Is it possible for prostitution to conform to employment norms and law?
https://nordicmodelnow.org/2025/12/18/is-it-possible-for-prostitution-to-conform-to-employment-norms-and-law

"This is an edited transcript of Esther’s talk at the Nordic Model Now! TUC fringe event held in Brighton on 8 September 2025.

Hello, I’m Esther. I’m the policy adviser at Nordic Model Now! and a survivor of prostitution and pornography. I’m going to talk to you about what whether prostitution can ever conform with our employment laws, regulations and practices, and what the impact on these laws, regulations and practices might be if prostitution were fully decriminalised in the UK.

Job description and person specification
When employers recruit staff it’s standard practice to create a job description and person specification explaining what the role involves and the type of person they are looking for.

Let’s consider what that might look like for prostitution. Time is limited, so I’ll just take some of the general categories.

General tasks:
Sexual activity with multiple male strangers, regardless of their age, appearance, attitude, health, and hygiene.
Every orifice must be available.
Re-enact degrading scenes from porn.
Responsibilities:
Do whatever the buyer wants, even if it hurts or disgusts you.
Never complain.
Simulate pleasure. Be convincing.
The buyer is always right.
Abandon personal boundaries, and health and safety standards to stay competitive.
Desirable qualifications
As young, or with as little previous experience in the sex trade, as possible.
Ability to dissociate.
Preferably poor and vulnerable with a lack of social support.
A history of sexual abuse, exploitation, self-harm, homelessness or a childhood spent in care.
Career development pathway
Downwards the longer you spend in the role
Lengthy experience in the industry makes you less desirable to punters.
Potential negative impact on future career, health and wellbeing, and even the ability to work.
Social isolation. Substance abuse.
I think you must agree that this does not represent anything like a normal job.

Over-recruitment is standard in the sex industry because punters demand choice over the type of person they choose to pay – and let’s be clear, they are not just paying for sex but paying for someone who won’t say “No” to whatever he wants. If punters don’t have a satisfactory choice, they look for another provider who is able to supply it.

So, when prostitution has free rein, the supply of available women involved in it always tends to exceed demand. The resulting competition lowers the prices women can charge and increases the risks they face as they will need to engage in more extreme and dangerous acts or have larger numbers of prostitution encounters to keep the same income.

Over-recruitment reflects punters’ demands for “new” bodies and the fact they pay more for recent recruits and pay less the longer a woman has been in the industry. This is not standard practice in any other work environment. Does it happen in the NHS? In the railway industry? In the financial sector?

Punters pay less to use women with longer involvement and commonly post reviews on prostitution advertising websites and punter forums saying things to the effect that more “seasoned” women are more “practised” and less “genuine”. This is an implicit admission that longevity in the industry damages women and suggests that buyers clearly recognise that prostitution is harmful.

Another industry would only overrecruit on a similar scale if it anticipates a very high turnover of staff due to serious harm to physical or mental health or death, such as might happen if you were maximising recruitment of soldiers to send into combat zones.

Health and safety
Employers must post notices in workplaces advising employees of health and safety risks. This is what one might look like for prostitution:

Heli has already mentioned the homicide rate for women involved in prostitution. The incidence of PTSD is also higher and more complex than that found in combat veterans.[*] Traumatic brain damage in women who have lived experience of prostitution is typically at rates comparable to victims of torture and professional boxers.

The risks are intrinsic to prostitution
Exposure to such huge risk is not a consequence of the introduction of the Nordic Model.

In July 2024, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously held that France had not violated Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights – the right to private and family life – by introducing the Nordic Model in 2016."

Archived:
https://archive.ph/fqD5Z

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