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Greece is not the only European country experiencing severe economic problems. Iceland has had some of its own. They include billions in unpaid debts and a banking collapse. Even so, lawmakers in Iceland’s Althingi parliament house (flickr image: putneymark) had another pressing matter to deal with: striptease! This week, they voted to ban strip clubs in their island nation. Marco Werman talks with Gundun Jonsdattor whose organization Stigmot provides information against sexual violence.

• Iceland bailout crisis

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MARCO WERMAN:  Greece is not the only European country experiencing severe economic problems.  Iceland has had some of its own.  They include billions in unpaid debts and a banking collapse.  Even so, lawmakers in Iceland had another pressing matter to deal with; strip clubs.  This week they voted to ban strip clubs from their island nation.  Gundun Jonsdattor is with the organization Stigmot in Iceland.  They provide information against sexual violence and helped push Parliament into the ban on strip clubs. Ms. Jonsdattor, why did lawmakers in Iceland decide to enforce this ban?

GUNDUN JONSDATTOR:  Yeah.  I understand that this might sound strange to you, because strip clubs may sound innocent and acceptable.  But in Iceland we had the porn industry entering with a huge force ten years ago.  And at the time, we got 13 so-called strip clubs, with foreign women coming from poor countries.  We got at least 1,000 women coming, and let me remind you that the whole population of Iceland is 330,000 inhabitants.  So we – - one foreign woman from a poor country to dance at the clubs for every 100 Icelandic men.  Those women were not here all at the same times and although it sounds innocent to come there dancing, the income of the clubs came from what was called the so-called private dancing, where the man could buy privacy with the women and then you can imagine what happens.

WERMAN: Is the intention, then, ultimately to ban prostitution as well?  Is this kind of like an overture to that?

JONSDATTOR: What we already did last summer was to criminalize the buying of women and prostitution.  We are the third country in the world to do that after Sweden and Norway.  So we have already criminalized buying women, but what we are doing now is closing the stores that sell access to women.

WERMAN: How many strip clubs are there in Iceland?

JONSDATTOR: Now there are about three or four, depending on how you define them.

WERMAN: Iceland, for a lot of people, is a socially liberal sort of place, but I think the way you’ve been describing this legislation, the motivation is pretty clear.  Half of all politicians, almost half of all politicians in Iceland are women.  Did that make a difference?

JONSDATTOR: I’m sure it does make a difference, but we have had opinion polls about how the population of Iceland thinks about prostitution and the women in prostitution.  We have this conscious awareness that there is a strong connection between violence and prostitution and the opinion poll from 2007 showed that there was a maturity in every political party for criminalizing the buying of women because of our understanding of what was involved in all this.

WERMAN: Are there any Icelanders upset with this ban?

JONSDATTOR: Of course there are.  There is a huge market for women as you must understand when you see that we brought in all those women 10 years ago.  Those who are willing to buy and those who don’t care about the situation of the women they are buying, they want to be able to continue to buy women.

WERMAN: In countries like the U.S., the U.K., other places too, a debate rages as to whether stripping and prostitution are degrading or empowering to women.  It doesn’t sound like Iceland really buys its post-feminist empowerment argument.

JONSDATTOR: No we don’t and neither do the other Nordic countries.  We are, both Sweden and Norway have, they have criminalized the buying of women because of this strong connection between sexual violence and what happens within the porn industry.

WERMAN: Gundun Jonsdattor with the organization Stigmot in Iceland, very good to speak with you.  Thank you for your time.

JONSDATTOR: Thank you.

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