(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
From 1. January, it will be prohibited to buy sexual services in Norway and the rest of the world for Norwegian citizens.
The road to criminalization has been long. As early as 1982, there was talk of amending the Penal Code of 1902 to punish the purchase of sexual intercourse. But it was not until Sweden's ban in 1999 that the debate gained new momentum. And when in the 2000s there were more visible prostitutes, and especially from Nigeria, on Karl Johans gate – just outside the premises of the country's politicians and media people – the race was in many ways presented to the Ministry of Justice's ban in April and the Storting's trade ban now in November.
Fafo researcher Marianne Tveit formulated it quite precisely in Ny Tid last week, when she asks when asked why it was banned now: "In the past, the arguments have been feminist, that prostitution is violence against women, but after the Nigerian prostitutes became visible in the street scene, the discussion has revolved more around human trafficking. "
And this is a very debatable twist of the debate: From the issue of women's exploitation, the debate on prostitution has also become a matter of restricting the immigration of African women. And thus it has been easier to get a ban. As if prostitution comes from Nigeria or Eastern Europe. As if Norwegian women and men do not prostitute themselves, even though they know the capital codes so well that they know not to go up and down the country's main street. The so-called invisible prostitution, in the back alleys and in the indoor market, is also far greater than the visible which the politicians and the public can provoke. But what you do not see does not provoke.
Even the Justice Committee in the Storting has just highlighted the most visible prostitutes in its position: “The Committee points out that in recent years there has been a strong influx of women from Nigeria in the area of street prostitution in Oslo. For the police, it is absolutely necessary to clarify the extent to which Nigerian prostitutes are victims of human trafficking. ”
There is still little information about the extent of so-called human trafficking in the Norwegian prostitution debate. Despite the fact that the Ministry of Justice already in February 2003 launched Norway's first action plan against trafficking in women and children. In the summer of 2005, the government launched a new action plan for 2005-2008, in which the Ministry of Children and Equality's campaign against human trafficking is one of the measures in this action plan. With the headline "Buying sex can be a slave trade – Do you buy sex?" The government's intention has been to address potential buyers of sexual services, in order to "point out the connection between the purchase of sex and human trafficking".
The government has also created the website stopmanseskehandel.no to stop prostitution. But again, we see how the authorities turn the debate over to something other than exploiting the bodies of others. Norwegian men, an estimated 13 percent of them have used prostitutes, are not encouraged to stop prostitution, but rather human trafficking. And it's often something else. And what about buying sex from Norwegian women who have been here all the time, who dominate the domestic market and who are not part of any foreign human trafficking? No, nothing is said or questioned.
Thus, the campaigns have not been based on global feminist principles, but rather on the protection of national boundary values. Norwegian men have thus not been given important and sustained information that it is somewhat fundamental to wrong to buy women's body.
The basic problem is not supply, but demand – that is, the overly widespread attitude among ordinary Norwegian men that it is okay to buy and exploit women. Had the demand for African prostitutes not been widespread among Norwegian men, Nigerian women would not be on the main street either. So here lies the main problem: The lack of understanding that the female body is not for sale.
Despite the trendy government campaigns, the skewed media production and the sometimes unclear political undercurrents, there is still hope that the new law can be a step forward. It still depends on how the law is understood and enforced. And it depends on how Norwegian men are trained to think about buying women's bodies, regardless of whether it has something to do with human trafficking or not. A start could be spending the state money on an attitude campaign, among young and adult men, that does not distinguish between domestic and foreign prostitutes.