Max Waltman is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stockholm University who has written about sexual exploitation and pornography in Canada, Sweden and the United States.

Not to be bought and sold for sex should be a human right. Sweden effectively recognized this in 1999, criminalizing buying sex and decriminalizing being in prostitution. This law has been adopted in full by Norway and Iceland, partly in Korea, Finland, Israel and the United Kingdom. France may enact it.

The Swedish model recognizes that prostitution is an institution of inequality. Most people in prostitution enter as children after being sexually abused. Lacking education and resources to survive, often destitute and homeless, they are easy prey to pimps and johns. Sexism and racism lock them in, as in the United States, where African-American women and girls are overrepresented in prostitution, as are native Canadian women in Canada.

When Sweden banned the purchase of sex, prostitution decreased.

Prostitution generally inflicts such trauma that escape is virtually impossible without social support. A study of 854 prostituted persons in nine countries, indoors and outdoors, found that 89 percent wanted to escape prostitution but felt they could not, and that two-thirds met clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress equal to that of treatment-seeking Vietnam veterans and victims of torture or rape. A Korean study in 2009 found prostitution strongly related to post-traumatic stress, even controlling for prior childhood abuse.

The wrong people are arrested in the United States when prostituted persons are criminals. Their situation of discrimination and subordination merits protection from official complicity in their victimization under the 14th Amendment. Sweden’s law identified prostitution as a form of sex inequality connected to gender-based violence, with johns as central in the exploitation and abuse.

Under the sex purchase law, prostitution and trafficking have drastically decreased in Sweden even as the number of prostituted women has increased in neighboring countries. Some claim that the Swedish law made street prostitution more dangerous, but an official 2010 evaluation found such allegations, with those of a “hidden” market, to be unfounded.

The superiority of the Swedish approach contrasts with the Ontario Court of Appeal’s. Compelling evidence shows that across-the-board decriminalization supports sex trafficking without improving health, safety or control of organized crime, as demand for unsafe and dangerous sex rises exponentially. Decriminalization is a failed experiment.

In 2011, Sweden amended the law so survivors can claim damages against johns for violating their equality and dignity, supporting crime victims' social welfare assistance, hence the ability to leave prostitution that its victims overwhelmingly say they want, and human beings deserve.