The Long Island Serial Killer Is Not Your End Demand Success Story
- Alex Andrews
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Let's clear something up before it calcifies into conventional wisdom: the Long Island serial killer case is not evidence that the Nordic Model works.
It is not a signal.
It is not a case study.
It is not, despite what was said from a podium at the recent NOW conference, that criminalizing buyers saves lives. And yet there it was, presented like a smoking gun - as if a man capable of stalking, torturing, and killing multiple women over the course of years was one solicitation charge away from a moral awakening. He wasn't shopping around for the right incentive structure. He wasn't weighing the legal risk of buying sex and deciding it was finally too steep. He was picking victims he believed no one would look for hard enough, fast enough, or at all - women he correctly calculated the system had already deprioritized.
That's the actual lesson, and it's a much less flattering one for End Demand advocates than "criminalize the buyers and predators will think twice." Predators like this aren't casual clients weighing risk over a Friday night out. They're already committing felonies of the highest order. Adding one more charge to a list that already includes kidnapping and murder doesn't function as a deterrent - it functions as a rounding error he never even calculated. Rape is illegal. Assault is illegal. Kidnapping is illegal. Murder is illegal. None of that stopped him, so it's worth asking honestly: why would we expect a solicitation charge to succeed where homicide law failed?
Sex workers support accountability
Here's the biggest misunderstanding in this debate: sex workers do not want to decriminalize violent clients. Violence is already illegal. Rape is illegal. Kidnapping is illegal. Assault is illegal. Murder is illegal. Coercion, stalking, and trafficking are already crimes. Full decriminalization doesn't touch any of those laws. It removes criminal penalties for the consensual exchange itself, so that violence can be reported and prosecuted as violence, instead of being buried inside a criminalized system that punishes the victim for coming forward.
Under full decriminalization, a client who rapes, assaults, kidnaps, stalks, traffics, or murders a sex worker can still be arrested and prosecuted. Nothing about decriminalization protects violent men from accountability. What changes is a sex worker's ability to protect themselves before violence happens - screening more openly, collecting identifying information, working with others, sharing warnings, hiring safety support, reporting suspicious behavior without fearing arrest, eviction, surveillance, or retaliation.
So, to restate the obvious: sex workers support serial killers being arrested. Sex workers support rapists being arrested. Sex workers support violent predators being removed from communities. There has never been a sex worker rights movement arguing that violence should go unchecked. The disagreement has never been about whether violence exists. The disagreement is about what actually reduces it, and criminalization, including buyer criminalization, has not shown that it does.
The Nordic Model would not have stopped this
The Nordic Model says, "We're not criminalizing the worker, only the buyer." But in practice, it still criminalizes the environment around the transaction. A buyer who fears arrest is more likely to use fake names, burner phones, vague messages, rushed negotiations, and isolated locations. That makes it harder for workers to screen and easier for predators to hide in plain sight.
The theory behind the Nordic Model - also called End Demand, buyer criminalization, or the Equality Model - is simple: if buyers face arrest, public shame, or harsher penalties, fewer people will buy sex, and fewer workers will be harmed. But that theory rests on a shaky premise: that buyers know the law exists, understand the penalties, and care. That assumption falls apart quickly. Many buyers don't know the details of buyer-criminalization laws. Some are occasional buyers, some are tourists, some are impulsive, some have spent decades assuming prostitution laws primarily target workers. Sex workers routinely report clients being genuinely surprised to learn they could be arrested at all - and deterrence only works if people know the law exists in the first place.
Even when buyers do know? They often don't stop. They adapt. They get more secretive: burner phones, no identifying information, no screening, rushed negotiations, more isolated locations. That's not safety. That's increased vulnerability dressed up as policy success. For an ordinary buyer, those conditions are an inconvenience. For a predator, they're an advantage - exactly the cover he was hoping for.
Violent men are already criminals
The Nordic Model gets sold as a way to weed out "bad buyers." But violent predators are already criminals, several times over, before they ever pay for anything. A rapist is not deterred because buying sex carries a penalty. A serial killer is not going to pause because solicitation is illegal. Someone already willing to rape, kidnap, or murder is not being talked down by the addition of a prostitution charge. What criminalization actually does is make it harder to identify that person before he hurts someone - because it pushes the entire transaction into the shadows where predators already prefer to operate.
It assumes violent men calculate risk the same way nonviolent buyers do. They don't. Rex Heuermann was not making a casual risk assessment about whether to buy sex. He was allegedly using the sex trade as an access point precisely because he knew the women he targeted were marginalized, isolated, and less likely to be urgently searched for. This is not a new pattern. Gary Ridgway targeted sex workers. Robert Pickton targeted sex workers. Samuel Little targeted women whose deaths were routinely dismissed or misclassified. In every one of these cases, the problem was never that violence was legal. The problem was that the victims were treated as disposable by the culture, and often by the systems meant to protect them.
Where the failure actually lives
What let this go on for years wasn't a lack of criminal penalties on the books. It was stigma - families reporting these women missing, communities raising concerns, and a response that was delayed, fragmented, and often dismissive, because of who the victims were and what work they did. Predators pay attention to that. They learn who society treats as disposable, who law enforcement prioritizes, and who can disappear quietly without anyone kicking down doors. That's not a demand problem. Buyer criminalization does nothing to touch it, and in some ways makes it worse - pushing transactions further into secrecy and discouraging the very screening and information-sharing that helps workers spot danger before it becomes a body count.
So no, this case doesn't belong to the Nordic Model, and it's more than a little galling to watch it get claimed as one. If anything, it belongs to the sex workers who showed up at sentencing, who organized, who bore witness - while the End Demand crowd was notably somewhere else. It belongs to everyone who's been saying for years that stigma is the vulnerability predators exploit, not a legal loophole they're carefully calculating around.
Come back next week, because we're going to get specific - and we're not stopping at one case. Over the coming posts, we'll walk through several serial predators, how each one operated, and exactly how he got away with it for as long as he did. For every case, we'll lay the two frameworks side by side: what an End Demand approach would have actually changed (spoiler: not much), and what full decriminalization - open screening, shared safety information, working together without fear of arrest - could have done differently. Same facts, radically different conclusions each time.
See you then!
