GiliGold/VAD_KnessetCorpus huggingface dataset:
אורית זוארץ: אם אני הייתי גבר הייתי מאוד נפגעת אם ההתייחסות אליי היתה התייחסות כאל יצור חייתי שאין לו שליטה בצרכים.
אורית זוארץ: כשמעלים טענות נגד הצעת החוק, אחת הטענות היא שאם לא ניצור לגיטימציה לזנות ולא נמסד את הזנות יהיו כאן מקרים של אונס.
אורית זוארץ: זה מן איום שמרחף מעל ראשינו ואני חושבת שאנחנו צריכים וצריכות להפוך את זה למאבק החברתי הראוי.
אורית זוארץ: זה לא מאבק הנשים בתוך המערכת או בתוך החברה הנשית, אלא זה מאבק חברתי למיגור התופעה של ניצול אוכלוסיות חלשות ותשלום של כספים כדי להשתמש בכוח הזה, בכוח הכסף, כדי לשלוט באחר.
אורית זוארץ: ברשותכם אני אעביר את רשות הדיבור לגב' עידית הראל-שמש, דוברת מכון תודעה לחקר תופעת הזנות, להציג את הגב' גונילה אקברג.
אורית זוארץ: הגב' אקברג תדבר באנגלית ויש לכולם תרגום על השולחן.
עידית הראל-שמש: יושבת ראש הוועדה, חברת הכנסת אורית זוארץ, מכובדיי כולם.
עידית הראל-שמש: עמותת מכון תודעה, לאה גרינפטר גולד, מיכל הורוביץ ואנוכי מברכות על ההזדמנות שניתנה לנו ליזום ולארגן את השתתפותה של חברתנו גונילה אקברג בוועדת המשנה למאבק בסחר בנשים.
עידית הראל-שמש: גב' גונילה אקברג היא עורכת דין שבדית קנדית ומומחית בין לאומית לנושאי זכויות אדם של נשים וילדות.
עידית הראל-שמש: במשך שש שנים שימשה כיועצת מומחית של הממשלה השבדית לנושאים של סחר בבני אדם והיתה אחראית על פיתוח המדיניות הציבורית והחקיקתית בנושא זה.
עידית הראל-שמש: גב' גונילה אקברג היא מרצה וסופרת מוערכת, מוזמנת לעתים קרובות כמומחית בנושאים של זכויות אדם של נשים ונערות, אלימות כנגד נשים וסחר בבני אדם, על ידי גופים בינלאומיים, גופי ממשל וארגונים לא ממשלתיים במדינות רבות בעולם.
עידית הראל-שמש: אנו מקוות שביקורה זה של גונילה בארץ ובוועדה זו יקדם את המגמה המתגבשת לקראת החלת החוק לאיסור צריכת זנות וטיפול בקהילה.
עידית הראל-שמש: שבדיה, שסללה את הדרך, ובעקבותיה הולכות מדינות נוספות, היתה הראשונה שאמרה 'עד כאן', זנות היא ניצול, דיכוי והשפלה, זנות היא אלימות ואלימות היא מחוץ לחוק.
עידית הראל-שמש: בהנחה שכבר עברנו שלב והבנו שאין בחירה בזנות ושלזנות מידרדרים כתוצאה מנסיבות חיים קשות, אנו חייבים לעבור לשלב הבא ולעצור את הביקוש.
עידית הראל-שמש: כל הפעילות הברוכה למניעה, שיקום ואכיפה תרד לטמיון אם לא ייעצר הביקוש.
עידית הראל-שמש: הגיע הזמן להאיר באור גדול את אחריותו של הלקוח לקיומה של תופעת הזנות.
עידית הראל-שמש: למי שטוען כי הציבור אינו בשל לחוק שכזה, יש לומר - האם לפני כל חוק שנחקק מחכים שהציבור יבשיל ויתכונן לקבל את החוק?
עידית הראל-שמש: כמה נשים, גברים, נערים, נערות וטרנסיות יצטרפו למעגל הזנות עד שתגיע ההבשלה המיוחלת?
עידית הראל-שמש: למי שטוען כי רק לאחר 30 שנה של הסברה החלה שבדיה בפעילותה ליישום החוק נשמע היום כי לא כך הדבר וכי שני התהליכים קרו במקביל מאחר ולחוק השפעה מחנכת.
עידית הראל-שמש: למי שחושש שנשים בזנות תיפגענה ושהזנות תרד למחתרת, הרי שגם כאן נשמע שלא כך קרה.
עידית הראל-שמש: חקיקת החוק לאיסור צריכת זנות וטיפול בקהילה תביא למהפכה בקידום מעמד האישה ובהגנה על זכויות אדם וחשוב מכל, תגן על אלפים רבים ואולי עשרות אלפים של נשים, גברים וטרנסיות שמושפלים, נאנסים, נשדדים, מוכים, מנוצלים, נאכלים מהסמים ולעתים נרצחים כתוצאה מחייהם בזנות.
עידית הראל-שמש: תודה.
אורית זוארץ: תודה רבה לך, גב' הראל, ואני אעביר את רשות הדיבור לגב' גונילה אקברג.
Gunilla Ekberg: Good morning, and thank you for inviting me, and thank you for being so many here.
Gunilla Ekberg: I'm delighted to get the opportunity to actually come to the Knesset and talk to you in this very important almost watershed in how you think about prostitution in Israel.
Gunilla Ekberg: I've been given about 15-20 minutes.
Gunilla Ekberg: I'm going to do an overview of the history how we got the law, what the law is all about, and also I'm going to talk about the results of the inquiry into the effects of the law that presented its report a year ago, on the 2nd of July, 2010.
Gunilla Ekberg: I think it's important to say that this is a law that Sweden was the first country in the world to implement.
Gunilla Ekberg: And of course because we were first, and the discussion focusing on the men who buy women, men, boys and girls for prostitution purposes, had not been lodged anywhere else.
Gunilla Ekberg: It took us quite a while to get to the point where we got a law.
Gunilla Ekberg: This is not the case now.
Gunilla Ekberg: We have several countries who have adopted similar laws and also have similar effects of those legislations.
Gunilla Ekberg: There are law proposals in many parliaments, and you can ask me where later.
Gunilla Ekberg: Time shortens down when consciousness is raised in a country but also across borders.
Gunilla Ekberg: So don't worry about when I start saying, which I'm going to say, 'We started in the '70s.' It was the women's movement, in our consciousness-raising groups, when we were talking about all of the different forms of violence that women and girls were subjected to in our society, and we have those groups in many countries.
Gunilla Ekberg: What might have been different is that in some of the groups, some women who had experience of prostitution took part.
Gunilla Ekberg: And when we talked about all the other forms of violence, like rape, battering, sexual abuse, women in prostitution also pointed to the fact that the men who buy them are also committing an act of violence and that we need to look at it from that angle.
Gunilla Ekberg: It wasn't difficult for us at all to look at that.
Gunilla Ekberg: We did not have a prostitution industry that spread false ideas about what prostitution is, at the time.
Gunilla Ekberg: Now the publicity people of the prostitution industry have more access to the media.
Gunilla Ekberg: So in 1986 the women's movement decided to put a demand to the Swedish parliament to change the legislation so that the men or those who purchase somebody for prostitution purchases actually should be criminalized.
Gunilla Ekberg: But it was also important for us to visiblize the fact that prostitution is not just about women, it's not about women who are immoral or women who are whatever description that is put on women in prostitution in the cultural or national context that we are in, but actually that what men do to women is a serious act of sexual violence, and that we need to talk about the actual prostitution act and not just about the building of where the individual who is in prostitution is being prostituted, which tends to be the case for those who want to legalize a prostitution industry.
Gunilla Ekberg: So we put a demand to the parliament.
Gunilla Ekberg: At the time, there were very few female parliamentarians.
Gunilla Ekberg: We had about 23% of the national parliament, which is just 1 chamber (we don't have a senate), that were women.
Gunilla Ekberg: And as you know, when there are few women in a decision-making body, women's issues or violence against women specifically is not a center question.
Gunilla Ekberg: In 1994 the women's movement had had enough of this misrepresentation in the parliament, so we challenged the political parties and said 'Unless you put every other person on the electors' list, a woman, we will form a women's party and you just watch out.' It did work.
Gunilla Ekberg: All of the political parties, except for one, did put every other individual as a female, and that led in the election in 1994 that we ended up having 45% of the parliamentarians as women.
Gunilla Ekberg: And that was key, it's not the only reason but that it was key in how the speed of getting the issue to be discussed in the legislative body.
Gunilla Ekberg: It was the women's movement, as I said, that initiated this.
Gunilla Ekberg: We spoke with the political parties.
Gunilla Ekberg: Women who were in the women's movement were in the political parties.
Gunilla Ekberg: So it went from the autonomous women's movement to becoming a cross-party issue, and that was important to us that this is not, violence of women has to be dealt with by any political party, because it is an issue that concerns everyone.
Gunilla Ekberg: Because of being many women in the parliament, and because of the activity of the women's movement, there was a commission put in place that was just like you here; there was the women's organizations, it was public authorities, it was the governments; it was anybody: police, prosecutors, judges, everybody, who were going to, we were going to do a whole package of laws and measures, initiatives on violence against women.
Gunilla Ekberg: And in 1998 it went so far as it went to the governments, became a government bill, and this government bill is, I think, has been key for our, in Sweden, for us, because the government bill had laws on battering, laws on sexual harassment, better amended laws on rape.
Gunilla Ekberg: There were monies set aside for battered-women shelters, finally, from the governments.
Gunilla Ekberg: There were all kinds of measures.
Gunilla Ekberg: There were monitoring mechanisms for how to see the laws worked, and stuff like that.
Gunilla Ekberg: But what was most important is that in that bill we put the law that prohibits the purchase of a sexual service, and we did that intentionally to show that this law is the same or similar as other laws on violence against women.
Gunilla Ekberg: We wanted to show that the act of prostitution is in fact an act of violence and so it should be, and there's also a short analysis on how we saw prostitution at the time.
Gunilla Ekberg: The law was voted separately, because at the time the Ministry of Justice wouldn't support the law; so she stepped down; has never happened with any other legislation in Sweden ever in 600 years.
Gunilla Ekberg: She stepped aside and ended up being the Minister for Social Affairs that supported the law.
Gunilla Ekberg: And she's now, by the way, the special representative for the United Nations on Sexual Violence Against Women in Armed Conflict, so there's a history of understanding.
Gunilla Ekberg: The law came into force on the 1st of January, 1999.
Gunilla Ekberg: The whole world stood on the streets of Stockholm with their cameras, really.
Gunilla Ekberg: There were journalists from all over the world standing in the streets, thinking to see whatever was going to happen when we started to enforce this controversial strange and, in some cases, wonderful law.
Gunilla Ekberg: Of course nothing happened, you could figured that out yourself, because of course men had already figured out that if they were on the street trying to buy women on the 1st of January, 1999, they would be arrested; so they weren't there.
Gunilla Ekberg: In the beginning, the police was quite contrary to this legislation.
Gunilla Ekberg: They did not like it.
Gunilla Ekberg: They were very angry about it.
Gunilla Ekberg: They didn't know how they were going to implement it, etc.
Gunilla Ekberg: And I remember when I, I started working for the government in 2000, but then officially in 2001, and I had a real fight with the police chief of Stockholm County, so it's the largest county police district in Sweden, who was just so mad and how could we and this was just the feminists who were trying to take over the world and how dared we.
Gunilla Ekberg: He retired about three years ago from his position as the police chief, and he made a point of showing, giving an interview to the largest Swedish paper, saying that in fact he had been wrong, that this law was one of the most important tools to be able to investigate procuring and trafficking cases, because it, and I will explain later why that is the case.
Gunilla Ekberg: And I thought that was kind of nice that he took that opportunity.
Gunilla Ekberg: The law is simple in how it's phrased; it just says that a person who obtains a casual sexual relation in exchange for payment shall be sentenced for the purchase of a sexual service to a fine or imprisonment for, at the most, 6 months.
Gunilla Ekberg: This, by the way, will change on the 1st of July.
Gunilla Ekberg: On the 1st of July, the prison sentence is going to be 1 year, and I'll talk about that later.
Gunilla Ekberg: What's also interesting with the legislation, which we amended in 2005, is because we realized that some men actually buy women in prostitution, or men in prostitution for other men, for bachelor's parties or big corporations, made by a woman, to give as a gift to a visiting businessperson.
Gunilla Ekberg: So we shut that hole by saying that also if payment has been promised or made by somebody else, the person who receives the sexual service still is liable under this legislation.
Gunilla Ekberg: The legislation applies everywhere, so it's not a public order legislation that some laws in some jurisdictions, should I wait?
Gunilla Ekberg: No?
Gunilla Ekberg: It's not a public order legislation so that it just targets street prostitution.
Gunilla Ekberg: It applies anywhere somebody purchases a sexual service.
Gunilla Ekberg: So whether it is an escort service, maybe in a hotel, in an illegal brothel or, as I will show you later, if the buyer has attempted to buy somebody via an Internet site, and that's important, of course, because a lot of the prostitution exchanges now happen that men send e-mails to websites to the pimps and to order a woman to come to their hotel or to their abode.
Gunilla Ekberg: So it applies everywhere.
Gunilla Ekberg: Another important thing with the law is that attempts are criminalized.
Gunilla Ekberg: So when you do this legislation, make sure that the attempts definitely are criminalized, and the reason for that is of course that we want to interrupt the purchase of a sexual service before the woman or the man is harmed.
Gunilla Ekberg: So the police intervenes as soon as there is an attempt.
Gunilla Ekberg: An attempt would be, for example, if it's street prostitution, if a man walks up to any woman, doesn't have to be a woman in prostitution, any woman and suggests how much; that's an attempt.
Gunilla Ekberg: An attempt is to, as I said, to send an e-mail to a website, that is monitored by the police, and that has been decided in court, in fact.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we've had a case where 1,500 men had sent e-mails and made an appointment with different, and they were all charged, which was lovely for everyone at that point; it's a couple of years ago and, if you want to know more about that case, I'll be happy to tell you.
Gunilla Ekberg: The law also applies, interestingly enough, the only country in the world, it applies to our peacekeeping troops.
Gunilla Ekberg: So Swedish peacekeepers who are stationed in different areas in the world actually can be charged and prosecuted under this law.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we've had prosecutions.
Gunilla Ekberg: We have peacekeepers in Kosovo during the K-4, so the European Union big peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, where Swedish officers bought Kosovo women and then were fired from the military, and they were actually charged and prosecuted and convicted.
Gunilla Ekberg: And one of the men got so upset that he went to the European Court of Human Rights, saying that his human rights were infringed upon because he was, it was his right to buy women in prostitution.
Gunilla Ekberg: He lost, obviously.
Gunilla Ekberg: So that's the law.
Gunilla Ekberg: But to have a law in our case, we wanted to set a number of principles in place, because a law without a context is much more difficult to get people to implement, you need to know why you have this legislation, and especially because this legislation in our case was new; it was a change of view on seeing women in prostitution as victims, seeing the buyers as the perpetrators, and of course seeing the pimps, the traffickers, the intermediaries, the escort-service owners, the telephone-operator owners, as also perpetrators.
Gunilla Ekberg: So what we wanted to show is that there is a possibility of changing a culture of prostitution; so a culture where it's actually accepted, or at least normalized, that some men in the society are, it's perfectly acceptable that they buy some women and some men for prostitution purposes.
Gunilla Ekberg: And I just want to talk about a few of the principles, and those principles we developed when I was in office, and those have informed not just the law but all of the work that we've done on prostitution.
Gunilla Ekberg: So support services to women; development aid to other countries.
Gunilla Ekberg: We don't give money to organizations that work on the idea that the prostitution industry should be decriminalized or legalized, for example.
Gunilla Ekberg: So the principles are important.
Gunilla Ekberg: And as you know, in Sweden we fought for gender equality for a very long time, and we've had all kinds of policies and laws and whatever.
Gunilla Ekberg: And so it's, the first principle is prostitution is a serious barrier to gender equality.
Gunilla Ekberg: As I said, if you're in a country where you want to give women and girls the same opportunities and possibilities as men have, you cannot set aside a subclass of women.
Gunilla Ekberg: And I use the word "subclass" because we know that those who are in prostitution are women who've for many reasons, first of all, the majority are women, so it's a gender-specific crime, but it also affects men and boys that are, as the women are, marginalized economically, ethnically in some cases.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we know, from all of the research that's been done on victims of prostitution, that the majority of victims in prostitution are survivors of prior violence; so they have been sexually abused often when they were children, etc.
Gunilla Ekberg: So that's an important one.
Gunilla Ekberg: We say that prostitution is a serious problem that is harmful, and it's harmful to, obviously, the women in prostitution or the man in prostitution, but it's also harmful to society.
Gunilla Ekberg: There was a feminist in the beginning of the 20th century in Sweden where there was a strong women's movement working on prostitution, and she said 'If you look at a society and you want to know how that society deals with the status and the position of women, you have to look at how they deal with prostitution.' So remember that.
Gunilla Ekberg: I think it's a very clever way to look at it.
Gunilla Ekberg: We are also very clear that prostitution, as I said before, is a form of serious violence, sexual violence against those who are in prostitution, and that should inform both our measures but it should also inform how we analyze prostitution.
Gunilla Ekberg: If we draw parallels between other forms of violence, so, for example, battering of women by their husbands, and we apply that onto the women in prostitution, we will end up understanding prostitution differently than we did if we say it's work or a profession or whatever misrepresentation of what prostitution is.
Gunilla Ekberg: I'd be happy to talk more about that.
Gunilla Ekberg: But it's also important to us because Sweden is signatory to all of the international human rights conventions and agreements, especially of course CEDAW, and also the agreements that focus on trafficking and women.
Gunilla Ekberg: And I teach international human rights for law students, and it's always fun when we get to this point to actually look up the international instruments and read what it says, because it does say very clearly prostitution is incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women,' and that has been an agreement internationally for years, and that is what informed Article 6 of the CEDAW.
Gunilla Ekberg: So if we don't do something on prostitution, we're actually in breach of the CEDAW.
Gunilla Ekberg: And many countries forget about that.
Gunilla Ekberg: I think, and also of course in the human-trafficking protocol, the Palermo protocol as we call it, there is a particular specific article that focuses on the demand, where it says, it's one of the few articles that underlines that it is obligatory for all of the signatories to the Palermo protocol to put into place measures to discourage the demand.
Gunilla Ekberg: And so it's not just, it's not optional.
Gunilla Ekberg: This law is actually making you, if it passes, makes you in line with the international human-rights instruments, and you wouldn't be if you don't.
Gunilla Ekberg: So a core thing, other than focusing on the demand and the men who create the demand, is of course that the women or the men or the boys, whatever, who are in prostitution are not criminalized in Sweden and they should not be.
Gunilla Ekberg: You never criminalize victims.
Gunilla Ekberg: Victims have a right, has rights.
Gunilla Ekberg: There are victims' rights principles that most countries have agreed on internationally.
Gunilla Ekberg: And not only should the women in prostitution be seen as victims but they should also have access to exit services; so, social support organizations.
Gunilla Ekberg: And those social support organizations must be funded by the state.
Gunilla Ekberg: It's not just to shove it over to nongovernmental organizations.
Gunilla Ekberg: The nongovernmental organizations should do the work, if they're good at it, but they should be funded.
Gunilla Ekberg: Shouldn't have to scrape around, like many do, even in Sweden for that matter.
Gunilla Ekberg: And finally, just the latest principle, just to get myself to where I'm supposed to go, is that we are very clear that any measures that try to legalize or decriminalize any prostitution activities are absolutely not accepted in our country.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we also, when I was in government, we made sure that the rest of the world found out that we were against the legalization of the prostitution industry wherever it takes place, because it normalized an extreme form of violence, sexual discrimination, and it strengthened male domination in the society.
Gunilla Ekberg: So those are the principles.
Gunilla Ekberg: Now, so this law has been in place now for twelve and a half years.
Gunilla Ekberg: And I do think that after this long time the effects are clear to all of us; they were clear to us before that, but the current government decided that it was important to have a special inquiry into the effects of the law.
Gunilla Ekberg: So they appointed a woman judge to be the leader of the special inquiry, and she surrounded herself with different experts and they spent 2 years looking at the 10-year period, so from 1999 to 2008, of the implementation of the law.
Gunilla Ekberg: They interviewed every, everyone who could be in any case, shape or form, could have an opinion or was involved working against prostitution; talked with women and men who had experience of prostitution, some of them in prostitution, some of them out, women's organizations and so forth.
Gunilla Ekberg: And they came with a report last year.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we worked with it, we knew that.
Gunilla Ekberg: We said 'Well, we knew that.' But it's nice to have it in one report.
Gunilla Ekberg: And you will get excerpts of that report, plus an article that I've written on it.
Gunilla Ekberg: The woman who was the judge, from the women's movement's point of view, which I was then left government, and we were very nervous, because you never know.
Gunilla Ekberg: There can be political reasons why somebody accepts that position.
Gunilla Ekberg: And so we were all kind of hovering in the background, keeping an eye on it.
Gunilla Ekberg: Now it just so happens that she knew nothing about prostitution or anything.
Gunilla Ekberg: But during the two years, she became very knowledgeable and did a brilliant job in this inquiry, and now she's the chancellor justice in Sweden, so she's also the highest legal officer.
Gunilla Ekberg: But she still travels and talks about the inquiry, and she's very enthusiastic about the law, which was fun.
Gunilla Ekberg: I mean, that was what happened.
Gunilla Ekberg: So what did they conclude?
Gunilla Ekberg: They concluded that the number of persons exploited in street prostitution in Sweden has halved since 1999, so before the law.
Gunilla Ekberg: And that's interesting of course, but it's even more interesting what they did, because they compared with the situation in Norway and Denmark.
Gunilla Ekberg: Norway and Denmark are similar countries to Sweden.
Gunilla Ekberg: The societies are similar.
Gunilla Ekberg: Sweden is a larger country.
Gunilla Ekberg: But they wanted so it was just not comparing with ourselves but actually comparing.
Gunilla Ekberg: And so they said that Denmark and Norway, during the same period of time, have three times as many individuals in prostitution as we have in Sweden.