GiliGold/VAD_KnessetCorpus huggingface dataset:
Gunilla Ekberg: But because the police and the prosecutors and the judges take their jobs seriously, these men can no longer trust that they are scot-free when it comes to this law.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we are very happy, because of course men in positions buy women; we know that.
Gunilla Ekberg: But this time there's a serious deterrence.
Gunilla Ekberg: This is just like the last two years that the police actually have gone to the … Sweden to investigate and prosecute one of their own, and that does not happen in most other countries.
Gunilla Ekberg: So thank you for underlining that one.
Gunilla Ekberg: And about not being allowed to having opinions about whether the law worked or not, that's simply not true.
Gunilla Ekberg: It says in the directives for the commission that they would like the law to continue, but an independent inquiry can issue any opinion they like, as is part of a parliamentary democratic society in most countries.
Gunilla Ekberg: It is not, the government cannot control a special inquiry.
Gunilla Ekberg: That would be undemocratic.
Gunilla Ekberg: The rest we'll leave aside.
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: Okay, please, we have another question.
בוסנה ירדני: יש לי שתי שאלות מאוד קצרות.
בוסנה ירדני: השאלה הראשונה היא כזאת, איך החוק מתמודד עם תופעות של תעשיית מין בבתים, בדירות או שוגר דדי?
בוסנה ירדני: זה נראה כאילו שהחוק בא להתמודד עם זנות ברחוב.
בוסנה ירדני: השאלה השנייה נוגעת לחברה השבדית בעקבות החקיקה.
בוסנה ירדני: נראה שלכאורה תעשיית המין והזנות עברה לארצות השכנות.
בוסנה ירדני: יכול להיות שהנתונים בשבדיה ירדו, אבל נראה שגם הנשים וגם צורכי שירותי מין מהגרים לארצות השכנות על מנת בעצם לממש את זממם.
חגית לרנאו: אני מהסנגוריה הציבורית בישראל.
חגית לרנאו: העמדה העקרונית שלנו היא שאנחנו מאוד מסויגים מהצעת החוק הזאת ואחד הטיעונים הפרגמטיים הוא שאנחנו חושבים שיש קשר או אנלוגיה בין אכיפה של מדיניות נגד סמים לבין החוק שמוצע כאן ואפשר לחשוב על האנלוגיה בכל מיני דרכים ואנחנו אומרים את זה כבר שנתיים.
חגית לרנאו: כשמסתכלים על אכיפה של מדיניות נגד סמים, אחת הטענות שקיבלה לאחרונה ביטוי מאוד חזק מהאו"ם זה שבאכיפה הזאת אולי יש איזה שהם יתרונות אבל החסרונות שלה, הבעיות החברתיות שהיא יוצרת בתום מאה שנים של אכיפה, הן גדולות יותר מיתרונות ובכלל ספק עד כמה אכיפה חזקה וחדה ככל שתהיה באמת מצליחה להשפיע על התופעה של שימוש בסמים.
חגית לרנאו: אז השאלה היא קודם כל בכלל מה דעתך לגבי הרעיון הזה והאם מדוח האו"ם שיצא לאחרונה, שמדבר או ממליץ, כמובן זה תהליך ארוך, לדה-קרימינליזציה של סמים, אפשר ללמוד דברים שקשורים לסוג הזה של החקיקה?
אורית זוארץ: עוד שאלה ואנחנו נסגור עם השאלה הזאת.
מתי שושני: מעניין אותי מאוד לשמוע, אחרי עשור שהחוק קיים, מה ההשפעה בערכים של החברה, מדובר על החינוך של הנוער והצעירים, אם היו מחקרים על מה התפיסה של אנשים לגבי זנות, האם זה משתנה אחרי 15-10 שנים, שאנשים תופסים את זה כדבר פחות לגיטימי, אותו דבר, האם זה משתנה באמת?
מתי שושני: האם המאבק של הרשויות נגד התופעה נחלש, שאנשים תופסים את הרעיון ורצים איתו או שזה פשוט נשאר באותו מצב ותמיד צריך להמשיך עם האכיפה והמלחמה נגד הקרימינלים?
Gunilla Ekberg: Now I have to answer, because I can only handle about three questions at once; otherwise my brain cells,
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: It was the last question, so,
Gunilla Ekberg: Okay.
Gunilla Ekberg: So you asked me about apartment, prostitution, indoor prostitution.
Gunilla Ekberg: Most of the investigation, we don't have very many individuals who are in street prostitution at all anymore.
Gunilla Ekberg: So I would say 90% of the investigations of the police is in indoor prostitution and illegal brothels.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we've had, I'd be happy to give you the numbers, which are, I have actually the numbers of the cases of, last year, for example, we had 120 cases of procuring that went to court.
Gunilla Ekberg: We had 16 cases this year on trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we had trafficking for other purposes this year, 18.
Gunilla Ekberg: And so that, and I'm using those numbers to let you know that the police know where all of the activities take place; that's not the problem.
Gunilla Ekberg: The problem is to have resources to investigate.
Gunilla Ekberg: And it's very, it's not, prostitution cannot exist underground, and I want to underline that for everybody who thinks that it can.
Gunilla Ekberg: For being able to sell a woman for prostitution purposes, the pimp or the woman herself must be in contact with the buyer.
Gunilla Ekberg: It's the buyer who pays, and that is where you get the profit.
Gunilla Ekberg: If you don't have a buyer, you have no … The police investigate the buyers.
Gunilla Ekberg: And so the Swedish police, in their investigations, they will follow the trail of the buyers.
Gunilla Ekberg: So, for example, we have a special unit of the police that does only Internet investigations of prostitution trafficking, and also there's another unit that does, on child pornography.
Gunilla Ekberg: And a lot of information that's generated from their investigations are used to initiate police investigations.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we use the information, see, the buyers are the in for everybody, into the industry.
Gunilla Ekberg: So we use the buyers and their testimony to get to the networks, because we want to stop the networks, of course.
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: How many people work in this unit?
Gunilla Ekberg: There's different, different police districts have different size units.
Gunilla Ekberg: But we have is that they're, the police,
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: But in Israel we have only 17 investigators or 12,
Gunilla Ekberg: Yeah, yeah, that's not enough.
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: For Internet crimes,
Gunilla Ekberg: But we did an interesting thing, just to add to that, is that,
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: All over Israel.
Gunilla Ekberg: We did that.
Gunilla Ekberg: The national police, where a lot of the knowledge to investigate these things, was given money to do two things, as I said: training, but the police districts, and we have 21 police districts, they could apply, I mean, they can still apply, for money, for resources, both for resources for the investigations but they can also invite investigators from the national police to a local police district, if they have cases where they investigate in procuring and trafficking, and that is not very expensive.
Gunilla Ekberg: I just want to say that that worked really well, because not only the police districts can have up-to-date investigative technique information because they have so few cases, but when there is a case, both the information goes to the district and people will come and assist in the investigation.
Gunilla Ekberg: So it does, and that's, you save a lot of money doing that, actually.
Gunilla Ekberg: And I can talk to you if you want to know more about that.
Gunilla Ekberg: But so, and your other question was if the prostitution businesses went to other countries.
Gunilla Ekberg: Well, of course they did when we got this law.
Gunilla Ekberg: That's what's so interesting.
Gunilla Ekberg: Let me give Norway as an example.
Gunilla Ekberg: Don't, I will say the whole thing.
Gunilla Ekberg: Norway, when they put their law into place, 50% of the pimps left the country within the first few weeks, and they went to Denmark.
Gunilla Ekberg: What does that tell us? That tells us that the law works as a barrier for the establishment and continuation of prostitution activities.
Gunilla Ekberg: And the solution to it would be to have the same law in all countries.
Gunilla Ekberg: This is the same discussion as we had in the European Union on money laundering.
Gunilla Ekberg: Same arguments were used saying, and there was two countries who did not want to have legislation on money laundering.
Gunilla Ekberg: So of course all of the organized crime networks went to those two countries and laundered their money.
Gunilla Ekberg: That's how law works.
Gunilla Ekberg: It's good.
Gunilla Ekberg: It shows us that it's effective and it shows us that in Denmark they need to have the law.
Gunilla Ekberg: And also right when this happened, for the first time the Danish Police contacted the Swedish Police to 'Maybe could we have some training on how to look at, how to get to the buyers.
Gunilla Ekberg: ' So it's really important.
Gunilla Ekberg: I mean, it's lots of legislation.
Gunilla Ekberg: That's how it works.
Gunilla Ekberg: You minimize the crimes, and the criminals would go somewhere else.
Gunilla Ekberg: But that tells us something.
Gunilla Ekberg: And those countries will then have to be responsible to change the laws there.
Gunilla Ekberg: So that was that question.
Gunilla Ekberg: I have to say for you, from the public defense, that I don't really, I can't answer your question, because I don't draw parallels between prostitution and drugs, other than that organized crime networks may be involved both in prostitution and drugs.
Gunilla Ekberg: As for the arguments in terms of the decriminalization of drugs in the US, personally I think that's absolutely outrageous that they have come to that conclusion.
Gunilla Ekberg: And that tells us that there is some powers that want that to happen.
Gunilla Ekberg: But that has nothing to do with what we're trying to do.
Gunilla Ekberg: We're working on a different area.
Gunilla Ekberg: We're talking about, this is a combination of women's rights, seeing prostitution as violence, and targeting those who are the perpetrators.
Gunilla Ekberg: If you want to, you can parallel, you can parallel any crimes with that, because there's always a perpetrator who's always a victim, and there might be something that is exchanged.
Gunilla Ekberg: But I think that is a, it's a comparison that limps.
Gunilla Ekberg: I'd be happy to talk to you.
Gunilla Ekberg: The prosecutors in Sweden were extremely against the law when it came; they had all kinds of problems with it in terms of evidence and things like that.
Gunilla Ekberg: But they also have changed completely their mind and opened their mind to how this law, see, in the procuring and trafficking cases, the prosecutors will use the testimony of the buyers; they will try the buyers in the same trial as they try the pimps and the traffickers, one, as an educational thing to show the buyers that they're part of the organized crime, that they are the reason, but also the testimony that the buyers give is very helpful for prosecuting the cases.
Gunilla Ekberg: I'd be happy to give you contacts with the Swedish International Chamber that works on these cases, and you talk to them yourselves if you like.
Gunilla Ekberg: Enforcement.
Gunilla Ekberg: I think we've already, you were talking about attitudes.
Gunilla Ekberg: I think I've already mentioned that, but I'll just underline it again that the support for the law, from the public, has been consistently the same, between 70 and 80%, since it came into place.
Gunilla Ekberg: And as for the buyers, the men who buy, it has halved.
Gunilla Ekberg: The percentage, so it's gone from 13.6% of men who've bought to 7.8.
Gunilla Ekberg: And I think that that is as close as we can come to support.
Gunilla Ekberg: And you have to remember that we are in a very different situation today than we were when the law came into place, because the international, the global prostitution industry knows that when this law comes into place, their profit will go out the window, they will not make money.
Gunilla Ekberg: And so, for example, when Finland was having their discussion whether or not to have this legislation, there was a majority in the parliament until a couple of weeks before they were going to vote, because in the law committee that was doing the consultations on the law, suddenly out of thin air appeared two organizations that were calling themselves sex-worker organizations.
Gunilla Ekberg: No one had heard of them before.
Gunilla Ekberg: Fifteen young women from Estonia were testifying to the committee, saying that they liked to be in prostitution in Helsinki, that they made more money than they would in Tallinn.
Gunilla Ekberg: They were all between 18 and 25.
Gunilla Ekberg: They were not there on their own volition.
Gunilla Ekberg: There were pressures, obviously, from those who would profit, or trying to profit off of selling the women.
Gunilla Ekberg: And they knew that if this law came into place in Finland, then they would be out of business.
Gunilla Ekberg: So don't think that this is a pure discussion.
Gunilla Ekberg: You have to ask yourself who is speaking.
Gunilla Ekberg: I mean, you can ask about me, who am I, what's my background, what reason do I have to support this.
Gunilla Ekberg: And you can come to the governments too, except I don't work for the government anymore, and I was part of the women's movement from the '70s, pushing for the law.
Gunilla Ekberg: But you also have to ask those who ask questions and who say that prostitution is a profession or it's sex work, who are they.
Gunilla Ekberg: I was part of this Demand Change! campaign in the UK; it's online, by the way, so you can look at it.
Gunilla Ekberg: Suddenly there was an organization that was also a sex-worker organization, but we didn't believe that.
Gunilla Ekberg: So journalists investigated their backgrounds, and what were they?
Gunilla Ekberg: They were escort service agency owners.
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: Toda raba.
Gunilla Ekberg: That's by a pimp in Newcastle Upon Tyne.
Gunilla Ekberg: So don't, you know, you have to be careful with,
ויקה גולצמן: שאלה נקודתית.
ויקה גולצמן: אני מנהלת מקלט לנשים קרבנות סחר.
ויקה גולצמן: יש לי שאלה, האם שירותי שיקום ניתנים רק לנשים אזרחיות שבדיה, מה משך הזמן במקרה הזה ומה קורה בדרך כלל עם רוב הנשים, האם הן נשארות בשבדיה או חוזרות למדינות המקור?
Gunilla Ekberg: I'm sorry, I'm a little bit tired because I've been speaking for the last, last Monday I started in Belgium and I spoke in the Belgium parliament, the European parliament.
Gunilla Ekberg: I've spoken here.
Gunilla Ekberg: I'm a little bit tired.
Gunilla Ekberg: So if I don't sound cohesive all the time, don't worry about it.
Gunilla Ekberg: Yes, of course there are women who are victims of trafficking across borders into Sweden.
Gunilla Ekberg: We have residents' permits that can be applied for these women, and it gets applied, sorry, the application for the residents, or the temporary visa rather, is done as soon as we find those women.
Gunilla Ekberg: Then they have access to the same medical, social services, whatever, employment services, as the Swedish citizens, during the time of the trial and appeals and so forth.
Gunilla Ekberg: Most women, because most women who are victims in Sweden come from countries within the European Union, so they don't need a temporary visa when this goes on.
Gunilla Ekberg: They have a right to stay in Sweden.
Gunilla Ekberg: So it's a bit different in your case.
Gunilla Ekberg: Any European Union citizen can stay 3 months without a problem, in a country.
Gunilla Ekberg: So they are not, they don't have to be under the scheme.
Gunilla Ekberg: We have the possibility for the women to apply for long-term, or a permanent visa in Sweden to stay, and women have about, I think we have about 30 women who have applied for that.
Gunilla Ekberg: 99% of the women testify in Sweden, which is very different numbers than in other countries, and I think that is because our police and social workers are actually very good at meeting with the women.
Gunilla Ekberg: So they are willing to stay and testify.
Gunilla Ekberg: However, most women don't want to stay in Sweden.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we've, I mean, we've fought, from the women's movement, to give permanent visas to everyone, but a lot of women have children at home or they want to go home to whatever country they come from.
Gunilla Ekberg: And when I was in the government, we decided that Sweden had a responsibility for those women that went home, because they went to countries where there were no social services, that's why they left in the first place, where women who come back will be very poor.
Gunilla Ekberg: So we did a pilot project with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania where we gave money to build shelters in these three countries, the Nordic countries, so that there would be, and ensure that women from the women's movement actually worked in those shelters.
Gunilla Ekberg: So at least we had somewhere where the women could return.
Gunilla Ekberg: Women, and I want to add this, women who are complainants in procuring and trafficking cases automatically are assigned a legal advocate who is a lawyer, and that lawyer is responsible to ensure that she gets compensation.
Gunilla Ekberg: So there's a request to the court for compensation.
Gunilla Ekberg: But he or she is also required to ensure that the woman has a decent place to live; if there's shelter or if she doesn't live in shelter depends on her situation.
Gunilla Ekberg: If the woman, if there's not enough evidence in court to say that this particular woman can be given compensation, because sometimes there are a number of women and not all of them we can link the woman with the perpetrator.
Gunilla Ekberg: Then the legal advocate has to ensure that there's an application made to the Crime Compensation Board, which is a public authority that can give compensations to victims of crimes where the perpetrator is not identified but there's still a level of evidence to show that she's been a victim of a crime.
Gunilla Ekberg: So I think I even wrote it here, I can't remember.
Gunilla Ekberg: But the majority of the victims have been given compensation.
Gunilla Ekberg: What we were concerned about when I was in the government was that, when women return to other countries, the risk was that somebody else took the money, boyfriend, pimp, whatever.
Gunilla Ekberg: So we've also tried to set up systems so that nobody else can access the funds upon return.
Gunilla Ekberg: And the Crime Compensation Board did a study that I do mention here, just 2 years, a year ago, 2 years ago, to see what had happened, and most of the women had been able to keep their money.
אורית זוארץ: עורכת דין רחל גרשוני, מתאמת המאבק בסחר בנשים, התייחסות קצרה.
Rachel Gershoni: This isn't something you're going to be able to answer in 2 seconds, so I just wanted to raise it.
Rachel Gershoni: I have a big dilemma here.
Rachel Gershoni: Given that at this moment the Israeli public does not have the consensus on this issue that prostitution is violence, okay, my question is, is this the moment to legislate?
Rachel Gershoni: And, again, should we wait a while?
Rachel Gershoni: First, practically, because we did some research on criminal law for social change, for example, Prohibition in the United States, which in a way failed because they didn't engage the whole of the society and it was a very limited group of women.
Rachel Gershoni: And on the other hand, what very much succeeded here in Israel, even though it's a very different subject, is forbidding smoking in public places, which was done in a very gradual way, okay?
Rachel Gershoni: So you can say it's a very different thing.
Rachel Gershoni: Practically, should we wait a while?
Rachel Gershoni: And the second thing is, fundamentally, what is the purpose of the criminal law?
Rachel Gershoni: Is the purpose of the criminal law to educate?
Rachel Gershoni: And I go on; is the purpose of the criminal law to educate, or should it be the last step when at least some consensus has been reached, and only then you use this very extreme tool of criminal law?
Rachel Gershoni: Questions which have no real, one answer.
Gunilla Ekberg: No, but I can give some hints at what I think.
Gunilla Ekberg: If we look at other forms of violence against women, I assume you have legislation that would criminalize batterers, right?
Gunilla Ekberg: I also assume that when that legislation came into place, not everyone agreed that that would happen.
Rachel Gershoni: Well, you know,
Gunilla Ekberg: Not, the batterers wouldn't.
Rachel Gershoni: Criminal,
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: And sexual harassment.
Gunilla Ekberg: Let me,
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: We can take sexual harassment, for example,
Gunilla Ekberg: Depending on which legislation,
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: 12 years ago.
Chairman Orit Zuaretz: The majority of the guys thought that,
Gunilla Ekberg: Yeah, so sexual harassment legislation, that's a good example, because that's very difficult to get consensus in a society.
Gunilla Ekberg: But you still have that law.
Gunilla Ekberg: We can take other laws that don't affect women, that we put into place because we want change to happen.
Gunilla Ekberg: If we look at violence against women and the changing behavior of men who are violent, we know from tons of studies and experiences that awareness-raising is not enough to make men stop sexually harassing or make men stop rape or make men stop battering their wives.
Gunilla Ekberg: It's important with awareness-raising to change attitudes, and that's something, that's an ongoing project; that's not something you do all along.
Gunilla Ekberg: But, I mean, when we talk about or do awareness-raising within the women's movement, we may do it on the changing of behaviors of men when it comes to violence, and prostitution is added to that.
Gunilla Ekberg: Do you see what I mean?
Gunilla Ekberg: It's not a separate subject.
Gunilla Ekberg: I think that laws, I'm a lawyer, laws are, we use laws when we know that there is a certain behavior in society that is harmful to people and we want that behavior to stop, but we do it in connection with awareness-raising.
Gunilla Ekberg: You can continue in awareness-raising till the cows come home, and you're still going to have this behavior to go on.
Gunilla Ekberg: But if, as the men themselves say, and I think that in this case we can let them talk, the men who bought, they know that if there's a law, that will change their behavior.
Gunilla Ekberg: And we're interested in that behavior change.
Gunilla Ekberg: Then when the law is in place, then we can work on those who actually are buyers or who are wife-beaters or rapists, and try and change their attitudes.
Gunilla Ekberg: But the law needs to be there to show the seriousness of this crime, and specifically in prostitution it's not seen as anything that's seriously harmful to women.
Gunilla Ekberg: It is defined as all kinds of other ways.
Gunilla Ekberg: And so we can't just push the law later on.
Gunilla Ekberg: The law, a parallel example that I think is better than the drugs example of the prosecution office here is the law that we got in 1977 on prohibition of punishing, corporal punishment on children.
Gunilla Ekberg: That was put into place against violent protests in the community, but there was an understanding that we wanted a society where children were not to be penalized and not beaten up by their parents, because in our country it was important that children had rights and that there are other ways of changing behaviors of children.
Gunilla Ekberg: Three, sorry, two prosecutions we've had under this law, because it's not been necessary.
Gunilla Ekberg: There was a parallel awareness-raising.
Gunilla Ekberg: There was the law.
Gunilla Ekberg: The law is there and it is used, if we don't use other child neglect and whatever.
Gunilla Ekberg: So laws are both normative and direct, and all laws are like that.
Gunilla Ekberg: They tell us, I mean, if we still believe in a society that's based on community and not about parallel living individuals, which seems to be the case in many, then we have to take responsibility this way, I think.
Gunilla Ekberg: And you can push it forward ahead of you.
Gunilla Ekberg: It's not going to make a difference, but it's important to start to do the awareness-raising so every time somebody mentions the word "prostitution", you just automatically say 'What about the buyers?' That changes attitudes in 2 seconds sometimes, because a lot of people haven't even thought about the men.
Rachel Gershoni: The basic attitude that's in dissension here on discussion: Is prostitution violence against women?
Rachel Gershoni: This is the basic issue, and this is what people don't agree on.
Gunilla Ekberg: I know that, but that is up to you and to us and to the NGOs and the politicians to explain why it's violence against women.
Gunilla Ekberg: And I can give you three questions very quickly how you analyze that.
Gunilla Ekberg: You ask yourselves who is it that's in prostitution; you know that; it's marginalized people.