Iceland Considers Banning Strip Clubs as Exploitation

Update: The legislation banning stripping unanimously passed in Iceland.

Icelandic police might soon find themselves saying "Hey, baby ... put it back on." That's because the government is considering a full ban on striptease for profit in the country. Police in Iceland have been growing increasingly concerned with the hundreds of women who are brought into the country every year to work in strip clubs, many of whom they suspect are trafficked, controlled, or otherwise don't have full agency. So lawmakers have decided to try nipping the problem in the bud, by banning the striptease all together.

Investigations by Icelandic and European police have found that stripping is an industry which many women are lured into under false pretenses or held in against their will. Traffickers can make an incredible amount of money by controlling women they force to work in strip clubs. They profit off of the women's salaries and tips, and they may even get a cut of the profits from the bar. Some traffickers will also force women to sell sex acts at the strip club, profiting off that income as well. In some areas, stripping is a more profitable industry than prostitution. Icelandic police have found in investigations that even women who are in the industry of their own fruition are often being coerced or controlled by someone else behind the scenes.

One of the most interesting elements to this swift and sweeping proposal is that prostitution is legal in Iceland, as long as a third party doesn't financially benefit from it. And the folks in Reykjavik have no intention of changing that. So if the current recommended legislation passes, Iceland could become the first country where it's legal for a woman to sell a man a sex act but not a lap dance. Is it just me, or does that seem a little out of balance? Usually, stripteases and exotic dancing are considered a safer, more socially acceptable form of commercial sex. Many advocates who have rejected the common assumption that most women in prostitution are in the industry voluntarily haven't paid the same attention to women in stripping. Is Iceland on to something, that more serious human rights abuses and exploitation take place in stripping than in prostitution? Or are they just over-reacting to their human trafficking problem in a slightly odd, possibly backwards way?

If this law passes, Scandinavia will officially become the most fascinating case study in the effectiveness of legislation in curbing human trafficking. In Sweden and Norway, it's legal to sell sex but not to buy it or profit from it. In Finland, it's not legal to engage in prostitution at any level. In the Netherlands (I know, not technically Scandinavia, but close), prostitution is completely legal, taxed, and regulated. And now in Iceland, there is a possibility that selling sex will be legal but stripteases won't. Well, I for one am now accepting grants to go over and study how all these different policies affect rates of prostitution, human trafficking, and sexual violence in these countries.

The $63,000 question here is not "Does stripping harm women if they don't want to be strippers? " (which it obviously does), but "Are enough women forced, tricked, or coerced into stripping that the industry as a whole should be banned?" Similarly, you could ask, "Do the benefits of stripping for the women who choose it outweigh the costs to the women who don't, society, public health, etc.?" If Iceland can answer these questions, I'd love to see it. But if not, they may just end up telling everyone to please calm down and keep their clothes on.

Photo credit: Max-B