We are indebted to her work. Amnesty International conducted research in Norway during the development of its policy on prostitution. There were many irregularities in how they went about developing and consulting on this policy. This should set your alarm bells ringing. It certainly goes some way to explaining the design of the research. At the time, opinion within the wider Amnesty community was polarised between two different approaches:.
In these circumstances, a principled approach would have been to conduct research in places that had implemented these two different approaches so that comparisons could be made. There was no significant support within the Amnesty community for prohibition, in which all parties are criminalised, so there was no obvious purpose for this amount of effort and research being conducted in countries with this system. However, this meant that the results of the research in Norway would inevitably be compared with the results of the prohibitionist approach in the other three countries where prostituted individuals suffer violence and extortion at the hands of the police and other authorities, because selling sex is illegal and there is widespread corruption.
If the research had simply looked at the impact of the prostitution laws, the difference between the results in Norway and in the prohibitionist countries would have shown that the Nordic Model is in fact an effective approach. Most European countries have brutal and unfair immigration laws that are disproportionately applied to the most vulnerable. Moreover, racism is a problem all over Europe, including in Norway. This is all unacceptable, but they are separate issues from the prostitution-specific legislation and need analysing and tackling separately and in their own right.
Instead, Amnesty chose Norway, which passed the law ten years after Sweden, and only five years before the research was carried out. Many people, particularly men, resist the changes involved.
This means it takes time and political will for the approach to bed in, and training and education are required. Moreover, there can be many opportunities for the spirit and implementation of the approach to be sabotaged โ on a national, regional, or local level. There is no evidence that Amnesty understood this. The research methodology Amnesty used falls short of research norms and good practice.
