“What sort of a signal does this give if you distribute condoms to men committing a criminal offence,” said local councillor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh to Skånska Dagbladet.
The prostitution unit at Malmö council announced that it planned to start distributing a parcel of items including condoms and a rape alarm, to prostitutes. But it has now emerged that condoms are also on offer to those buying sex.
Sweden criminalized the purchase, but not the sale, of sex in a new law passed on January 1st 1999.
The law has subsequently been criticized for focusing on only one side of the problem and that prostitution in Sweden has simply moved underground.
Its defenders argue that sex buyers are the last link in the trafficking chain and therefore responsible for the exploitation. Furthermore it is argued that the problem has to be tackled somewhere and that street prostitution is a logical place to start.
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