Ash Regan’s proposal had a comforting slogan and a disastrous evidence base from day one. It claimed to “protect women” by decriminalising prostitution while criminalising the men who pay for it — the so-called Nordic Model, imported from Sweden and presented as if it were settled success rather than contested policy.
It is neither, this approach does not end prostitution. It would have driven it further indoors, into darker corners, where screening clients becomes harder, negotiations are rushed, and violence is less likely to be reported because any police attention now threatens the client and therefore the worker’s livelihood. It is not protection its is a displacement of risk.
The proposal also made a basic category error: it deliberately blurred the line between trafficking victims and consenting adults. They are not the same. Treating them as such wastes police time chasing consensual transactions while real coercion becomes harder to detect.
Human rights organisations from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch oppose this model for exactly this reason. They support full decriminalisation, as seen in New Zealand, where sex workers can refuse clients, report abuse, and access services without fear.
Most tellingly, many sex workers themselves oppose the Nordic approach because they understand something policymakers often don’t, when you criminalise the client, you criminalise the conditions under which they have to work.
The Scottish Parliament did not vote against protecting women. It voted against a policy that mistakes symbolism for safety, ideology for evidence, and moral posture for harm reduction.
