EU prosjekt med mørk bakside

Kvinnefrontens representant i CATW (Coalition Against Trafficking in Women), Stina Bergsten, jobber nå med å kartlegge prostitusjonspolitikken i Europa og EU.

Hun ser på “The DemandAT project” – et prosjekt som i utgangspunktet jobber med å få bukt med menneskehandel, men som også består av mennesker som aktivt arbeider for legalisering og “normalisering” av prostitusjon.

Stina Bergsten skriver:

The DemandAT project brings together a multidisciplinary “team of experts” across seven European countries from 1 January 2014 to 30 June 2017. The project’s nine partner institutions span Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. It is funded by the European Union. DemandAT is an interdisciplinary project addressing the challenge of understanding demand for trafficking in human beings and analysing the policy and practical measures that can influence this demand. The project feeds into recent efforts of European countries to find ways to reduce demand for the products and services provided by trafficked persons within their own economies and societies as a means of tackling trafficking. The project investigates multiple forms of trafficking and forced labour to assess the impact and potential of demand-side measures to reduce trafficking. The main problem with this project is the so called “team of Experts”. The team consists of lobbyist who have been working for the pro lobby for years. 

Examples: 

• Petra Östergren – Swedish PhD student who has been one of the loudest critics when it comes to the Nordic Model the last 15 years. 

• Don Kulick – Also a critic to the Swedish sex legislation. Went from defending the right to buy sex for 400 000 Swedish men to nowadays focus on defending physically disabled men’s right to go to Thailand and buy sex. 

• Marieke van Doorninck – Historically been on the board for all the Dutch pro organisations such as De Graaf Stichting and has started organisations like ICRSE (sex workers rights). She is also a representant for La Strada, an NGO lobbying for legalization of prostition in Eastern Europe. 

The fact that this group of well-known lobbyists will assess EU action against trafficking is like a bad joke. The main European scientists on the subject: Julia O’Connell Davidson, Sven-Axel Månsson with over thirty years of research on the subject is completely sidelined. The other researchers in DemandAT Group has in general never done research on prostitution, but focused on migration, fisheries, agriculture and border policy – something that has completely different mechanisms than men’s interest in buying sex. And who is going to supervise the project? No one other than the sex industry’s own NGO – GAATW.