ABSTRACT
The chapter will discuss the proposed amendment to Article 18(a), in which the European Commission has suggested that EU Member States should make it mandatory to criminalize the knowing use of trafficked persons to discourage demand. The chapter will explore the concept of demand, the roles of different stakeholders, including civil society organizations, against which the different understandings of “discouraging demand” among advocates of the abolition of prostitution and sex worker rights will be discussed. The chapter will also present the strategies that sex worker rights defenders have in eliminating exploitation and the counterstrategies that aim to eliminate, silence, or exclude sex worker rights defenders in the contemporary European political arena.
