The laws on prostitution in Sweden make it illegal to buy sex, but not to sell the use of one's own body for such services. Procuring and operating a brothel remain illegal. The criminalization of the purchase of sex, but not the selling of one's own body for sex, was unique when first enacted in Sweden in Since then, this "Nordic model" for sex trade legislation has been adopted in several other nations.
Prostitution is not mentioned in any law texts in Sweden in the middle ages , and was thus not formally a crime. However, under the influence of the church, sexual acts outside of marriage were criminalized for both sexes regardless of circumstances, which also affected prostitutes.
The normal punishment for extramarital sexual relations was fines or if the accused was unable to pay them pillorying, whipping, or other disciplinarian physical punishments within the Kyrkoplikt. The earliest law to explicitly ban prostitution was in the Civil Code of , where procuring and brothel keeping were punished with whipping, imprisonment and forced labor, and prostitution at a brothel with forced labor.
In 18th-century Stockholm, there were concerns that coffee houses that were managed by women, financed by former rich lovers, were in fact masked brothels, as were often pubs and bars, where the waitresses were suspected to be prostitutes. In , a law was introduced which allowed compulsory medical examination and treatment of any one suspected of carrying a sexual disease, a law that was in practice mostly forced upon women in the capital suspected by the police of being prostitutes, which lead to protests of harassment.
Between and , an attempt was made by the local authorities in the capital of Stockholm to establish state control over prostitution, and thereby sexual diseases, through an experiment with private licensed brothels, London and Stadt Hamburg , but without success.
