Governing in the name of caring: migration, sex work and the "Nordic model"
Creators: name: Vuolajärvi, Niina
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2021

description: Due to heightened concerns about trafficking and the globalization of commercial sex, a new trend has taken place in global prostitution policies in the mid-2010s. In 1999, Sweden was the first country to aim at abolishing the sex trade through criminalizing buying (rather than selling) of sex relying on radical feminist arguments of commercial sex as a form of violence against women. This policy approach is commonly known as the "Nordic Model". Relying on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Nordic region, where the policy approach originates, this thesis interrogates the cultural dynamics and social struggles underpinning this feminist-inspired prostitution and anti-trafficking policy approach. Sweden has become a "supermodel" for prostitution and anti-trafficking policies and its policy approach has spread globally, despite the lack of evidence-based research on the claimed success of the Nordic Model. Drawing on large-scale ethnographic, interview and media data -- which includes 210 interviews with sex workers, policy-makers, police forces and activists in Sweden, Finland and Norway -- this thesis provides the first evidence-based account on the Nordic Model approach and its intersection with immigration controls from the perspective of those most affected: sex workers.The thesis demonstrates that in a context where most people performing sexual labor are now migrants, the policies and practices of regulating sex work and trafficking become intertwined with the policies and politics of migration and race. This thesis unpacks the Nordic Model's humanitarian claims. The findings of this study demonstrate that the pursuit of sex buyers functions as a smokescreen for punitive practices towards sex workers that specifically target migrants who sell sex and lead to police harassment, evictions, and deportations. The thesis shows how sex workers become subjected to punitive enforcement of third party and immigration laws. The findings of this thesis illustrate how the influx of migrants in global sexual commerce has shifted the regulation from prostitution law to immigration controls, resulting in bifurcated regulation governance of domestic and foreign sex workers and racialized policing. Nationals are provided social welfare policies to assist exit from commercial sex such as therapeutic counseling, whereas foreigners are excluded from state services and targeted with punitive measures. The thesis further suggests that the success of the Nordic Model approach relies on its ability to symbolize a humanitarian state at a time when increased migration and neoliberal developments have intensified redistributive inequality. Drawing on sociology of law and policy, critical migration studies, and feminist theorizing, this thesis contributes to broader discussions on intimate migrations and border regimes, precarization and precarious labor, feminist ideological production and its relation to state-making, as well as the intersectionality of struggles within feminism and the feminist antiviolence movement.