However people end up in sex work, their worst enemies are authorities and dogooders. While suchlike pretend concern with sex worker welfare, they offer SFA in the way of true help. The best way to help sex workers trapped in their occupation, mostly by financial pressure and discrimination, begins with decriminalization.
Why leave out the Nordic model as an option? It doesn't direct the authorities to harm sex workers. If business suffers as a result, they aren't chained to selling "sex" as a way to make money (and we should providing a UBI system anyway)
The Nordic model stops the law abiding customers. It doesn't stop demand, it just leaves the only customers being the abusers and actual criminals, those with no qualms about illegality.
And there is never, ever, ever a UBI or "retraining"/"back to the workforce" program paired with this to get them out of SW.
The Nordic model is at best ineffective virtue signalling and at worst actively increasing the danger SWers are exposed to.
Is it wrong or unexpected for feminists to question an industry that primarily objectifies women's bodies? Let's say you don't agree that it's ethically problematic for a john to buy from a person without knowing if they're actually able to consent vs. being threatened/poor/addicted to drugs. Would it not be rational for a feminist who does think that way, to advocate for the Nordic model?
The problem with saying that that is a feminist perspective is that it is primarily concerned with the moral expectations on men, while ignoring the reality of women, underprivileged or trafficked, and the inevitability of criminal violence in illegal industries. It's positively Victorian.
It does also seem to infantilise women who are capable of making a choice. I've only heard arguments that prohibition is 'for their own good' or necessary to correct male behavior.
Many women in illegal and coercive prostitution face the reality that their families will be injured or killed if they escape or go to the police. They will also likely be deported even if they aren't arrested for prostitution. I would rather reduce the client base for illegal prostitution by allowing legal prostitution, which removes it from the nexus of drugs of dependence, corrupt policing and criminal violence.
In Sweden prostitution was legal in both sides of the transaction before the law, so your question is strange as there was no legalization going on.
As to why the stigma has increased, it is a documented fact that it did, established by the evaluation that was done some ten years after the law was introduced. Swedish political climate regarding the question being what it is, the investigator saw the worse conditions for sex workers as something that was a positive outcome.
