Simplifying the Disaster of the “Equality” Model

By Gaye Dalton

Regardless of their intention or motivation Nordic Model Campaigns (like Equality Model NY, “Turn off the Red Light” now rebranded as “Beyond Exploitation”) are equivalent to a blanket false accusation. They reinvent the people who sell sex as different people, living different lives, with different needs and different problems who made very different choices for very different reasons to the people were really are. To protect this reinvention from any risk of confusion or challenge, they studiously avoid any direct or equal engagement with the people who sell sex (unless they can secure total control of the analysis and outcome of that engagement).

Any legislation that results from Nordic “Equality” Model campaigns has similar impact to a criminal conviction based upon the false assertions made by the Nordic “Equality” Model campaigners, and leave the people who sell sex in a remarkably similar position to the falsely accused and convicted.

The falsely accused and convicted are unable to manifest honest insight, remorse or repentance towarss the charges and, as a result, are invariably worse off than the guilty unless they can get the conviction overturned, and even then, the damage of that conviction can never be fully restored.

Likewise the only way people who sell sex can hope to improve their position within a Nordic “Equality” Model system is to learn how to live a lie, falsely admit, accept, and strive to recover from being different people, living different lives, with different needs and different problems who made very different choices for very different reasons to the people they really are.

This is a deeply harmful state of affairs where the more problems you have the more harmful the Nordic “Equality” Model is to you, yet the only alternative is to go on alone, with nowhere to turn at all, even if you are desperate to get out, or just desperate in general, or if you are the victims of serious crime.

As the Nordic “Equality” Model creates potentially insurmountable barriers to seeking viable help and support within civil society and statutory services it leaves the people who sell sex in a position where they cannot afford to reject any more realistically useful help and support on offer elsewhere, on almost any terms. This increases their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse.

Ironically this emulates the point at which a substantial number of people recognised the ongoing futility of continuing to seek help and support within civil society or statutory services and decided to use the high income, potentially shorter hours and access to, almost instant, cash involved in selling sex to meet their real needs and help themselves as best they can instead.

The people who sell sex are not all the same, or anything like a homogenous group, perhaps the only generalisation you can safely make about us is that we are not anything like the people the Nordic “Equality” Model accuses us of being when it sentences us to lifelong isolation and alienation. I believe that what I have said would stand the test of almost any case, and I recognise that may also include clear cut victims of coercion and trafficking. I cannot find sufficient evidence of fact based research and investigation to form a clear opinion on who they are, what has happened to them, how it has affected them and what they really need to escape and recover.