The EU’s approach to prostitution: Explaining the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the EP’s neo-abolitionist turn

Abstract

The aim of this article is to offer a comprehensive analysis of the European Union’s neo-abolitionist approach to prostitution, drawing on the literature that addresses the global rise of neo-abolitionism and using key concepts developed by the gendered approaches to the European Union in order to adapt them to the particular context of the European Union. To do so, the article undertakes a critical frame analysis of the European Union’s violence against women policies, as it is in such policies that prostitution has been most thoroughly addressed, in combination with an analysis of the nature and evolution of the European Union’s gender equality policies more broadly. The article contends that the emergence of prostitution on the gender equality agenda of the European Union and the adoption of an explicit neo-abolitionist approach by the European Parliament can be explained by the coalescence, in the mid 1990s, of three key factors: Sweden’s accession to the European Union and the consequent positioning of Swedish femocrats, keen on exporting Sweden’s neo-abolitionist agenda to the European Union, in central positions of power within European Union institutions; the crystallisation of a robust neo-abolitionist velvet triangle through the creation of strong institutional links between the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Women’s Lobby, which remained unchallenged; and the gradual development of a hybrid model of gender equality in the European Union which resonates with neo-abolitionist ideals at the same time as neo-abolitionism itself was increasingly associated to gender equality as a fundamental European Union value.

Keywords

Europe European Union neo-abolitionism prostitution prostitution policy

Introduction

Starting in the mid 1990s and intensifying in the mid 2000s, the European Parliament (EP) abandoned its previous ambivalence towards prostitution and began to adopt an explicit neo-abolitionist approach, defining prostitution as a form of violence against women, conflating it with trafficking in women for sexual exploitation and actively advocating for the adoption of client criminalisation. While the issue remains contentious at the European Union (EU) level, therefore, the debate has thus been gradually vectored by an insider/outsider divide, such that neo-abolitionism is increasingly defended within the EP and sex work approaches have been progressively relegated to the sphere of civil society. This shift of the EP towards neo-abolitionism must be understood as part of a broader trend, underway since the mid 1980s, in which Western European states have increasingly debated prostitution as a compelling realm of political and policy action. A trend, moreover, in which neo-abolitionism has gradually become hegemonic (Ward and Wylie, 2019).

Still, the EU’s shift towards neo-abolitionism is remarkable. First, because the EU lacks explicit competences on the matter and tends to avoid intervening in politically contentious and nationally sensitive issues, especially those related to questions of morality (Kurzer, 2001). Indeed, even when such issues have emerged on the political agenda of the EU, it has tended to avoid tackling them directly, by invoking the subsidiarity principle and thus leaving the final decision to member states (Euchner and Engeli, 2018). Second, the EU’s neo-abolitionist turn is outstanding when compared to other international and regional organisations, which have also seen prostitution emerge on their political agendas, essentially as a result of its association with trafficking in women, yet have limited their actions exclusively to the latter, based on the distinction between voluntary and forced prostitution (Saunders, 2005; Sembacher, 2006). Finally, the EU’s neo-abolitionist turn represents an anomaly within its own gender equality policies, as prostitution is not conceptualised through the hegemonic labour-market perspective that is dominant among the rest of issues that the EU addresses without having explicit competences to do so, such as the reconciliation of work and family life or women’s reproductive rights (Lewis, 2006; Repo, 2016). How, then, can we explain the EP’s turn towards neo-abolitionism?

The profound changes experienced by the sex industry in Europe in the last three decades, together with the variety of national, regional, and international policy responses this has generated, has fostered the proliferation of literature on prostitution policy in Europe, particularly in the last 10 years (Økland and Wagenaar, 2018; Skilbrei and Holmström, 2016; Wagenaar et al., 2017; Ward and Wylie, 2019). This literature has focused on attesting and explaining the rise of neo-abolitionism and on developing multilevel, contextualised and agency-aware analyses that acknowledge the complexity of current prostitution markets and policies in Europe. Yet, this literature falls short of providing a comprehensive account of the emergence and framing of prostitution at EU level. The studies that have addressed the matter tend to do so incidentally, as part of a broader analysis of other things, or through descriptive analyses that yield little in terms of the causal factors explaining the EP’s neo-abolitionist turn.

The aim of this article is to offer a comprehensive analysis of why and how prostitution emerged and is addressed within the gender equality agenda of the EU. Drawing on the insights developed by the literature on prostitution policy in Europe regarding the rise of neo-abolitionism and using key concepts developed by the literature addressing the EU from a gender perspective in order to adapt them to the specific context of the EU, it pays particular attention to the concerted role of actors and discourses. As such, the article contends that the emergence of prostitution on the gender equality agenda of the EU and the adoption of a neo-abolitionist approach by the EP in particular, can be explained by the coalescence, in the mid 1990s, of three key factors. First, Sweden’s accession to the EU and the consequent positioning of Swedish femocrats, keen on exporting Sweden’s neo-abolitionist agenda to the EU, in central positions of power within EU institutions. Second, the crystallisation of a robust neo-abolitionist velvet triangle through the creation of strong institutional links between the European Commission (EC), the EP and the European Women’s Lobby (EWL), which remained unchallenged. And third, the development of a hybrid model of gender equality in the EU that resonates with neo-abolitionist ideals at the same time as neo-abolitionism itself was increasingly associated to gender equality as a fundamental EU value.

Data and methods

To substantiate these claims, the article undertakes a Critical Frame Analysis (CFA) of the EU’s violence against women policies, as it is within such policies that the EU’s neo-abolitionist turn has materialised. The analysis covers the years between 1985, when violence against women first emerged on the gender equality agenda of the EU, and 2014, which marks the consolidation of the EP’s neo-abolitionist turn. It includes all the policy documents produced by the Council of the EU, the EC and the EP that address violence against women and/or prostitution during such time, covering a total of 1 Council conclusion, 2 EC Communications and 13 EP reports and resolutions. As a qualitative and discursive methodology designed to analyse the different meanings ascribed to gender equality in the EU (Verloo, 2005: 13), CFA allows us to identify and compare the ways in which prostitution is framed as a political and policy concern within the EU’s violence against women policies as well as the policy solutions proposed.

In this regard, two main frames can be identified: a sex work frame that defines voluntary prostitution as an income generating activity and thus as sex work, proposing its decriminalisation; and a neo-abolitionist frame that defines all forms of prostitution as sexual exploitation and violence against women, proposing the criminalisation of third parties and, most recently, of clients in particular. While prostitution is often addressed through various other frames, including public order, public health and public morality frames (Tertinegg et al., 2007), these do not appear in the EP documents analysed, essentially because such documents have all been drafted from a feminist perspective and thus exclude the former, more conservative, frames. An exception is the public health frame, which does appear, yet in relation to the depiction of prostitution as a form of violence against women and thus subsumed within the neo-abolitionist frame.

Still, CFA has two important shortcomings, in that it does not pay attention to either context or agency. As Lise Rolandsen (2013) suggests, ‘we cannot analyse ideas stemming from policy documents as if they were detached from the institutional context (discourses, structures, powers, resources) in which they are produced and the actors who produce or oppose them’ (p. 18). To understand the EP’s neo-abolitionist turn, therefore, we need to go beyond the textual analysis of its violence against women policies and attend to the discursive and institutional context in which these have developed as well as the specific actors and power dynamics pushing them forward. As such, the article combines a CFA of the EU’s violence against women policies with an analysis of its gender equality domain more broadly, focusing in particular on the content and evolution of its gender equality policies, the structure and rules of its policy-making process, the actors that populate it and the power dynamics between them.

The article is divided in three parts. The first part offers an overview of the current literature on prostitution policy in Europe, identifying two preponderant themes within it: the rise of neo-abolitionism and the need for multilevel, contextualised and agency-aware analyses, as well as an important literature gap regarding the EU. The second part illustrates the EU’s neo-abolitionist turn with reference to the main policy documents in which it has materialised. The last part develops the main argument of the article, drawing on key concepts developed by the gendered approaches to the EU in order to describe and analyse the three factors that coalesce in the mid 1990s to explain the EP’s neo-abolitionist turn.

The ‘EU gap’ in the literature on prostitution policy in Europe

A key theme within the recent literature on prostitution policy in Europe has been to attest and explain the rise of neo-abolitionism to the point of becoming hegemonic, that is, presented as the only adequate and legitimate conceptualisation of and response to prostitution (Ward and Wylie, 2019: 4). Such literature has highlighted three key factors to explain this. First, is the role of Sweden and its sexual purchase ban, adopted in 1999, as exemplars, attested by the ubiquity of references to it as a success. The active promotion of Sweden’s sex purchase ban abroad was indeed an explicit policy aim from the very beginning, in turn facilitated by its international recognition as a morally conscientious and gender equitable welfare state. A second factor often mentioned is the role of feminist transnational advocacy networks, particularly those formed around the issue of violence against women, where neo-abolitionism has found fertile ground, especially as a result of the conflation between prostitution with trafficking (Reanda, 1991). Finally, a third factor commonly raised is the nature of prostitution as a standard case of morality politics; a type of politics dominated by values, where the primacy of the symbolic results in the resilience to facts and concern for effects, the formation of cross-party alliances and the development of a particular conflict style, often a moral crusade, in which the aim is precisely to render one’s position hegemonic (Wagenaar and Altink, 2012).

A second key theme within the literature on prostitution policy in Europe is the need to develop more complex analyses of current prostitution markets and policies in Europe which acknowledge their multilevel nature and take agency and context more into account. Indeed, it has been argued that the literature on prostitution policy has tended to disavow the agency of the actors involved in favour of more structural explanations (Wagenaar et al., 2017: 15). Moreover, it tends to ignore the specificities of context and thus of the myriad of factors that intertwine to shape prostitution markets and policies at different levels, as well as their interconnected and thus multilevel nature (Skilbrei and Holmström, 2016). As a result, examples of more nuanced analyses have recently been emerged, particularly in the form of national case studies (Økland Jahnsen and Wagenaar, 2018; Wagenaar et al., 2017). Yet, these rarely pay attention to their multilevel nature and, crucially, overwhelmingly ignore the EU. Indeed, analyses of the emergence and framing of prostitution at EU level are few and those that do exist tend to address the matter incidentally, as part of a broader analysis of the global rise of neo-abolitionism (Ward and Wylie, 2019), the EU’s approach to trafficking in women (Locher, 2007) or violence against women in general (Montoya, 2013). When the issue has been addressed directly, moreover, it has been through descriptive analyses that merely reproduce the general explanations of the rise of neo-abolitionism and thus yield little in terms of the causal factors explaining the EP’s neo-abolitionist turn (Outshoorn, 2019).

Existing explanations of the EP’s turn to neo-abolitionism, ultimately, do not respond to the call for more complex analyses. We actually find more nuanced analysis of the EU’s alleged silence on the matter. According to Gill Allwood (2018), prostitution is absent from the gender equality agenda of the EU because it is recurrently and actively blocked by the argument that it falls outside EU competences. Euchner and Engeli (2018), in turn, suggest that the lack of convergence in the politics of values between member states and the EU renders non-intervention the norm. Allwood, Euchner and Engeli, however, conflate the governmental and decision-making agendas of the EU, that is, the issues that are being discussed at EU level without concrete decision-making proposals and those that instead are ‘up for active decision-making’ (Princen, 2012: 35). As such, they conclude that prostitution is not on the agenda of the EU because it is addressed almost exclusively by the EP and only in soft law instruments. This, however, does not amount to non-intervention. To the contrary, the EP’s adoption of an explicit neo-abolitionist approach, even if only in soft law, implies a significant intervention in contemporary prostitution debates. Moreover, it is not without effects. In fact, it has fostered considerable debate at EU level, as well as contributed – albeit indirectly – to the spread of neo-abolitionism and client criminalisation in the national domain by means of its normative power (Ward and Wylie, 2019: 21).

The EP’s neo-abolitionist turn

Prostitution was addressed by the EU for the first time in an EP resolution of 1986 on violence against women. The latter addresses prostitution in an ambivalent manner, employing both neo-abolitionist and sex work frames. Indeed, it addresses prostitution as a ‘profession’, calling on states to ‘decriminalise’ it; to ‘guarantee prostitutes the rights enjoyed by other citizens’; to ‘support prostitutes self-help groups’ and to ‘involve’ them in the policy-making process (European Parliament, 1986: 9). Moreover, while it refers to both prostitution and trafficking in women, it addressed them separately. Yet, the resolution also refers to prostitution as ‘a form of exploitation of women’ and thus calls on states to ‘prevent the prostitution of young women and facilitate the reintegration of prostitutes into the labour market’ (European Parliament, 1986: 9). This ambivalence responds to the fact that the resolution was drafted by Hedy D’Ancona, a Dutch parliamentarian engaged in the national debates that would lead to the redefinition of prostitution as work in the Netherlands. Indeed, while not explicitly articulated as such, the distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution is what seems to hold the two frames together.

Prostitution was not addressed again until the mid 1990s, yet this time within a clear neo-abolitionist frame. Such was the case of the EP’s 1997 resolution on the need to establish an EU-wide campaign for zero tolerance of violence against women, drafted by the Swedish parliamentarian Marianne Eriksson. The report leading to such resolution dedicates an entire section of its explanatory statement to prostitution, where it is explicitly defined as a form of violence against women in which women ‘become a commodity’ (European Parliament, 1997: 12). In addition, it cites a US study to suggest that gender inequality, particularly in the form of sexual violence, is a cause of prostitution, at the same time as it defines prostitution itself as a cause of sexual violence and thus gender inequality, arguing that it ‘confirms the prejudice that sexuality is a male preserve and, hence, underpins the unequal balance of power between the sexes’ (European Parliament, 1997: 12). As such, this time, the report explicitly rejects the sex work frame, arguing that free-choice in prostitution is a ‘myth’, as women are forced into it and governed therein by third parties and structural forces ‘beyond the individual’s power to influence’ (European Parliament, 1997: 12). Hence, the solutions proposed focus on criminalising third parties and prevention and protection, the latter increasingly geared towards exiting women from the sex industry.

In the mid 2000s, this position was consolidated, as the sex work frame and those advocating it were increasingly silenced and/or delegitimised. A key turning point in this regard was the EP’s 2004 report on the consequences of the sex industry in the EU, the first to solely and exclusively focus on prostitution, which was again drafted by Eriksson. Interestingly, the adoption of the report was preceded by a hearing in the EP in which both neo-abolitionist and sex work positions were voiced; the former by Janice Raymond, a renowned neo-abolitionist activist and scholar from the United States, and the latter by Veronica Munk, coordinator of the transnational AIDS/sexually transmitted disease (STD) prevention among migrant prostitutes in Europe project (TAMPEP), and Marian Wijers, a prominent anti-trafficking scholar who at the time was president of the EC’s experts group on trafficking, created in 2003. In their contributions, both Munk and Wijers addressed the marginalisation of sex workers as workers, stressing the importance of guaranteeing their human and labour rights. They criticised the negative impact of client criminalisation on sex workers themselves and defended the need to distinguish between sex work and trafficking (Munk, 2004; Wijers, 2004). While some of their suggestions did make it into the report, this inclusion was largely rhetorical, as they were either annulled by opposing arguments or fundamentally delegitimised.

For example, the report emphasises ‘the importance of drawing a clear distinction between trafficking and prostitution in accordance with the UN’s [Palermo] Protocol’ (European Parliament, 2004: 8). It recognises that ‘significant ideological disparities exist in the debate about prostitution’ and insists that ‘the views of the women involved should be heard’ (European Parliament, 2004: 10). Significantly, it acknowledges that ‘EU legislation relating to the free movement of goods and services is applicable to the legal side of the (sex industry)’ (European Parliament, 2004: 7) as a result of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice. Indeed, in its ruling on the 2001 Jani and Others v. Staatssecretaris van Justitie case (268/99), which the report actually cites, the ECJ explicitly recognised prostitution as an income generating activity that falls within the scope of self-employment and thus of the rights to freedom of movement and establishment contained in the Treaties and the Association Agreements signed with the (then) acceding countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Simultaneously, however, the report repeatedly links prostitution to trafficking in women, despite its declared adherence to the Palermo protocol. Moreover, it continues to define prostitution as based on the commodification of ‘the most vulnerable women’ (European Parliament, 2004: 7), and thus concludes, in defiance of the ECJ’s jurisprudence, that it ‘can never be reduced to a choice of profession’ (European Parliament, 2004: 14). What is more, the report explicitly questions the legitimacy of those advocating a sex work approach, whether member states or civil society organisations, by accusing the former of having become just ‘another profiteer in the market’, and the latter, especially those funded by the EU HIV/AIDS programme – a direct allusion to TAMPEP – of possibly being ‘representatives of criminal organisations!’ (European Parliament, 2004: 18). The report was arduously debated in the EP’s women’s rights committee (WRC), where it passed with a small margin. The EP, however, did not follow up with its conversion into a resolution (Outshoorn, 2019: 371).

Various elements of the neo-abolitionist position defended in the 2004 Eriksson report were taken further in subsequent EP documents. The first to do so was the EP report of 2005 on the situation in combating violence against women, drafted by the Swedish parliamentarian Maria Carlshamre. The report links prostitution more strongly to violence against women and gender inequality by stating that ‘65-90% of prostituted women had already been subjected to sexual abuse’, as well as depicting prostitution as ‘an obstacle to women’s participation in society and the labour market’ (European Parliament, 2005: 2). The second document was adopted in 2009, again as a resolution on violence against women drafted by a Swedish parliamentarian, this time Eva-Britt Svensson. Here, the legalisation of prostitution is directly linked to ‘the increase of trafficking in women’ (European Parliament, 2009: 2). Two years later, prostitution was addressed again in a resolution on violence against women, again drafted by Svensson, which declared the existence of ‘a serious problem of prostitution in Europe’, as a form of exploitation and abuse that ‘leaves deep psychological scars, damages the general health of women and girls, including their reproductive and sexual health, and in some instances can result in death’ (European Parliament, 2011: 2).

The definitive step in consolidating the EP’s neo-abolitionist position was taken in 2014, however, with the adoption of the resolution on prostitution and its impact on gender equality. The latter continues to present prostitution as based on the exploitation and commodification of women, as always forced and thus as a form of violence against women that is both a cause and a consequence of gender inequality that cannot be ‘trivialised [as] a normal activity [or] a job’ (European Parliament, 2014: 8). Still, the report takes previous documents further in that it pays unprecedented attention to the role of the client and thus explicitly advocates for the Swedish model of client criminalisation. Indeed, the report stresses that ‘the buyers of sex play a key role as they maintain the demand’ (European Parliament, 2014: 7). Moreover, it uses such demand to link prostitution and trafficking in women, stating that ‘the demand for women in prostitution, whether trafficked or not, is the same’ (European Parliament, 2014: 10). As such, the report explicitly advocates for the adoption of ‘legislation that shifts the criminal burden onto those who purchase sexual services’ (European Parliament, 2014: 10), stressing – though without proof – that it reduces prostitution, has ‘deterrence effects on trafficking’ and ‘clarifies what the acceptable norms in society are’ (European Parliament, 2014: 12). Interestingly, the report cites Art. 2 of the Lisbon Treaty in order to justify EU intervention, thus explicitly invoking gender equality as a fundamental EU value. While the report was controversial, this time it was turned into a resolution with 343 votes in favour, 139 against and 105 abstentions (Outshoorn, 2019: 372).

Explaining the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the EP’s neo-abolitionist turn

A chronological analysis of the policy documents adopted by the EP in the field of violence against women, therefore, shows a trajectory regarding prostitution from initial ambivalence, through conflict and debate, to the final consolidation of an explicit neo-abolitionist approach. This can be explained by the coalescence, in the mid 1990s, of three key factors. First, Sweden’s accession to the EU and the consequent positioning of Swedish femocrats, keen on exporting Sweden’s neo-abolitionist agenda to the EU, in central positions of power within EU institutions. Second, the crystallisation of a robust neo-abolitionist velvet triangle through the creation of institutional links between the EC, the EP and the European Women’s Lobby, which remained unchallenged. And third, the development of a hybrid model of gender equality in the EU that resonated with neo-abolitionist ideals, at the same time as neo-abolitionism itself was increasingly associated to gender equality as a fundamental EU value.

Swedish femocrats as ‘norm entrepreneurs’

The debates leading to the adoption of Sweden’s sex purchase ban in 1999 coincided with those on its accession to the EU in 1995. Gender equality and prostitution emerged as key themes in the latter, interestingly, as a reason for staying out. Indeed, Swedish feminists initially opposed accession to the EU for fear that its democratic deficit and pressures for convergence would downgrade the high standards of Sweden’s gender equality regime (Hellgren and Hobson, 2008). Regarding prostitution, the fear was that accession would expose Sweden to Brothel Europe, that is, to the Dutch model of legalisation, as well as to an invasion of Central and Eastern European sex workers; ideas that circulated widely among the general public (Kulick, 2003: 206). When accession became a fact, however, Swedish feminists inverted their strategy and started to become particularly active at EU level, where they sought to export their gender equality regime, including their approach to prostitution (Hellgren and Hobson, 2008: 219). In fact, the EU was seen as a particularly fruitful venue in which to do so, especially after Swedish femocrats had acquired central positions of power within EU institutions.

Such was the case of Anita Gradin, a feminist politician with a long history of anti-trafficking activism who became Commissioner of Justice and Home Affairs, and of Marianne Eriksson, a feminist from the Left Party who became a vocal member of the EP’s Women’s Rights Committee. Indeed, the concerted action of Gradin and Eriksson as norm entrepreneurs in the mid 1990s was key in putting violence against women on the agenda of the EU, and through it, that of prostitution (Joachim, 2007; Locher, 2007; Montoya, 2013). Norm entrepreneurs defending a sex work approach were also present in the EP at the time, particularly among the Greens. Such was the case of Nel van Dijk, a parliamentarian from the Dutch communist party and of Patsy Sörensen, founder of the Belgian sex worker organisation Payoke. Both drafted reports in the field of trafficking during the 1990s in which they framed prostitution as sex work and thus rejected the conflation of the two (Outshoorn, 2019: 367). By the end of the 1990s, however, both had left the EP. Moreover, during their stay, their actions were limited to the domain of trafficking, rather than actively advocating for sex worker’s rights, and they remained rather isolated, not managing to forge alliances with homologous norm entrepreneurs in other EU institutions nor with civil society organisations, essentially because such norm entrepreneurs did not exist (the presence of Gradin in the EC was indeed exceptional) and because sex worker organisations operating at EU level were embryonic (TAMPEP was only created in 1993 and the ICRSE would not be formed until the early 2000s). In contrast, the cardinal role of Gradin and Eriksson as norm entrepreneurs was considerably aided by the regional advocacy networks of which they were a part and which consolidated precisely in the mid 1990s.

An ‘unchallenged’ neo-abolitionist velvet triangle

The success of women’s political mobilisation in the EU has been explained with reference to the specific form that such mobilisation takes, coined a velvet triangle, for being characterised by the collaboration of feminist politicians, experts and civil society actors in allegedly fluid and democratic terms (Woodward, 2000). Violence against women and prostitution are no exception. A robust velvet triangle developed around the two in the mid 1990s through the creation of strong inter-institutional links between the femocrats of the EC, the EP and the EWL. This materialised most clearly in the EU’s violence against women campaign of the mid 1990s.

Indeed, the latter not only included the EP’s 1997 resolution on the need to establish an EU-wide campaign for zero tolerance of violence against women but also the Daphne Initiative, launched by the EC as a capacity-building instrument for civil society, and the EC’s communication on violence against children, young persons and women of 1998, both of which were spearheaded by Gradin. The communication, in particular, also addressed prostitution in neo-abolitionist terms, within a continuum in which the sexual exploitation, trafficking and violence against both women and children were continuously conflated (European Commission, 1998). In addition, the campaign included a hearing in the EP which was attended by feminists from both the EP and the EC, experts and civil society organisations, with the EWL playing a particularly prominent role (Montoya, 2013: 94–95). It was precisely at this time that the EWL consolidated its neo-abolitionist approach to prostitution, as attested by its 1998 motion on prostitution and trafficking in women (EWL, 1998).

The decreasing attention of the EC to both violence against women and prostitution as a result of Gradin’s exit in 1999 and its turn to a centre-right and right leadership since then was compensated by the continued attention of the EP and the intensification of the neo-abolitionist advocacy of the EWL, as testified by the numerous campaigns that it has developed, particularly in the last decade, such as the Brussels’ call or the Together for a Europe free from prostitution campaign (EWL, 2015). This scenario contrasts radically with that of sex work advocates in the EU, which have not managed to build a velvet triangle strong enough to contain, let alone counteract, the EP’s neo-abolitionist turn. Indeed, even if the various actors that typically conform a velvet triangle existed at EU level since the early 2000s, that is, feminist politicians, academics and experts and civil society organisations defending a sex work approach, these did not managed to forge alliances capable of crystallising into a velvet triangle. Crucial in this regard is the fact that the EU’s civil society interface, that is, the rules and structures that regulate its engagement with civil society organisations, levies particular obstacles for sex worker ones. Established in the early 2000s in response to mounting concern regarding the EU’s democratic deficit, such rules seek to attest the representativeness of the civil society organisations that the EU consults (Kohler-Koch and Quittkat, 2013). This is done through a set of eligibility criteria, co-designed by the EC and the European Economic and Social Committee, which include, among other things, the need for organisations to exist permanently at EU level; to have a large membership composed of organisations that cover the majority of member states and are considered representative by them; to be independent financially and in their decision-making and represent ‘general interests that tally with the interests of European society’ (EESC, 2001: 6).

Sex worker organisations are particularly ill suited to comply with these demands. Indeed, they very often lack the financial resources to exist permanently at EU level and rarely count with organisations in the majority of member states, let alone that are deemed representative, given the obstacles that sex workers’ collective mobilisation faces as a result of stigma, criminalisation and so on (Mathieu, 2003; Weitzer, 1991). Moreover, their interests are seldom considered general given their relatively small numbers while their demands are rarely seen to tally with the interests of European societies, particularly as the rise of neo-abolitionism in the EU has been accompanied by its increasing association with a particular notion of Europeanness linked to gender equality. Hence, the criteria established by the EU to evaluate the representativeness of civil society organisations implicitly discriminate against sex workers. This is in turn compounded by the fact that the EWL has a financial monopoly over the funds that the EU distributes to women’s organisations and that the alternative funding of sex worker organisations has sometimes led to accusations of convenience with criminal organisations, as in the EP’s 2004 report. Finally, it is also compounded by the defective institutionalisation of intersectionality in the EU, which favours the participation of organisations that represent one single axis of inequality and speak with a unitary voice rather than intersectional and multivocal ones, as sex worker organisations tend to be (Rolandsen and Roth, 2011).

The EU’s hybrid gender equality model and the progressive identification of gender equality as a ‘fundamental EU value’

The last factor explaining the EU’s neo-abolitionist turn is the expansion of the EU’s gender equality policies beyond formal equality in employment to cover other issues such as violence against women and the consequent development of a hybrid model of gender equality which accommodates two distinct approaches to equality. First, a liberal non-discrimination approach that focuses on individual formal equality and is based on a notion of equality as sameness. And second, a socio-democratic approach focusing on substantive equality and women as a group based on the notion of equality as difference (Ferree, 2008). Both approaches can be found in the EP’s approach to violence against women, especially in its conceptualisation as a manifestation of gender inequality in both economic and sexual terms. This is illustrated by the gender (in)equality frame that is predominant in all EP documents addressing violence against women.

Indeed, the EP locates the origins of violence against women as a problem of gender equality in women’s economic subordination, that is, in their ‘weak economic position and concomitant dependence’ (European Parliament, 1986: 2). As such, the policy solution proposed is to increase women’s labour-market participation through measures of equal treatment in employment. Violence against women is also said to originate in women’s sexual subordination, however, within a ‘patriarchal society where women’s needs are subordinated to those of men sexually’ (European Parliament, 1997: 11). In this case, its eradication is said to require criminalisation, victim support and education in order to guarantee women’s sexual self-determination, defined as the ‘right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence’ (European Commission, 1998: 4).

This dual definition of violence against women as a problem of women’s economic and sexual subordination contributed to link the issue firmly to gender equality and thus to justify EU involvement. It also served to justify such involvement in prostitution, however, particularly in neo-abolitionist terms. Indeed, what unites both diagnoses of the origins of violence against women is a similar conceptualisation of women’s freedom and emancipation based on the liberal notions of self-determination and self-ownership, in turn guaranteed by the presence of consent and bodily control. It is the latter that underpin the commodification of labour and its resulting association with economic freedom, as well as the definition of sexual self-determination and its equation with sexual freedom.

The result, however, is a limited conception of economic and sexual freedom that resonates with neo-abolitionist ideals, to the extent that they are based on hegemonic notion of free labour and legitimate sexuality that implicitly exclude sex work. An exclusion that is then rendered explicit through the metonymic displacement of selling sex into selling oneself that is enacted by the notion of sexual commodification; and the logic of denial that defines ‘wrong choices as those that do not express the autonomy of the person who chooses’ (Sabsay, 2016: 19) and thus no choice at all. As such, prostitution can only figure as the opposite of free labour and sexual self-determination, and thus as a form of violence against women that is contrary to gender equality. This explains why prostitution is not conceptualised through the hegemonic labour-market perspective that is dominant among the issues that the EU addresses without having explicit competences to do so.

That the consolidation of this dual conception of violence against women was accompanied by the progressive identification of gender equality as a fundamental value of the EU also contributed to strengthen the EP’s neo-abolitionist approach. Despite being absent from the original project and design of the EU, gender equality has increasingly been proclaimed by EU institutions and incorporated into the EU’s political identity as a foundational value, culminating in its explicit recognition as such in Art. 2 of the Lisbon Treaty (Macrae, 2010). This allowed neo-abolitionists inside the EP to claim the moral high ground by associating neo-abolitionism to gender equality, to the political identity of the EU as gender and sexually progressive and thus to a specific idea of Europeanness. This explains why sex workers have tended to mobilise other EU values to legitimise their approach, in particular that of free movement, both in their political advocacy and within the ECJ (Andrijasevic et al., 2012). The fact that in its response the ECJ explicitly rejected intervening in the debate over values, however, limiting itself to the sphere of rights, explains why its legal recognition of sex work has not served to counter the rise of neo-abolitionism in the EP, where the issue has been increasingly framed as a matter of values rather than rights (Foret and Rubio Grundell, 2020).

Conclusion

The aim of this article was to offer a comprehensive analysis of why and how prostitution emerged and is addressed within the gender equality agenda of the EU, in a way that could answer to the recent calls for multilevel, contextualised and agency-aware analysis of prostitution and prostitution policy in Europe. In this regard, the article has filled the EU gap in this literature, by demonstrating the EU to be a significant site for the rise of neo-abolitionism. More importantly, the article shows that understanding the EP’s neo-abolitionist turn, in particular, requires adapting the explanations generally offered to the specific context of the EU, and in particular, to the specificities of its gender equality domain as well as of the actors and power dynamics involved.

First, the fundamental role of Swedish femocrats as norm entrepreneurs needs to be situated within the broader context of Sweden’s relationship with the EU, in which gender equality and prostitution have played a fundamental role. Only by taking this into account can we understand the particular interest of Swedish femocrats in exporting their gender equality and prostitution regimes to the EU. Indeed, while the active promotion of Sweden’s approach to prostitution abroad was an explicit objective from the beginning, ‘as part of Sweden’s own identity-shaping in the international realm’ (Ward and Wylie, 2019: 4), it acquired specific characteristics in relation to the EU, which has become a predilect venue for such objective.

Second, the importance of transnational advocacy networks in the promotion of neo-abolitionism needs to be read through the particularities of the collective mobilisation of women in the EU, and in particular through the concept of the velvet triangle, as well as the rules and structures governing the EU’s civil society interface. Only by doing so can we understand the importance of the institutional links created between the femocrats in EU institutions and the EWL and, crucially, why they remained unchallenged by a parallel velvet triangle advocating for a sex work approach. It is this which explains why neo-abolitionists were ultimately unable to dominate the violence against women agenda in the international domain, where they had to confront an equally strong sex worker transnational advocacy network seeking to mainstream the distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution, and yet, why they were successful in the EU, rendering it a key site for the rise of neo-abolitionism both in Europe and beyond.

Finally, the article has demonstrated the crucial role played by the evolution of the EU’s gender equality policies into a hybrid model of equality and the parallel recognition of gender equality as a fundamental value of the EU, both of which pivoted around notions of economic and sexual freedom that strongly resonated with neo-abolitionist ideals. Indeed, the latter formed an indispensable discursive opportunity structure allowing the velvet triangle to frame prostitution as an EU concern, fitting it within its gender equality competences and relating it to its political identity as a progressive polity. Only by doing so were they able to engage the EU in a matter so far outside of its competences, and to outweigh alternative understandings of prostitution that also existed therein.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank Emanuela Lombardo for her support in the initial phases of this article and the two anonymous reviewers for their enthusiasm and pertinent suggestions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Lucrecia Rubio Grundell

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