In 1999, when Sweden passed a law criminalising the buying but not the selling of sex, many outsiders were dubious. It seemed a quirk of Sweden’s famously collectivist, earnestly feminist political culture. “In European countries, when we were talking about the Swedish model four or five years ago, people were actually laughing,” says Olga Persson, the head of a network of Swedish women’s shelters, who has pressed for other countries to adopt similar laws.
Some people still see things this way, but these days the Swedish model has lots of momentum behind it. Norway adopted it in 2008 and Iceland in 2009. Canada’s government recently proposed a version of it. Earlier this year, the European parliament approved a resolution by the British MEP Mary Honeyball calling for the Swedish model to be adopted throughout the continent. Should a Labour government be elected in the UK, Honeyball says, there could be a serious push for it.