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PION is a GAATW member in Norway. Emilia Cebrián from the GAATW Secretariat conducted this interview with Astrid Renland, PION’s Manager, in August 2022 to better understand the organisation’s history, work, and context.
Emilia Cebrián: When was PION founded and why?
Astrid Renland: PION was started in 1990. In the 1980s, prostitution had become a hot issue in the context of social and drug policy in Norway. There was an increased focus on the criminalisation of drug use and drug users, especially women who were selling sex for money to buy drugs. During this policymaking process, all groups of sex workers were completely ignored. At the same time, feminists were advocating for the criminalisation of sex workers’ clients, and it was also the time of the HIV epidemic.
PION was founded by two women indoor sex workers who wanted to form an organisation to become spokespersons for indoor sex workers and to provide services for them. Back in the 1980s they attended the Tursdagsgruppen (Tuesday groups) at Pro Sentret, which was a social service for women, mainly drug users, who sold sex to finance their heroin addiction. Pro Sentret started with an abolitionist approach to offer exit programmes, but eventually became a strong supporter of harm reduction work. The Tursdagsgruppen also brought together female sex workers who did not have drug problems, and they discussed sex worker politics and the absence of sex workers in the public debate. Our founders were working at the Ministry of Health on HIV prevention involving sex workers, which provided the resources to establish PION.
We’re a small organisation with a team of seven people doing multiple tasks and covering several positions. Also, 50% of our Board Members have experience in sex work, and we also have lawyers, health specialists, and people from many different backgrounds which allows us to connect with a very wide range of institutions.
EC: Congratulations on the many years of experience! Could you tell me a bit more about the main issues you work on? And who are the people you support?
AR: PION’s community includes everyone who is in sex work in Norway, so we work with female, male, transgender, local, and migrant sex workers. The only people we don’t have services for are the most marginalised groups of sex workers, such as undocumented migrants and drug users, because we don’t have the proper resources to provide the social services and support that they need. Also, there are public services in Oslo, for example, who specifically support these communities.
We do harm reduction work for HIV prevention, and our goal is to do outreach work to show that we are there for people. We do health work such as distribute condoms and lube, help people to get PrEP and so on and we offer legal aid. We also advocate to change the political situation towards sex work in Norway. As you know, in 2009 Norway banned the purchase of sex, which has had a major impact on sex workers who are an easy target for the police. The ban on the purchase of sex came because of the Labour Party and the Socialist Left, which were then in government and the radical feminists had demanded it since the late 1980s. But everyone knows that the reason for this majority to criminalize the purchase of sex was not sudden support for the radical feminists’ gender violence view but trigged by moral panic interspersed with racism and sexism over the increase of Nigerian street sex workers in Oslo, Bergen and Stavanger. The Nigerian sex workers had residence permits in Italy and Spain.
This was a major step back for us, we felt like we had to start again from the beginning to try to find alternative regulations for sex workers. We are studying New Zealand’s legislation and arguing to get the regulation out of the penal code and make a specific bill for sex work in Norway based on the New Zealand model. Many of the people who need our services are selling sex but don’t see themselves as sex workers, so our approach is very broad. We are a sex workers organisation but not a trade union. As a trade union, we would’ve worked exclusively for labour rights and excluded those groups of sex sellers who don’t define themselves as sex workers, while we’re both a political actor and run peer supported rights work. We do hope that someone would start a sex workers’ trade union in Norway so we can cooperate with them.
EC: What are some of the challenges that sex workers face in Norway? Do you have any contact with victims of human trafficking? If so, could you tell us a bit about the main challenges for trafficked persons as well?
AR: Yes, some people who are victims of trafficking have contacted us and we refer them to organisations who provide the necessary assistance. We don’t have the necessary resources to support them and there are other organisations focused on this issue that are better prepared than us. Of course, we offer all the help we can by putting them in contact with institutions and organisations that can provide lawyers and shelter to them. We distinguish between trafficking and sex work, which is not the case of the public debate and policymaking in Norway, yet for us this is a very important distinction. Sex workers can be victims of trafficking, but sex work is not trafficking. This means that the dominant view in public policy is focused on migrant women who sell sex, and it’s not nuanced enough to distinguish between different groups of people. Since 2005, it’s not just the criminalisation of purchasing sex, but also the pimp paragraph [penal code §315] and the anti-trafficking paragraph [penal code § 224] that are used to fight transnational organised crime. The police are chasing sex workers. They do undercover operation on websites and pose as clients to get access to sex workers’ address. The police raid the premises, confiscate the sex workers’ mobile phones and private belongings, and call the landlord, threaten a pimp report and say they must evict the tenant. If sex workers are working together, they are charged with pimping.
In the 1990s and the early 2000s, sex workers used to work together in groups, but now they’re travelling and working alone to avoid the police.
From the mid-2000s to around 2015, the raids on sex workers were legitimized as combating trafficking. But since 2015, the raids have been carried out by Immigration with the aim of deporting foreign sex workers. The immigration police use the penal code provisions on prostitution to enforce a political anti-migration goal. Sex workers are subject to arbitrary controls and sanctions that have serious consequences for their life situation. Especially sex workers who only have a residence permit and come from countries outside Europe risk being deported to their country of origin even if they have an apartment, partner, etc. in Europe.
Around 80% of sex workers in Norway are migrants – both people living in Norway and migrant sex workers traveling around in Europe. The mobility among sex workers in Europe is quite high.
EC: Can a migrant be deported for engaging in sex work?
AR: They don’t directly use sex work as a reason for deportation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they used sex work as an excuse to ‘prevent’ the transmission of the virus and protect public health even though there was nothing that indicated that sex workers posed a threat. The police asserted in the media that sex workers were infectious disease bombs - as a ghost from the HIV epidemic!
But since the immigration authorities don’t recognise sex work as work, migrants don’t need a work permit to do sex work, so migrant sex workers come into the country as tourists and the immigration police therefore use section 17e of the Immigration Act, which states that when the foreigner cannot prove the stated purpose of the stay, they can be deported.
They need to ‘act’ as tourists. Sex workers are deported on incorrect grounds, it may be that the police claim that they have been here longer than the tourist visa allows, that they don’t have travel documents for return even if they do have a ticket showing they are leaving the following week.
The interrogations often take place without an interpreter even if the sex workers speak very poor English - as do police officers – and sex workers are asked to sign documents without fully understanding what they’re signing. They’re entitled to a lawyer, but police-appointed lawyers don’t always work in the best interests of the client. Our work is to ensure that sex workers' rights are safeguarded, especially when it comes to deportation because it means a ban on entry afterwards and can have major consequences for stays in Schengen countries
EC: Does the general public in Norway view sex work as a crime?
AR: In Norway, it’s legal to sell sex and income from sex work is subject to tax and Value Added Tax. According to the Immigration Act, sex work is not defined as work, and according to the Criminal Code, it is not allowed to advertise your own sexual services or rent premises for sex work. The only place sex workers can work legally is in the streets. Few people know about this complex picture and politicians don't care, so yes there’s a clear polarisation on the issue. However, there has been a shift in the last decade within the civil society sector, as more people have joined the discussion in favour of decriminalising sex work. The abolitionist view is not as strong anymore, but abolitionists have a strong position among certain political sectors because of the conflation between sex work and trafficking and the fight against organised crime.
Lately, PION has been receiving more support, especially from young people. The problem is that, for example, both Norway and Sweden are promoting the ban on purchasing sex to fight organised crime and trafficking, so I think there is a very strong direction on the political level to endorse the criminalisation of sex work. And even at the EU level, there are strong attempts to get the EU Parliament to take a stance in favour of the Swedish model. But I think for the countries who have adopted the Swedish model that the policy is not about sex work, it’s actually, as we’ve seen in Norway, about controlling migration and legitimising a fight against ‘transnational crime’ as a political goal and even drug policies. It’s an extension of the war on drugs. So, just like in the 1980s in Norway sex work was seen as a drug problem and public policies were directed at getting people out of drug use, now with UNTOC it’s seen as a crime problem. I think it’s very hard to change this situation on the political level, but we do have strong support from the community that are pressing for a change in perspective.
EC: How do you incorporate the experiences and perspectives of the sex workers in your work?
AR: PION has always based its work on sex workers’ needs. While we do political work, this is not our main focus. The purpose of our activities is to serve sex workers directly and from their point of view, that’s why we do a lot of outreach work. We have always focused on harm reduction, and I think this is because we first started doing HIV prevention. If you look at sex workers’ organisations in other countries, for example, you can see that they are more political, but our goal is to support sex workers and address issues from their viewpoints. We are also working with the tax authorities, because even if sex work is not legal here, it is still taxable. We are also pressuring politicians and policymakers to look into the multiple laws that we have, as each of them (immigration law, tax law, penal code) says something different. When it comes to policy advocacy, our main goal is to decriminalise sex work.
EC: You mentioned that 80% of sex workers in Norway are migrants, so I was wondering if your services are provided in multiple languages or how do you work around language barriers.
AR: We have a Thai person who does outreach work with Thai communities, as well as a Spanish-speaking person for Hispanic communities. We also hired a migrant sex worker to do peer support work among male and transgender sex workers. We try to have as many languages covered as possible. We do not interact that much with East European sex workers because we don’t have Russian, Ukrainian or Polish speakers. But we saw during the pandemic that they know we exist, and they spread the word for sex workers to reach out to us if they need anything. We support them with finding a lawyer if they’ve been detained. And for the languages we don’t speak, we try to communicate at least on a very basic level to let them know that we’ll support them, help them find a lawyer, give them the best chance they can have so as not to be deported.
EC: What about traffickers, do you know anything about them, who they are and how they operate?
AR: I don’t have first-hand information, but what I know from the police and from conferences is that most cases in Norway that are first regarded as trafficking end up as pimping, because it’s difficult for the police to investigate. I also know that it’s mostly people who sell sex that are caught by the police. It’s not like they’re criminals, and it’s mostly women. If you’re working as a sex worker and you’re organising other sex workers, then you can be regarded as a pimp by the law, and female sex workers are also convicted as traffickers. It’s more like they’re trapped in a situation where there is a third party involved that they owe money to. I don’t think there are many cases where people have been trafficked and exploited, like the stories frequently presented the media. I think you see worse cases of trafficking and exploitation in other sectors such as the fishing and other industries in Norway.
EC: You mentioned that in Norway sex workers cannot work together in an apartment because they might be charged with pimping. You also mentioned that they usually travel around. Is this the most common way to organise their work?
AR: Today, I think it’s more common to take outcalls where you visit the client at home or in a motel where they’ve rented a room. This is not a good solution because you have less control of your own business. There are also apartments that you can rent for this purpose for a couple of days or a week as a mobile sex worker, but the price is very high. There are still some sex workers working in hotels, but they have to be very careful because the police work in cooperation with hotel staff and they can easily be reported. Also, if you’re a Thai woman or a Black woman, for example, you can be denied services at a hotel because they think you’re doing sex work, even if you’re not. We recently published a report based on a survey about the experiences of people who sell sex via the internet, and most of the respondents mentioned that they don’t go to the police or talk to health workers because of stigma, and they had many experiences of violence, harassment and threats from their clients. This was surprising because I thought that clients behaved better, but I apparently criminalisation is affecting them.
EC: I don’t have any more questions. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
AR: The conflation between sex work and trafficking in our legislation has made sex workers more vulnerable. Not only has it made them an easier target for the police and criminals, but it has also influenced the clients’ attitudes. Not all clients behave badly, of course, but both criminals and clients speculate that sex workers will not go to the police to report them, and they use that to their advantage.
In terms of political approach, in the past sex work used to be understood as a social problem and those who made a living selling sex needed help and support. Today, the fight against crime dominates the political approach and the focus is on human traffickers, pimps, and clients, while sex workers have become completely invisible. Sex work is no longer understood as an expression of poverty, social problems, living conditions or access to the rest of the labour market. It’s individualised and about strengthening police resources. The criminal perspective dominates everything.
EC: Thank you very much.