Those girls behind the Central Station are the heroin/crack addicts you hear about elsewhere. Amsterdam also has a Cologne/Hamburg like site for street hookers, with wooden walls, alarms etc. (a prominent alderman of the Amsterdam social-dems was brought down a few years ago because he was spotted there). Right now they're renovating the area, so the prostitutes will likely move elsewhere.

But interestingly, one claim I've seen several times (including here) is that the legalisation of prostitution makes clients more confident, more socially accepted and therefore more aggressively demanding of sex workers.

Shame as the prostitute's protector?  Who would have thought?

This study argues that the Victorian experiment, brought in with a view to 'harm minimisation', has in fact shown that legalisation creates a massive expansion of the sex industry.  Alongside the expanding numbers of legal brothels, the number of legal brothels, trafficked women, and the amount of street prostitution and child prostitution have both gone up.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Neither of those drugs makes you pock-marked or thin, nor is a drug habit crippling. Nor does it require you to sell your body. All of those things become true only if addicts have the misfortune to live in a society which insists on prohibiting those drugs

But that's the sales pitch to try to scare you into not taking them. But your point is valid that drug prohibition is the cause of the vulnerability of these woemn. As Deborah Orr goes on to point out in the article Migeru highlighted;-

The irony is that those who run escort services or saunas are no more enamoured of drug-addicted employees than are the managers of insurance offices. Addicted, chaotic, mentally-ill, care-leaving girls or abused women - even older, less attractive, or less personable women - find it hard to get work in other, less dangerous, parts of the sex industry, for much the same reason as they can't get work anywhere else. They're just not very employable. They're not good material for entrepreneurial self-employment either.

So none of the models quoted will work for these women.They are made vulnearble by their addiction, an addiction which society blames them for.

Unfortunately, just as street prostitution is stubbornly seen as a feckless choice rather than a rock-bottom consequence of having no perceived choice at all, heroin abuse is viewed as a moral dereliction rather than an addictive illness.

but the solution to making these women less vulnearble would require a politically-unacceptable reformation of Britain's (and probably the global) approach to drugs.


keep to the Fen Causeway

Reality is less nice than that. Sex traffickers often make the 'sex workers' they sell addicts, on purpose.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Years ago, during the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry, I interviewed a young woman in the red light district in Manchester who was covered in cuts and scratches after a client attacked her with a wire coat hanger; last week, when I took part in a discussion on a Dublin radio programme with a woman who works with prostitutes in Ireland, she said she routinely hears from women who have been beaten, raped and even gang-raped by clients.

In 1998, when the global sex trade was on a smaller scale and possibly less institutionally violent than it is today, research carried out in five countries showed that 73 per cent of prostitutes reported physical assault and 62 per cent had been raped; among the rape victims, between a third and a half had been raped on more than five separate occasions. The situation of women who work indoors is hardly better, especially since the influx of trafficked women from countries such as Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. A study carried out recently by the London School of Tropical Hygiene discovered that 95 per cent of trafficked women had experienced physical or sexual violence. Sixty per cent reported experiencing some form of violence before they were trafficked, demonstrating a cycle of abuse.

The Swedish model has been a complete failure from the view of the prostitutes

Has it? I am not aware of any serious research into the effects. Do you have any links?

, who regularly rage against it

Where have they raged about it? I have only seen white upper middle class male neoliberals idelogues rage that this is the case. The views and experiences of people who has sold sex I find lacking from the debate now as well as before the illegalisation.

To sum up my point of view: The "Swedish model" is not about the safety of people doing prostitution, it is about morals. And the debate features two groups trying to push their morals on society. In one corner you have the marxist feminists (which is what I suppose you refer to, as I am unaware of any selfdescribed "feminazis" (actually, I have not seen this term used outside of patriarchal male discourse, would you care too give a definition?)) and in the other the neoliberals (in the european sense). Both pushing their view of what prostitution means for society. Limited agency versus rational choice. System of domination versus freeing the individual. Most other groups keep out of the debate, including people who confess any experiences of prostitution (except for some cases, but then mostly in either sides magazines or papers, where you can supposed they would not have been published had they not supported respective sides position).

I am not surprised that this is the case considering that prostitution has very strong connections with marginalisation in our cultures (or our culture, depending on definitions). I you are not in a marginalised group you are probably not doing prostitution. If you are in a marginalised group, policy is something done to you, not by you.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

American Journalist Robert Jensen, writing about pornography, also stresses that "mainstream" pornography is getting more and more hardcore, i.e., more "exciting".  I quoted extensively from one of his articles in an old thread on pornography.

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides

The demand is created by human beings too inadequate to create natural, mutual relationship(s) to satisfy their needs, and/or masturbate, and/or control a sexual need for a period of time.

Moral frameworks are not useful for creating policy and most certainly not as a way to understand human behavior. That kind of thinking should be isolated to fundies.

you are the media you consume.

The demand is created by human beings too inadequate to create natural, mutual relationship(s) to satisfy their needs, and/or masturbate, and/or control a sexual need for a period of time.

I'm unconvinced that sex is the only dynamic.  Somewhere when researching this I found the claim that the 'typical' client is 35-55 years old and has, or has had, a wife or girlfriend.

As a student, I lived on the edge of the red light district, and my own impression was that the typical kerb-crawler is 35, normal looking and in a company car.

I don't think prostitutes are the only option for sex for these men.  Which means that they must be paying for something else.