Mark P. Lagon: Taking a Swedish cue on prostitution

Improbable though it may sound, the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, is taking a page from the Swedish welfare state in revising his approach to the problem of prostitution. Loudly applauding his eight-month-old experiment is End Demand Illinois (EDI), a coalition of nonprofits that aims to extend the reform statewide and eventually see it replicated across the country.

What Sheriff Tom Dart has done is shift enforcement resources from the supply side to the demand side: from arresting (and releasing and rearresting) forcibly prostituted women and girls to arresting pimps and johns and impounding their cars, while directing the prostituted females to social services. (Last week a U.S. district judge threw out another part of Dart's new strategy: a lawsuit against Craigslist for the hazard created by its online want ads offering "erotic" and "adult" services -- some 13,000 ads a day.)

It is too soon to say what effect this policy reversal will have in the Chicago area. But supporters (including the nonprofit I head) point to the success of a similar reform in Sweden that already has a track record.

In 1999, Sweden criminalized the purchase of sexual services. Offenders face a fine or up to six months in prison, while pimps and other traffickers face incarceration for up to 10 years. Prostituted women, meanwhile, are not prosecuted but directed to social services designed to help them develop alternative means of support and recover from their dehumanizing experience. Some are provided legal services. Foreigners are encouraged to participate in trafficking investigations and prosecutions. Those who decline are returned to their country of origin after 30 days.

The rationale, in the words of Thomas Bodstr?m, a former Swedish minister of justice, was that "as long as men think they are entitled to buy and use women's and girls' bodies, human trafficking for sexual purposes will continue."

Within five years of the law's enactment, the number of trafficked persons in Sweden had declined significantly. In October 2004, Gunilla Ekberg, Sweden's top anti-trafficking official, wrote:

In 1999, it was estimated that 125,000 Swedish men bought about 2,500 prostituted women one or more times per year. Of these women, approximately 650 were street prostituted. [Since then], the number of women involved in street prostitution has decreased by at least 30 percent to 50 percent, and the recruitment of new women has come almost to a halt. ...

Sweden's apparent success has elicited some counterclaims. Some critics contend that in practice too few johns are being punished. Some health care experts have cited an increase in the proportion of prostituted women with sexually transmitted diseases...

In the United States until recently, human trafficking was mistakenly assumed to be a problem primarily plaguing the developing world. With an estimated 14,500-17,500 people trafficked into the United States annually, however, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimating as many as 100,000 U.S. minors currently caught up in the sex trade, there has been a concerted effort to direct attention to our domestic problem.

Until now, targeting supply has been the prevailing approach of law enforcement. But this neglects the plight of the victims of commercial sex. A study by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, of 235 women in Cook County Jail on October 31, 2001, found that "82 percent of the women had been physically assaulted; 83 percent had been threatened with a weapon; [and] 68 percent had been raped while working as a prostitute."

Not only is the new policy intended to direct appropriate care to these women, whose human dignity has been grossly affronted, but Sheriff Dart expects it to save money: He says social services will cost less than the unending cycle of arrest, release, and rearrest. The Cook County fund from fines of arrested johns is already netting $30,000 a month (from an average of 75 johns) for survivor outreach and victim services, according to EDI's leader, Samir Goswami.

If Dart is right and the Swedish model is successfully transplanted to Cook County, supporters like End Demand Illinois will see to it that other states take notice.