Sweden is just trying to keep the hobby illegal while at the same time pandering to women who say they want control over their bodies. So the govt says "fine, you can do what you want with your bodies" then turns around and says men are not allowed to buy sex. End of the day same basic situation as making the hobby illegal.
From Wiki:
In 2008 Kajsa Wahlberg, of the human trafficking unit at Sweden's national police board, conceded that accurate statistics are hard to obtain, but estimated that the number of prostitutes in Sweden dropped 40% from 2,500 in 1998 to 1,500 in 2003. However by 2010 she had conceded that the policy (buying being illegal) had failed, and that issues around prostitution were increasing as noted in the media which carried out surveys on the street.
According to the Swedish police, 400 to 600 foreign women are brought to Sweden each year to be prostitutes. In Finland, which is only half the size of Sweden, that number is between 10,000 and 15,000 women.
Jonas Trolle, an inspector with the Stockholm police from a police unit dedicated to combating the sex trade, stated that: "We only have between 105 and 130 women -- both on the Internet and on the street -- active (in prostitution) in the city of Stockholm today." This compares to about 8,000 to 11,000 prostitutes active in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Monitoring and evaluation were delegated to the Socialstyrelsen, which has produced three reports (2000, 2004, 2007). These acknowledged the difficulties in evaluating the situation and provided no hard evidence that the law had in any way achieved its objectives. The 2007 report states that street prostitution is on the increase after an initial decline and that customers and sex workers now use the internet and mobile phone to communicate. There is no evidence that the law has reduced violence, rather there is evidence it has increased. There has been a 40% increase over the last ten years in reported sexual offences. Judges and senior police commanders have been caught purchasing sex, and most recently Sven Otto Littorin, the Government Minister of Labour (Littoringate).
In 2008 the number of police reports was 1,500 with 86 convictions in 2006. A Supreme court ruling has prevented the optional jail term being applied, and parliamentarians are calling for a minimum one year jail term. To date nobody has been imprisoned. A number of sources suggest that the law is not being enforced very strictly.
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BTW, a quick search showed dozens of hot SP girls advertising online in the city of Stockholm with rates of Can$ 300 hour, 240 h/h. As with most of western Europe, many SPs are not local from the country in question, but are imported EE girls. Still hot girls, just not local talent. If I got to France I want a born and bred French SP, or in Switerland a Swiss SP, or in Sweden a Swedish SP, in Holland a Dutch SP, or in England an English SP. It is harder to do over there than here I find. Of those 11,000 SPs they quote as working in Amsterdam, the percentage that are actually born and bred Dutch girls is not that high, esp in the red light district.
