographs, but strains emerged over the question of children. Alison wanted a baby but Mark didn’t, and for 18 months they saw a  counsellor together. In the spring of 2000, Mark disappeared and Alison began to suspect something was very wrong. Years later, she discovered that he was an undercover police officer who had assumed a false identity to spy on left-wing activists.

Alison’s evidence, which she gave in a private session to the Home Affairs Select Committee last month, has just been published. Her story is almost beyond belief – the Labour MP Bridget Phillipson said she was “stunned” when she heard it – but Alison is one of 11 women who are suing the police for damages. Another witness, “Clare”, told MPs that her partner also disappeared abruptly, and her desperate attempts to find him led to a stunning discovery: he was an undercover officer who had assumed the identity of an eight-year-old boy who had died of leukaemia. Another woman is said to have had a child with an undercover cop without knowing the father’s true identity.

This is a scandal of monumental proportions. It began to emerge two years ago, when a criminal case against six people accused of a conspiracy to sabotage a coal-fired power station was halted because of the involvement of an undercover police officer. Two days ago, the select committee produced a damning interim report condemning the practice of officers etering into sexual relationships under false identities unless they’ve btained “prior authorisation”, which should be granted only in the most exceptional crcumstances”. Some of the MPs’ most scathing remarks are reserved for the practice of “resurrecting” dead children to provide documentation for undercover officers, which they describe as “ghoulish and disrespectful”.

But these cases raise another issue. If someone agrees to an intimate relationship on the basis of lies, can they really be said to have given meaningful consent to sex? Last year, a strange and troubling case came before Guildford crown court in which a 19-year-old woman, Gemma Barker, posed as a boy on Facebook to trick female friends into having sexual relationships with her. She was convicted of sexual assault and fraud, and sentenced to 30 months.

Lawyers say this is a “grey area”, but there are striking parallels between the Barker case and allegations that undercover officers had sex with women who’d been deceived about their true identities. Nor is there any doubt about the impact on the victims. Another woman, “Lisa”, told MPs she was “shocked and devastated” when she discovered the truth about the man she had shared a bed with for six years. “I cared deeply for somebody whose life was intermingled with mine,” she said bleakly, “and that person’s life story is a fiction.”

Independent on Sunday, 24 February 2013

Hang on a minute: I know we’re all guffawing over the behaviour of the jury in the trial of Vicky Pryce, but are there really grounds for assuming that something went badly wrong? Hilarious as some of their questions to the judge appeared to be, it’s possible to come to a very different conclusion, namely that the system actually worked rather well.

In this scenario, which seemed to get the support of the former lord chief justice of England and Wales, Lord Woolf, on Radio 4′s Today programme, the jury’s questions were not the product of startling naivety. They look more like a successful attempt by one or more of the jurors to alert the judge to the fact that the discussion in the jury room was going in alarming directions.

In Latin grammar, the word “num” at the beginning of a sentence indicates that it requires a negative answer. Several of the jury’s questions appeared to fall into this category, inviting a robust response. The wording of one – “Can a juror come to a verdict based on a reason that was not presented in court and has no facts or evidence to support it?” – almost demands that Mr Justice Sweeney answer “No”, if not dismiss the jury on the spot.

Another of the questions offered the biggest clue to what may have happened during the jury’s secret discussions. When jurors are selected, there’s a tacit assumption that they’re acting on behalf of the state. English law is secular and Ms Pryce, whose trial starts again tomorrow, isn’t accused of an offence laid down in the Bible or the Koran. She’s accused of the common law offence of perverting the course of justice, which she denies on the unusual ground of marital coercion.

So why did the jury ask whether “religious conviction” was a reason for a wife to feel that she had no other choice but to obey her husband? The judge’s response was brusque and unequivocal: “This is not, with respect, a question about this case at all.” He’s right, and a reasonable inference is that one or more of the jurors had strong religious convictions which they intended to use when reaching a verdict.

This is supported by a report in the Daily Mail, which revealed that the jury rose 30 minutes early on two occasions because a juror had to keep a “religious observance”. And while it doesn’t matter a jot if most of the jury were of Afro-Caribbean or Asian origin, as the paper also claimed, it does matter if some jurors were judging the case not on the facts and the law, but through the prism of personal religious conviction.

If I do something wrong, I want – and, indeed, I have a right – to be judged according to secular law. If jurors are regularly bringing religion into the jury room, I’d be very worried indeed, and there’s clearly a case for further research in this area. But in this instance, at least, it looks as if someone blew the whistle – and that strikes me as a vindication of the system.

The Independent, Saturday 23 February 2013

Galloway has ended up representing the nearest thing Britain has to a religious party

Good news for investors in George Galloway plc: after an anxious few months, the CEO has moved to protect the embattled brand. Attempting to draw a line under last summer’s unwise foray into gender politics - clearly, one has to say, not the company’s area of expertise – the brand is returning to familiar territory with an all-out attack on Israel.

The CEO may not know much about rape but he’s learned, it seems, a trick or two from Iran’s crowd-pleasing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The lesson couldn’t be simpler: when things are going badly, deny Israel’s right to exist. The opportunity presented itself at an Oxford University debate this week when the Respect MP was scheduled to speak in favour of a motion calling on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank. His opponent, a third-year student called Eylon Aslan-Levy, had just begun to speak when Galloway interrupted him.

“Are you an Israeli?” he demanded. When the student confirmed that he was, Galloway responded that he didn’t debate with Israelis. “I’ve been misled, sorry,” he declared and walked out. It was a typical Galloway performance, characterising himself as the victim of what was actually very bad manners on his part. Didn’t he ask in advance who else was taking part? Galloway’s behaviour has caused outrage in some quarters and I have no quarrel with that, even though I’m not a fan of the current Israeli government or its policies. But the important thing to understand about Galloway is that it’s years since he spoke for a broad range of people on the left.

Journalists tend to have a soft spot for him – he provides good copy, if nothing else – but he was thrown out of the Labour Party a long time ago, and he’s alienated those of us who opposed the Iraq war but still believe the last Labour government did some good things. Even so, Galloway’s brand of populism found admirers who managed to stomach his long-ago interview with Saddam Hussein and his more recent defence of the Holocaust- denying Ahmadinejad: “The truth is Ahmadinejad is not an extremist. There are people in Iran who think he is far too moderate, far too centrist.” Galloway has denied that Iran executes gay men just for being gay, causing fury among gay activists, but until recently his rows tended to be one-offs and with specific interest  groups.

The difference in the past few months is that Galloway has now taken on half the human race. It may be that his stunning by-election victory in March last year blunted
his political antennae, but it wasn’t the smartest move, in the midst of a lively revival of feminism, to express downright idiotic and offensive views on rape. The MP’s recent pronouncements have led significant numbers of people to regard him as a preening buffoon with rebarbative attitudes towards gender. Much-married George has a problem with women, in other words, and that’s where we need to look when thinking about the origins of this latest brouhaha.

Connoisseurs of bad theatre might wish to re-run the video podcast from last August in which the MP, shirtsleeves rolled up and thumping the table like a revivalist preacher, denounces the women who’ve accused Julian Assange of sexual assault and rape. With a curious oval disc moving behind his head (it looks like a poorly attached halo but is more likely part of a chair), Galloway lays down the law: “Even taken at its worst, if  the allegations made by these two women were true, 100 per cent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don’t constitute rape, at least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it. And somebody has to say this.”

It’s vintage Galloway, positioning himself as the iconoclast who’s prepared to say aloud what everyone else is only thinking. But on this occasion, many of us were actually thinking that the MP had himself failed to understand the law – or, to put it succinctly “what a prat”. His claim in the same podcast that “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion” was guaranteed to offend half the population, many of whom said so on Twitter, and it didn’t endear him to female members of his own party. Respect’s leader, Salma Yaqoob, condemned his views on rape and resigned her post a month later. Bradford’s first Muslim lord mayor, the Labour councillor Naveeda Ikram, said that women were “outraged” and pointed out that “Muslim women, in particular, played a large role in electing Mr Galloway for Bradford West”.

It was a pretty spectacular miscalculation, but not one that came as a surprise to those of us who have followed his career. Galloway has pretty standard Catholic views on abortion, talking about women who “kill their children unborn”, even if they sit rather oddly with his boast about having “carnal knowledge” with more than one woman on a trip to Greece in the 1980s. Nor is it surprising that he’s ended up representing the nearest thing Britain has to a religious party, asking voters during the by-election campaign to think about how they would justify their choice of candidate on Judgement Day.

Such tactics don’t play well in largely secular Britain, but Galloway has an even bigger problem. When she resigned as the party’s leader, Yaqoob said she had always admired Galloway’s “anti-imperialist stances”. But she also said that having to choose between that and standing up for the rights of women was “a false choice”. Many Muslim women don’t like patriarchy, any more than women on the secular left. Rewind to this week: ditch patriarchal attitudes or stage a diversion over Israel? No contest, son, as Galloway himself might say.

Independent on Sunday, 17 February 2013

Earlier this month, a 17-year-old girl died in hospital after being brutally gang-raped in South Africa. The details are too horrible to repeat and the murder sparked public protests, even if it received less attention outside the country than the recent gang rape of a student in India. South Africa has one of the highest rates of rape in the world, with almost 150 cases reported to the police every day and many more unreported. It also had the highest rate of intimate femicide – murders of women by their partners – according to a 1999 study.

I didn’t hear this context mentioned on Thursday when it was reported that a woman had been shot dead at the home of the South African Paralympian, Oscar Pistorius. Radio 4′s Today programme suggested that Pistorius had killed his girlfriend after mistaking her for an intruder, a theme that was taken up elsewhere. I listened with astonishment as broadcasters advanced what is almost certain to be Pistorius’s defence, citing the fear of crime which leads the wealthy in South Africa to live on estates with armed guards. The initial coverage was so sympathetic that it seemed to come as a shock when Pistorius was charged with murder later in the morning, prompting a screeching U-turn and the discovery of a “darker” side to his character.

Pistorius is entitled to a fair trial. But Reeva Steenkamp has not been served well by the initial rush to assume that her death was the result of a dreadful accident. It speaks volumes about the reluctance of the media to acknowledge the existence of widespread domestic violence in South Africa, a point certainly not lost on the police. Brigadier Denise Beukes said officers were “very surprised” by the accidental-shooting theory, and revealed that there had been previous incidents of a “domestic nature” at the property. On Friday, Pistorius was remanded in custody, charged with the more serious offence of premeditated murder.

A few days earlier, it was revealed that a British violinist, Frances Andrade, had killed herself during the trial of her former music teacher. Michael Brewer was found guilty of five counts of indecently assaulting Ms Andrade when she was a pupil at a music school in Manchester. Her family said she was traumatised by her experience in the witness box, where Brewer’s barrister accused her of being a liar and a fantasist. Such tactics are used to discredit complainants in trials, encouraging the myth that malicious accusations of rape are common. They aren’t, and the disbelief of alleged victims sits uncomfortably with lenient attitudes to men who may have perpetrated sexual or domestic violence.

There are other ways of demeaning victims. Within 24 hours of Ms Steenkamp’s death, she was on the front page of The Sun in a tiny bikini. All it lacked was a page 3 caption: “Stunning Reeva will have less time for modelling in future, being dead”. Well done to the British popular press for its shiny new invention, murder trial porn.

Independent on Sunday, 10 February 20

Thirteen years ago, a trial in Yorkshire revealed that hundreds of tons of poultry declared unfit for human consumption had entered the food chain. For several years, five men had operated a nationwide scam, selling chicken and turkey destined for pet food to butchers’ shops, restaurants and supermarkets. Stomach-churning details emerged of how they’d washed the meat to get rid of mould and faeces, and soaked it in brine to remove the stench. The judge criticised the gang for targeting discount supermarkets serving poorer consumers who couldn’t afford more expensive cuts of meat.

This scam posed a much greater risk to human health than anything that’s emerged so far in the horse DNA scandal which has caused embarrassment to one household name – Tesco, Lidl, Iceland, Aldi – after another. Food scandals sound like something from the Victorian era, when so much rubbish was added to bread, beer and coffee that the first Food Adulteration Act had to be passed in 1860; these days, there’s a mass of regulations to make sure shoppers can trust what it says on the packet – or that’s what most people seem to have imagined until Ireland’s Food Standards Agency triggered a stream of revelations about traces of horse in popular foodstuffs.

Two days ago, Findus was the latest company to be dragged into the scandal, saying it was withdrawing its beef lasagne after some products were found to be 100 per cent horse. The thought of eating horse may make some queasy but so far no one’s fallen ill from it, although Labour’s Shadow Environment Secretary, Mary Creagh, has asked if animal painkillers could have entered the human food chain. Even so, there’s no escaping a simple conclusion: class is at the heart of what’s gone wrong (again) with the food industry.

For years, supermarkets have taken out huge ads targeting poorer customers, and creating wildly unrealistic expectations about the price of food. Who really believes it’s reasonable to pay £1 for eight burgers, one of the lines withdrawn by Tesco after being found to contain up to 29 per cent horse meat? Two things have come together here: the relentless pressure supermarkets place on suppliers, who have to produce food that can be sold at ridiculously low prices, and the willing credulity of consumers who don’t have much money. Naturally they want to believe the cheap-food illusion they’re offered every day, without giving much thought to how it’s achieved.

Now the UK Food Standards Agency has told the industry to carry out tests for the presence of horse meat in all processed beef products. It believes two of the cases are linked to suppliers in Ireland and France, and says the evidence points to “either gross negligence or deliberate contamination in the food chain”, which is why the police are now involved. That’s bad news for the food industry, which faces a loss of public trust. But it’s good news in terms of human and animal health, as the true cost of low prices is exposed.

Material on this site (c) Joan Smith 2010-2013