ABSTRACT
Sex work laws are subject to ongoing debate globally with different countries taking divergent legislative approaches to regulating sex work. New Zealand is a unique example as the only country to have decriminalised sex work nationwide. Despite being a policy for which sex worker rights organisations around the world have campaigned for decades, which is endorsed by several international organisations such as Amnesty International and the World Health Organisation (WHO), decriminalisation remains exceptional in the context of global sex work regulation (Amnesty International 2016; Day & Ward 2004; Wojcicki 1999). Instead, the criminalisation of clients, commonly referred to as the ‘Nordic Model’, has been adopted in several countries such as Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland and France (Huschke & Ward 2017). This policy approach is based on the premise that sex work is intrinsically harmful, and proponents of this perspective conceptualise the sex industry as emblematic of gender inequality (Svanström 2017).
