La Idea ontológica del lenguaje

The next element of a social problem that Best (2015: 19) identifies is the claims- makers and their audiences. Claims-makers, according to Loseke (2003: 26), make statements in order to persuade their audience that a condition is a social problem. The truth of the claims being made is irrelevant, Loseke argues (2003: 35): instead, it is what audience members believe to be true that needs to taken into consideration. Regardless, in the case of sex work the truth is elusive: as Levy and Jakobsson (2014: 3) point out, research is often quite limited. In effect, sex workers are a clandestine group due to marginalisation, stigmatisation, social exclusion and criminalisation, making it difficult to obtain a representative sample (ibid.).

5.5.1 My role as an audience member

I am part of the audiences of both the 2010 report and the NSWP toolkit, and I believe it is clear from my analysis so far which camp has persuaded me. In spite of my

extensive reading concerning the arguments of both sides, I cannot be representative of a typical audience member because:

a) I am not Swedish and therefore lack the socialisation concerning gender equality that every Swede experiences,

b) My academic background means that I am more critical of the methods used to draw conclusions, so the demands I place upon sourcing are more stringent than those of a typical lay person, and

c) My background as a student of social sciences means that I have encountered people of the sex-as-work perspective in an everyday context unlike, I would guess, a typical audience member of the 2010 report. This means I have been able to escape the mindset that this model is radical, and instead I was

encouraged to explore it out of curiosity and interest.

I therefore acknowledge my position as both subject to discourse and as participating in discourse, but I believe I cannot use my experience here to explain how claims- makers target and seek to persuade their audiences. This section therefore analyses the assumptions made in both discourses about their audiences disregarding from here onwards my own status as an audience-member.

5.5.2 The audience targeted by the 2010 government report

In the 2010 government report, a societal attitude of disapproval is taken for granted: in effect, it is repeatedly stated that the ban reflects ‘society’s attitude that prostitution is an undesirable social phenomenon that is important to combat’ (2010: 29).

Furthermore, the report claims that since criminalisation in 1999, public support for the ban has increased, implying that it has had a normative effect (2010: 31). Those who disagree with the legislation, the report claims (2010: 34), are either a minority of the general public or those ‘still being exploited in prostitution’. Some of the negative effects of partial criminalisation include, according to this perspective, increased stigmatisation of prostitutes, a feeling of being hunted by the police, a failure to acknowledge the difference between voluntary and forced prostitution and prostitutes being treated as ‘incapacitated persons’ (ibid.). Those who continue to work in prostitution, it is suggested, are against the ban because they are unable to escape the perspective that they themselves ‘are responsible for the emotional scars and painful memories they must deal with for the rest of their lives’ and therefore are against blaming the buyer (ibid.). This deeply discrediting explanation leads the Swedish government (ibid.) to somewhat patronisingly conclude that

For people who are still being exploited in prostitution, the above negative effects of the ban that they describe must be viewed as positive from the perspective that the purpose of the law is indeed to combat prostitution.

The report therefore assumes that its audience is in agreement with the perspective that partial criminalisation is beneficial: in the context of the report prostitution is a pre- established social problem, which only serves to reinforce the justifications behind it.

5.5.3 The audience targeted by the NSWP toolkit

The NSWP toolkit, on the other hand, makes a concerted effort to persuade the reader that it is the Sweden’s criminalisation of the sale of sex and the ensuing treatment of sex workers in Sweden that is the social problem rather than sex work in and of itself. This goal to ‘raise awareness’ is clearly stated in the introduction: the toolkit is described as aiming to ‘challenge widespread promotion of this detrimental legal and political approach to the regulation of sex work’ (2015: 1). The NSWP argues that the Swedish government has repeatedly silenced the voices of the sex workers advocating decriminalisation, either by claiming sex workers are not fully self-aware and do not fully comprehend their situation, by arguing that sex workers put on a brave face and deny their difficult circumstances, by claiming that the sex workers who are critical of the law are misrepresentative, or by exaggerating or caricaturing a sex workers and their testimonies as a means of distracting from their argument (2015: 1:9). In this way, the NSWP argues, the Swedish government has created a ‘discursive vacuum’, that undermines accounts diverging from mainstream understandings of sex work (ibid.). Levy (2015: 44-45) found in his research that those with divergent perspectives were actively excluded and blacklisted from the debate surrounding the legislation, and one of his respondents recounted being fired from social services once her opposition to the ban became known. The NSWP faces a significant challenge here: they acknowledge that the public is already largely persuaded by the Swedish Model, leaving them with the monumental task of convincing it otherwise.