A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain. – Oscar Wilde
I’ve discussed the “Swedish Model” (also called the “Nordic Model”) of prohibition several times before, most completely in my column of October 14th, and in my column of November 4th I predicted that more and more prohibitionists would shift to the Swedish rhetoric in order to capitalize on “human trafficking” hysteria, deflect arguments based on women’s right to control our own bodies and win the support of fence-sitters and even some misguided whores. Well, I didn’t have to wait long for evidence; on November 8th the Police Department of Montgomery County, Maryland (suburban Washington, DC) posted the following manifesto on its website. It goes far beyond the usual police distortions, omissions and blatant lies; pay close attention to the Nordic Model subtext which permeates the document and (by its presence on an official website) signals a shift in Maryland’s policy to this boldly misogynistic rhetoric attempting to disguise itself as concern for prostitutes.
The detectives in the Vice and Intelligence Section of the Special Investigations Division of the Montgomery County Police Department want to advise the public of initiatives they have enacted to address the growing concern of human trafficking.
The crime of human trafficking/prostitution may be thought to be a victimless and voluntary crime. That notion is frequently portrayed in films and television shows but those story lines have very little to do with reality. Although it is true that the demand side of the crime is voluntary, the provider side is often not voluntary. The provider may not be a lone entity. The provider can be exploited for money and often coerced through violent means by individuals, and that may go unnoticed by the public and law enforcement. Frequently faceless corporations and persons that utilize the unregulated internet to openly promote illegal activities for a price benefit financially from this crime and fail to take any responsibility for it.
The public may not be as aware of the crime of human trafficking because it is generally hidden from public view. The advertisement, recruitment, and exploitation of victims occur on a variety of internet sites. Some internet sites have been created with the sole purpose of promoting the crime of human trafficking, but internet social sites are also commonly used to recruit victims into human trafficking.
The Montgomery County Police Department is committed to addressing the true benefactors of human trafficking and making them accountable for their illegal activities. The following initiatives have been developed over the past year to address the use of the internet by individuals to promote and financially benefit from human trafficking:
1. The Vice Section has effectively shut down escort websites that blatantly advertise activities that are illegal in Maryland. No other crime is so openly confessed to in any forum as the crime of human trafficking. The Vice Section is using a variety of investigative techniques to make web hosts accountable for their complicity in the advertising of human trafficking. Consequently, Web Hosts are eliminating the internet site from their servers. This tactic has eliminated the internet sites for TGND Talent, Diamond Escorts, and Desirable Companions. Sadly, these sites are now moving to servers outside the USA to continue their illegal activities.
2. The Vice Section has effectively infiltrated the Erotic Review website and identified key members of the group. The Erotic Review is a website where members openly confess to illegal activities. The website’s members rate women’s appearance, sexual performance, etc. while providing information on contact numbers, organized crime outfits, and local police activities.
3. The Vice Section through plea agreements is now operating established and once legitimate escort internet sites where “johns” are currently providing names, places of employment, and contact numbers as if they are communicating with the now defunct service. These contacts are being utilized to arrange “john stings” and identify individuals on the demand side of human trafficking.
4. The Montgomery County Police Department has established a spread sheet that identifies all individuals advertising and participating in human trafficking in the jurisdiction of Montgomery County. This spreadsheet identifies participants in human trafficking by name, alias, escort service, telephone number, etc. The primary internet advertisers of human trafficking (EROS and Backpage) are being officially notified that these specific individuals are utilizing their site to participate in illegal activities. The Vice Section is also requesting that Backpage and EROS discontinue the future advertisement of these individuals or be prepared to be found complicit in the crime of human trafficking.
5. The official notification to EROS and Backpage that probable cause exists that specific services and individuals have been found to be involved in human trafficking/prostitution and are utilizing their site to promote their illegal activities will eliminate their thinly veiled defense that they are not actively participating in prostitution. This official notification will place these sites into the position of possible civil and criminal ramifications for failure to refuse these individuals advertising space on the sites.
6. The Vice Section has initiated outreach to individuals working in the sex trade. The goal of this outreach program is to provide workers in the sex trade industry a safe place to report violence against them. This outreach has resulted in one arrest warrant for robbery and a second report that should result in a warrant for violence committed against a sex worker.
The trafficked individuals are the face of the business and consequently the most exposed and accountable to law enforcement and the judiciary. The true profiteers of human trafficking have learned to make large profits while allowing others to take all the risk. These legal investigative tactics are bringing vice investigations into the 21st century and making everyone involved in the organized crime of human trafficking accountable for their actions.
As you can see, the post is nothing like the usual “we’re gonna bust them dirty whores” police strutting; it is as straightforward a piece of Nordic Model propaganda as I have ever seen, recast in the form of a typical police threat-announcement. The second paragraph starts with a series of outright lies straight out of the standard propaganda pamphlet (including a total reversal of the truth by claiming that whore-positive media portrayals are false). Then the rampant word-substitutions begin; throughout the document Nordic Model words and phrases are substituted for objective terminology as though by use of a word processor “search and replace” function. Prostitution is called “human trafficking”, hookers are called “victims” and “trafficked individuals”, escort services are called “organized crime outfits”, clients are called “the demand side of human trafficking”, stage names are called “aliases”, and escort advertising sites are said to be “complicit in the crime of human trafficking”. Finally, section 6 and the concluding paragraph are nothing but a gingerbread house; by pretending to be concerned for our welfare, these ogres wish to lure naïve young girls in so as to pump them for information, use them as bait and thus make them pariahs in their trade, unable to earn a living as they choose and thereby forced into whatever menial labor they can find from such human traffickers as Wal-Mart and McDonald’s.
Though the posturing and threats contained in sections 4 and 5 are wholly impotent because neither Backpage nor Eros are domiciled in Maryland (another reason tyrants all over the world hate the internet), their threats to infiltrate websites and bust clients in Maryland are not, and the chilling effect on Washington area escorts’ business will not be inconsiderable. This is, of course, the whole Swedish strategy: Concentrate on busting as many men as possible so as to scare the rest and decimate prostitutes’ business, thereby forcing many of those without an established client base out of the profession without having to arrest a single one and thereby demonstrating their outrageous sexism. The Montgomery County Police Department’s unethical behavior doesn’t stop with lies and threats, either; on November 5th they resorted to spamming by attempting to use the Washington, DC site of Backpage itself to threaten potential clients! The spam was quickly flagged as inappropriate content and removed by Backpage administration, but a computer-savvy escort was able to retrieve the posting from her cache and post it on an escort information board. Note that the original contained the legal names of the men whose TER handles appear below, but since unlike the police I understand the concepts of “ethics” and “privacy rights” I have replaced the names with asterisks.
Montgomery County Police Seeking Information – 99
posted: November 5, 2010, 12:39 PM
The Montgomery County, Department of Police, Vice Section, is tasked with investigating those involved in Human Trafficking and Prostitution. In doing so, the Vice Section has obtained information through informants and other investigative means on individuals that have frequented an internet site known as www.theeroticreview.com (TER), Date Check, Preferred 411 and Back Channel. The Vice Section has compiled a list of individuals, along with email addresses, home and work phone numbers, home and business addresses and the handles associated with these sites. In an effort to further our investigation the Vice Section is seeking the assistance of others who have information on the following individuals on TER:
the-mailman – *************
mpduration – *************
bertlancaster – *************
Nuvela Man – *************
Geojohn – *************
Bill Nilla – *************
Tophervette – *************
Biggered – *************Please contact the Vice Section at [their email address] with any information on these individuals.
Poster’s age: 99
As much as I’ve said and will continue to say about the evil, misogyny and tyranny inherent in the “Swedish Model”, it cannot hope to compare with the knowledge of an anthropologist specializing in sex work. I thereby leave you with this link to an essay on the moral bankruptcy of prohibitionists, which appeared on The Naked Anthropologist, the blog of Laura Agustín (author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry) on the same day as the Montgomery County announcement was published.
We fought against totalitarianism/authoritarianism during WW2 and yet we now seem to be moving in that very same direction. Always with the best of intentions, of course!
Sadly, aging cultures nearly always move toward totalitarianism as the desire for “safety” replaces that for freedom. And now that propaganda has been raised to a fine art, it’s just going to get steadily worse until the revolution comes. 🙁
Laura’s website appears to be down, Maggie.
It seems to be a problem with her server; the link was working when I posted it this morning but it isn’t now, nor is the link from which I originally accessed it on the SWOP Las Vegas site. Until it’s fixed, you can read the article here though obviously you can’t see the comments.
It’s back up now, Susan. 🙂
Well, then it should be a simple matter to get arrest warrants, round ’em all up, prosecute ’em, and put an end to that nasty business, right?
Don’t be silly. How can they be advertising when you’ve rounded their asses up and thrown ’em in the slammer?
Wait a sec. Probable cause? Don’t you, like, need something more than speculation, like maybe a conviction, before you go making public assertions about someone’s guilt? Or are you planning to just skip that annoying step? Oops. I forgot. When it’s a sex crime, guilt is automatically assumed on the basis of an accusation from a credible source like the cops (LMAO!).
By safe, you mean they won’t be arrested or otherwise forced to give up their livelihood when they report that some john got violent? Excellent! I’m glad to hear that selling sex is no longer a crime there. Now all you have to do is legalize the buying of sex and your outreach program might actually be something other than a scam to con women into testifying under the threat of making their lives a living hell if they don’t.
I could go on and on, but dinner has just arrived…
We get “The crime of human trafficking/prostitution” and after that we hardly find the word “prostitution” used at all. It’s obvious that we are supposed to relegate “prostitution” as an old-fashioned term and embrace “human trafficking” as the newer, more-accurate term. That any prostitute could be anything other than a trafficked victim is something we are supposed to fail to consider.
But that won’t work. The general public is quite willing to believe that many prostitutes are victims and ache to do something else, anything else. Many will even believe that MOST prostitutes are exactly that. But only prohibitionist ideologues will believe that EVERY prostitute fits that mold, and they probably don’t really believe it.
I don’t think most of the public does believe it any more, though. Certainly a sizable minority do, but I think most people have come to realize that fighting prostitution is a failed experiment and an outrageous waste of public funds in addition to just being wrong. And I think one of the reasons the anti-whore rhetoric has become so aggressive in recent years is that the neofeminists, politicians and cops want everyone to go back to sleep on it; the neofeminists don’t want us loose, the politicians want to keep us scared and the cops want to keep being able to rape us without consequences. 🙁
Well that’s true. Anti-black statements were all over the place the more inevitable voting rights looked, and there was a lot of open sexism just before (and right after) ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The very fact that LE is having to switch from “dirty nasty whores” to “poor trafficked victims” is proof that the public sees you differently than we used to.
Polls depending on how they are asks shows most do not want to waste police and court resources going after in private consenting adult sexworkers – legal with no big issues in most of the rest of the world.
We could have gotten perhaps something meaningful done in San Fran and Berkeley except SWOP destroyed any chance of progress by insisting the public accept public nuisance street hookers which when included will guarantee no progress.
But they won’t give up that bone although its only legal in one country with a huge uproar and many European experiments with zones etc have been failures.
If the issue was in private consenting adults vs just “prostitution” in referendums etc they just may pass in many cities. But never if they include street hookers.
Streetwalkers (**sigh**) are a big bone of contention among hookers. Some are willing to throw them under the bus to save the rest of us, others (like SWOP) insist on the exact opposite, and most fall somewhere in the middle. For myself, I say that the actual act of prostitution itself must be decriminalized if we don’t want a regulatory nightmare; however, there is no reason a city can’t establish zoning restrictions and nuisance advertising laws.
Here’s an analogy: Selling cookies is not illegal; a housewife can even do it from her home without any kind of permit. But if she starts putting up big signs in her neighborhood or approaching passing cars, she becomes a nuisance. And if she wants to open a big bakery with lots of bakers and trucks coming in and out, the city has the right to insist on permits and zoning restrictions.
In other words, were I the dictatrix I would unilaterally decriminalize prostitution, but allow the police to ticket (not arrest) streetwalkers who were causing a public nuisance. After all, we would allow them to do the same thing to a noisy street vendor, shoe-shine boy or political activist. The important thing is that it is the DISTURBANCE which constitutes the offence, not the prostitution.
That’s what I think, too. I think anti-prostitution activists became scared when attitudes toward prostitution started relaxing, so they decided to redefine it in a way that would more easily garner public support for it’s universal eradication.
When you look closely at the tactics they have adopted, it’s as if they hired a marketing group to cook up sales pitch and publicity program. The fact that nearly all prohibitionist groups seem to propagate the exact same definitions, statistics, and action plan makes them sound like they are all part of one homogeneous organization that is simply broken up into numerous smaller NGOs as a way to secure donations and funding.
Right on, Dave and Sailor; I’ve noticed the same things as you have, which is why I predicted the shift to Nordic Model rhetoric (which will spread all over the Northeast in the next few years). If you look at the campaign for recriminalization in Rhode Island last year, you’ll find a lot of the propaganda was straight out of that book. When you think about it, the Nordic Model is perfect for police administration; it still allows them a group to victimize without having to worry about those nasty old charges of sexism they’ve been racking up lately.
But the most telling statement is this whole document is “The crime of human trafficking/prostitution may be thought to be a victimless and voluntary crime. That notion is frequently portrayed in films and television shows but those story lines have very little to do with reality.” Because it is a direct reversal of the truth on the same rhetorical level as a child’s “No I’m not, you are,” it constitutes a tacit acknowledgement of the weakness of their position in the public eye.
Isn’t the Swedish Model where selling sex is legal and only buying sex is illegal?
Yes, that’s the one. It’s based on the outrageously sexist premise that no woman is competent to make sexual decisions and therefore cannot be held liable for prostitution, whereas all men are competent and therefore can. Just as a 14-year-old seductress cannot be arrested but her 18-year-old lover can, so under the “Swedish Model” no prostitute can be arrested but any male client can be.
I can only say one thing good about this notion: It demonstrates conclusively that the self-proclaimed “feminists” who support it are no such thing. They’re not interested in achieving legal equality for women but rather in persecuting men for being sexual. 🙁
It really is an effort to extend the concept of statutory rape to adult women, isn’t it? The whole she doesn’t have what it takes to make this decision herself, so The Law will make it for her rationale.
That’s fine for children, even younger teenagers (especially in a culture that spends federal tax dollars to deliberately dumb them down when it comes to sex). But extending it to adult women suggests that women are always children, who must always be looked after and not allowed to decide for themselves.
And I just can’t accept that.
That’s precisely what it is. Mandatory domestic violence prosecution laws are based on exactly the same logic, that women are not competent to decide for themselves whether to participate in male-female interactions which neofeminists are repulsed by.
‘No crime is so openly confessed to in any forum as the crime of human trafficking.’
I guess they’ve never seen the marijuana websites.
There’s also the matter that, if fanatics are allowed to define “crime” after the fact, they can make nearly any activity a “crime” which is “openly confessed to”.
At least some lawmakers are trying to decriminalize marijuana.
That isn’t the link I wanted to link to, but it’ll do. Man, I shouldn’t do this so soon after getting out of bed.
The Swedish model – in so far as it attacks men – is based on reworking the
whore-madonna dichotomy into what could be called a client-nonclient dichotomy.
All men are divided into one of the two groups; either they can be classed as “good men” or they are denounced as “practitioners of violence against women”. The so-called good men must have their virtue protected and the bad men must be punished.
Swedish journalist Ann-Charlott Altstadt is a good example of this view; she seems to be of the opinion that sacrificing thousands of people is worthwhile if it makes it less likely for her son to visit a brothel.
You speak of misoginy but oddly not of misandry.
Isn’t targeting *men* and busting as many of them possible plain misandry ? Sexism against men in other words.
I agree the treatment of sex workers is also sexist but isn’t the whole abolitionist project a way to control *men*’s sexuality by stigmatising and criminalising clients ?
In this abolitionist project, sex workers have to disappear because radical feminist cannot accept the service they offer to men – sexual service.
As sexual service is of great value to men, radical feminists want it to disappear. And sex workers are collateral victims of this project. Men are the main target. That’s why in the nordic model prostitutes are fully decriminalized. They’re collateral damage that one tries to minimize (I agree completely unsuccessully).
But the whole project is about controling men’s sexuality, i.e. threatening men so as they don’t buy sexual services anymore, and instead have more pressure to “seduce” women – listen to their demands and needs.
Sexuality is a source of power. Controling one gender’s sexuality increases the power of the other gender.
That is what abolitionism is all about. The power of sex. Less freedom for men translating mechanically into more power for women (prostitutes not included of course).
It may be difficult for a feminist to utter these words. Here men are victims, too.
No offense, Alain, but you’re obviously unfamiliar with my blog if you think I don’t write about misandry. There are 1130 posts here as of today, so it’s a bit silly to complain that I didn’t address one particular issue in ONE of them.
I don’t think that prostitutes are collateral damage. Collateral damage is when you break things you didn’t mean to break and kill people you didn’t mean to kill.
I think prostitutes are targets, but those attacking seem more “feminist” if they pretend otherwise. But yes, they consider hitting men to be even more important than hitting prostitutes.
“Something rotten”, indeed. For some weird reason, Sweden has a reputation for being liberal about sexuality — perhaps because of their saunas.
However I have seen a very much darker and more twisted perspective on Sweden’s approach to sexuality … by a Swedish author: Stieg Larsson, who wrote “The Millennium Trilogy.” The title of its first book was translated as, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”
However his original title is far more specific and far more pointed: “Men Who Hate Women.” Because that is really what that book is about.
I have just read Book #2 in that trilogy. Though he didn’t title it as such, it could be called, “More Men Who Hate Women.” The contempt that many Swedish men have for women, in these books, is palpable. And their contempt readily translates into physical violence, to which they feel they are completely entitled to visit upon any woman they themselves choose.
The real problem, in these books, is that the women who face this violence have almost no recourse in terms of “respectable” social avenues. The reason why “The Girl” is so unusual is that she is ready and able to visit upon these men the very things that they think they have a right to visit upon women. Few of these men finish the book alive. Just as few of their female victims do.
In reading about Larsson, I learned that he held the view that this Swedish-male attitude toward women is commonplace. It is unspoken, because it’s not respectable to talk of such things openly. But, he held, those who act on that attitude get very little genuine pushback from Swedish authorities.
“Something is rotten in Sweden,” indeed.
[…] (and setting aside questions of whether law enforcement could overcome decades or centuries of entrenched prejudices re: sex workers), the “johns” might tend to be the people who know that what they are doing is illegal, […]
[…] trend is best exemplified by the global resonance of the “Swedish model” – a policymaking framework aiming to reduce the demand for prostitution by decriminalizing sex […]