ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introduction to the 1999 criminalization of the purchase of sex, an overview of the socio-political climate in Sweden during the years leading up to the law's introduction, as well as a critical interpretation of the political debates, the law's genealogies, and the discourses that have been used to justify and shape the sexkopslagen. The radical feminism that informs the sexkopslagen is an oppression model of 'prostitution' constructing sex work as itself a form of violence in which other violence is always enacted. As a result, these radical feminist philosophies and interventions seek to eradicate prostitution. Accordingly, states that have decriminalised or legalised prostitution are problematised in Sweden, and the 'liberal case' was not seriously considered in legal debate. Swedish criminalisation of the purchase of sex represents the first ever example of a country legislating according to the radical feminist call to criminalise demand in attempt to abolish prostitution.
