Sometime I wonder why there isn’t more creative energy applied to finding solutions to social problems that have been created by the proliferation of the sex trades. The debate around policy appears to be driven by those with political (and moral) agendas in such a way that two distinct camps have emerged: those who favor criminalization and those who favor legalization. Neither of these extreme approaches completely solves the problem of violence and exploitation of the women and men who operate on these markets. And so we have resigned ourselves to a debate over which policy minimizes the harm, while shrugging off the possibility of eliminating it all together.

The government of Sweden in 1999 clearly had a political agenda. They decided that there was no place for the sex trades in a country that firmly believes in equality by gender, and so set out a series of policies with the goal to abolishing the industry all together. In a change to the penal code they legalized the right for a sex worker to sell his/her body while maintaining that the buying of those services is a criminal act. At the same time they recognized the need for social programs to help sex workers transition out of the industry and to prevent the young and vulnerable from entering.

The basic assumption made was that the sex trade industry is driven by demand; eliminate the demand and eradicate the industry.

Last year an inquiry into the effectiveness of this policy found encouraging results: immediately following the policy's implementation, the number of sex workers in the Swedish street sector fell by half, and has stayed at that low level ever since. The inquiry recognized the possibility that increased Internet activity might have caused a sector shift away from the streets to indoor sex work. To see if this was the case they undertook a comparison between the number of sex workers in Sweden and on the streets in their neighbouring countries, Norway and Denmark. Neither of these countries had a similar ban on the purchasing of sexual services in the 1999 to 2008 period, although Norway has since brought in such a ban.

The inquiry found that although the number of sex workers on the streets of the three capital cities was very similar before the ban, ten years later Norway and Denmark had three times more street sex workers than Sweden. They also find while the number of foreign women in the street sex trade in Sweden has increased, the number in Norway and Denmark has increased by more.