Jenny’s Pennies

I’ve been cut off from the news during my time in Bogaland (the fictional country where our exercised peace support operation took place) so now I’m trying to catch up with everything that has happened in the world and in Bloglandia.

The Swedish government has decided to make an oversight of the Swedish law making it illegal to buy sexual services. That is needed, as there are a lot of scattered studies, speculations, and right out lies about the effects of the law. But there has been no general governmental analysis of the law and its effects.

But (not surprisingly) the government has given the person conducting the overview a limitation: she is not allowed to propose that the law should be repealed.

So even if the governmental investigator Anna Skarhed were to find that the law has had bad effects on the safety and health of sex workers, that is has not limited trafficking or lead to less violence against women or less child pornography (which it is said to be doing), Skarhed is not allowed to say that it would be a good idea to repeal the law.

I’m not saying that it would be any better if the investigation were to be done with the goal that the law should be repealed. That would be equally bad - studies should be made with an unbiased starting point. It is one thing that the government gives limitations regarding scope, depth and main perspective of the investigations it orders. But they shouldn’t say beforehand what conclusion they want.

And of course it goes without saying that the directives of the investigation doesn’t mention that it would be a good idea to speak to actual sex workers about the effects of the law.

Isabella Lund has more (in Swedish).

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 9:42 am and is filed under Sex and sexuality, Sweden, Swedish politics, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.