A critical account of a ‘creeping neo-abolitionism’: Regulating prostitution in England and Wales
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An increasingly dominant neo-abolitionist perspective on the issue of prostitution is currently taking hold across Europe. Pioneered in Sweden, this approach considers prostitution as inherently oppressive and seeks to tackle the dynamics of supply and demand by criminalizing purchasers and offering support to sellers who are regarded as victims. Against recent calls from both the European Parliament and an All Party Parliamentary Group on prostitution to universalize this model, we urge caution against moving any further in this direction. Our argument is informed, not only by critical accounts of the ‘Nordic model’, but also by emerging research which highlights the negative effects of recent criminal and ‘therapeutic’ interventions in England and Wales that have already attempted to reduce the demand and supply of commercial sex: the strict liability offence of paying for sexual services of a prostitute subject to exploitation and Engagement and Support Orders (ESOs) for on-street sex workers. We offer both normative insights and draw upon the findings of the first empirical study of ESOs, in order to highlight the problems that emerge when the complexities of commercial sexual exchange are reduced into a binary of ‘victims and victimizers’ to be saved or corrected by criminal justice sanctioned initiatives. In conclusion, we argue for a more productive use of the criminal law that complements rather than eclipses the wider social justice concerns in this arena.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".