Heather Brunskell-Evans: Hello. So this evening I have the immense privilege of podcasting with Merly from Sweden. Thank you so much for agreeing to podcasts with us this evening. 

Merly: Thank you. Hello. So honoured to be invited.

Heather:  Could you give us a little bit of background about yourself and what you've been doing?

I've had a little look on the internet and you are famous really within Sweden within the Scandinavian countries, but, relatively, is it fair to say unknown over here, but I've read some of what you've written and it's absolutely amazing. So we are so, so pleased to be able to share this now with everybody in the UK.

So, yeah, please, could you just let people know what you’ve been doing.

Merly: Oh, yeah. Well, thank you for that presentation. I'm born in Colombia. Came to Sweden, was the coerced into prostitution as a child. I was 14. Started to be outspoken about prostitution when I was 17, I wasn't an activist then, I was just a person in prostitution who felt the threat of being quiet. Being silent was much bigger of a trap than being able to speak out.  Living in a small town that wasn't easy, but I made a choice. I was in prostitution for 16 years. Right now, I am probably one of the few actually speaks about being a prostitution and being a mum simultaneously.

 Because I was a Mum for several years to my eldest daughter while I was in prostitution. I got out four years ago. It did change characters. After I gave birth to Corinne my oldest child. Before I had my daughter, I was in substance abuse. So that ended before I got my daughter, but the prostitution wouldn't let go of me.

So, yeah, I kept with the prostitution until 2015, when I just said, I'm going to try and live the life where there will be no prostitution, no back door. I will be poor if I have to, I will end up in debt if I have to. And I will not hurt myself anymore to that. 

Heather: So you said you went in at 14. I mean, that's very, very young. How did that come about? Because. Yeah. One of the things that we hear about the Nordic countries about the Swedish Model and so on is that this doesn't happen, that younger people end up in this situation. 

Merly:  Well, sadly, I've heard that too, when I've been out to speaking to people outside of Sweden, sadly, that is a lie. It's a bare faced lie. 

Prostitution happens in Sweden as it happens in many countries, you are being groomed or forced or manipulated into the situation in the same way. We don't differ from the other countries. I think that the age where people in general enter prostitution is between 12 and 13 or something.

I think they said very low number. We need to think about it globally. I think it's slightly higher in Sweden, but it follows the same pattern. I was bullied. I had low self-esteem. I had friends, I have parts of my childhood that is happy, but I grew up in a primarily white, upper class neighbourhood where being black, being a girl, it was not normal and it was not like the things I can read now about how black girls are being sexualised at an early age and the rights we have to our bodies and our sexuality and how early that is taken away from us. I can really relate to that.

 So when I was 13, I was pretty heavily harassed. I had my first encounter with a man who was a couple of years older than me. I know how the story goes. When you do something with a guy and that just ends up in the school paper. We didn't have a school paper, but everyone knew, and this is going on and on. So my sense of self was very low.

I had what I thought was a friend who really took advantage of that. I was raped for the first time when I was 14. And after that, this person really saw an opportunity to get me into prostitution. 

So it was that being able to threaten me saying that I will tell people, your parents about that you drink, that you had sex with a guy, that people loathe you, that people think you're a slut, if you don't do that.

Looking back at the 14-year-old, as a 34-year-old, I would say you could just have tried to reach out. You could just have lived with the fact that your parents knew, but as a 14-year-old, that was all already in a bad situation, that was too much to bear, too big of a threat.

So, I did that and well, of course the gun was even bigger at my head after I did that the first time. So I got stuck with it in that way. 

Heather: Obviously, once you're in that situation as a child, you know, that's quite a big thing to be dealing with. Did you consider exiting? Was there any help for you? Were there any services available to you to reach out to? 

Merly: Well, we have some services in Sweden, but the problem is that most of them - Oh yeah. We have three receptions in Sweden in the two largest cities, they have been in Sweden in from the seventies, but I didn't know about them at first because they are in the cities, I’m from a small town and in my small town, I could have accessed the social security network. Even when it comes to prostitution there's no guarantee because when I was 15, I actually did try and reach out after being in prostitution for a little over a year, I tried to talk to them. I try to explain the situation and they demonised me they looked at me, like I was the perpetrator, like I was a demon, like I was an adult making my own decisions. 

So even if you can reach out our experiences, my experiences, along with a lot of other people living in Sweden with the same experiences as me, is that you do reach out and you feel worse after you do.

Because what happens to me was that I was described as overly sexual. I was described as almost like a predator because of my background in prostitution. This was when I just turned 16. I had been in prostitution for what, almost two years. I came there after a breakdown after being locked in up an apartment in Stockholm, by another pimp. This happens, you get passed around. 

So after that, I turned to the receptions that we had that were working with all kinds of youth, there was not prostitution. It was just youth people under the age of 22, I think who needed the prescriptions or condoms or whatever. And they were kinder to me. They wanted to talk to me, but I couldn't tell them about the prostitution, I was so embarrassed. I was so ashamed. 

Once I did then I ended up in a psychiatric facility, the demonisation started, it began. I was locked in there for five months and I didn't receive any trauma treatment. I didn't receive any care. I was being told that you should never ever tell anyone about what had happened to you because people won't want to be your friend if you tell them. You won't get in any relationships. It will be hard for you to get a job and then going to school. So basically it was just five months of shaming. 

I will tell you this. Tomorrow, I'm going back to the same facility almost 20 years later after addressing them and saying that this pattern hasn't stopped, you have continuously kept acting like the same way as you did to me.

We need to talk about how you treat people that comes from prostitution, who comes from being a survivor of abuse because they've shown that same pattern over and over and over again. The same problem.  

Heather: When you're looking back on that and you're thinking, what would have been a benefit to you? What do you think would be the best or the ideal model that would have benefited you back then?

Merly: That's the $1 million question going back. What I wish would have happened is that they would have treated me like a victim and that I would have been, that I could have had trauma treatment. Because even though I was still a child, I was being very sort of closed off emotionally because of everything that has happened.

 If you just gave me the choice, I could have kept that even if I said no and just went on to do everything, that's happened after that, what I feel now is that I was shamed and blamed for something that wasn't my fault and I carried that with me instead and I think that that hurt me more. 

Heather: So there’s a movement here of people who say, well, to do that would be a rescue industry. It's victimizing people rather than empowering them. And so I'm quite interested to hear your view would be on that, that, you know, we shouldn't treat women and girls in prostitution as victims because to do so is to be patronising essentially. So, what would you say to them? 

Merly:  I would probably ask them, who are you helping with that sort of angle to it? Are you really helping the person in prostitution? Being patronising saying that you are a victim of a circumstance, is not to me the same thing. 

I met some of them in Sweden, too, that everything is shaming. You can't talk about even exiting because that will be shaming. I think it's a bigger shame to say that you should live in your guttural feelings and trauma and constant rapes and just being brutalised because I don't feel like helping you because very often, if not all the time, when people start talking about that it could be shaming to have people in prostitution, that is people with absolutely no experience whatsoever about prostitution. They are theorizing prostitution.

They are probably reading a lot of old reports from an era, which is still happening in a lot of places and countries where it's basically the sex lobbyists who have got into the system and just poison it. It's the same person that passes a child on the streets with no clothes and is dying saying that I can't help everyone.

It's more problematic to me, talking about shaming because it's basically saying that we should enable you to be in prostitution rather than helping you out of it. And who are you helping? You're only helping the pimps, the sex buyers to sort of preserve the status quo of things. 

Heather: So in an ideal world, what would you see set up?

Over here, we're looking very much at two models. One is decriminalisation of everything, including what some people call management and others call pimps. And then the other is the Nordic Model, which I think is often held up because this sort of perfect model. As someone who actually lives in Sweden and has experienced prostitution in Sweden. What's your views on that? 

Merly: I stand behind the Swedish model. I think it's a great model, but my critique of the same is that it was not thoroughly implemented in the system. If you look at how the police and the courtrooms are really implementing the law, they're doing a great job a lot of the time. A lot of the times where prostitution, especially when it comes to people under 18, they will do proper investigations and they will bring people to justice. But when you look at the other side, which is also in the motivation for the law, looking at the people in prostitution, as victims, who should receive treatments, or should receive resources, that was not properly implemented.

When you look at our statistic that says that 72% of the Swedish population is for the Swedish model. I used to say, yeah, therefore that the thing that it's not right to buy another person, but if you ask the question differently, if you would ask, do you think that the people in prostitution have themselves to blame, you probably would get a different answer, but as a model, as something that people should strive to implement in the countries, I say that I will always back the Swedish model. It is a great model when it's properly implemented and we are doing plenty of that work now, when we are really starting to bring in the question to the surface, that maybe we should look at how we could implement it like that, or we're talking to police, we are talking to people in the healthcare sector, teachers and social workers. We're talking to all of them, trying to strive to the goal of having people to understand what the other part of the law was and, you know, filling the gap when it comes to policy implementation and so on. 

Heather: So if it were to work as it was set up to, so with proper resources available to women in prostitution, in order to access with a little bit more on the social side and a little bit less on the legal side, perhaps, would you say that that would be almost an improvement. Could it be improved on? 

Merly: The law is actually very good how it’s written like word for word. It's a very good law. I wouldn't change that. I would probably make the penalties, even though we know that longer penalties and prison time, almost never services the purpose that we think it does when it comes to prostitution, like sex buyers. They're only charged and never really imprisoned. They get fines now. But the government are talking about actually giving prison time for prostitution. It is in the law that they could get prison time for doing that. But yeah, they’re talking about actually like being more clear about that and maybe extending that. 

But when it comes to the other part, sorry, if I misunderstood your question, but I feel like I need to take an example to explain how it was not properly implemented.

 If you look at the social department in Sweden, they have their own law, which is, you know, just the mirroring other laws. And in there, people who are in prostitution are not named as victims, they're not named at all. Which means when I was 18, trying to get resources because I wanted to leave prostitution, the social worker in front of me, he looked at me and said, well, it's a job. You have made plenty of money in the last couple of months, I just have to read, you know, look at how much you made and see if we are able to give you money.

So she just did some calculations and said, well, you know what, you're welcome back in three months because that's, what's the estimated figure that she said that I had like a proper income.

 People often in Sweden gasp when I tell you them, this, like, this is legal now, due to that, we have an implementable hole in the system saying that it's okay for each and everyone’s social worker to view it differently at their own will or how, how they see things.

So that is a hole that I'm currently trying to fill up with taking different contacts with politicians and some department saying that you need to launch an investigation and you need to shut that down. It shouldn't matter who you meet. We should have made a statement saying that if you’re a person in prostitution, you should be able to start from square one because you are a person that has been victimised.

So that is one thing that we are doing.  

Heather: So that wasn't taken into account when you were 18 trying to leave and it's reduced to, well, can we match the income rather than have you experienced trauma? 

Merly: Exactly. Because now it's up to each and every one to make their own decision. And, many people would say, that's really, you don't have that right. If you look at the law and if you look at the government explanation of how they want to work, but then you have something in Sweden called Municipal Independence in every municipal, they have their own social workers working for them. In one Municipality, they will say that we are not working with people in prostitution. This is not something that we highlight. This is not something that we want to give resources to. We have plenty of people working with substance abuse. So for people in prostitution, go on the dark group if they want help. So they would only help people with substance abuse. 

And I come from a small town like that. The municipality that earlier has had that sort of way to work. And it's very destructive. It means that no one is getting help. 

Heather: This is really, really fascinating from a sort of legal perspective and a human rights perspective particularly because obviously one thing that we're often hearing is that the Nordic Model has these theories but we're not really seeing, cause it's not in practice in the UK, we're not seeing how it would work in practice. 

So something that we're working on as FiLiA is the possibility of sort of updating the Nordic Model because it is 20 years old now, in order to really bolster that possibility of making available resources, ensuring that, for example, women don't lose contact with their children as a result of being in prostitution, ensuring that the council, which is our local municipality, has a duty of housing all those types of things.

So do you think with some scaffolding, a theory like that would be workable?

Merly: Oh, yes. It would be a great idea to update the Nordic Model I think. I am currently planning on the international conference on prostitution and the human tracking which is for me, basically the same thing. You can be trafficked within your own city, but, yes, that's just to highlight the implementation part.

And update part, like what do we need to work with? Because if you look at resources when it comes to prostitution and helping people in prostitution, if they're not based on the actual needs of the people in prostitution, they are worthless. I can take, for example, Sweden, again, like we have had during the last 20 years, quite a big sum of money being put into research, being put into working with an issue but there's not trickledown effect. So all that money will disappear sideways. It will go to high governmental officials that goes to fancy conferences, not arranged for social workers or policemen's or any other person not nurses.

It will just be the upper class people working with each other, and I've criticised that. So, yes, please, update the law updated and make sure that you really make sure that there is a resource tickled down. It could be money. It could be competence, just knowledge sharing, competence, like all of that is so valuable if you do that, because it will make a big change.

And also when people say, and I keep hearing this, even in Sweden, almost every day. You need to listen to the sex workers. Yeah. You need to listen to the people in prostitution when you're talking about resources helping them, you need to really listen to them, not the sex workers. 

Heather: What's the distinction?

Merly: The distinction is that everyone, pretty much, can call themselves a sex worker. A sex worker can be a pimp. It can be a buyer, really, if he gets money for doing that, like in porn, for example, I would say that. It could be someone working in an erotic shop. I wouldn't say that that comes nearly to the experience of being in prostitution as a prostitute, being a sex worker, I think it's just the way to a patriarchal wash, if you may, of something that should be aiming to help and protect people. Instead it's used to normalise. Normalise prostitution, normalise brutality, normalise people's lack of choices.

Heather: That’s what we’re hopefully working to end. And so we're really looking forward to your conference. I hope that FiLiA will be able to attend. I hope that you'll be able to come to FiLiA as well.

Merly: I am looking so much forward to come and see you this fall and not even hell can keep me away, so I will be there.

HEATHER: Brilliant. I think that this is the beginning of a really, really exciting partnership to really change the world. So thank you so much for talking to me this evening and I'm looking forward to meeting you.