WUNRN
GERMANY - DEBATE ON CONTINUED
LEGALIZATION OF PROSTITUTION
Sânandrei
is a poor village in Romania with run-down houses and muddy paths. Some 80
percent of its younger residents are unemployed, and a family can count itself
lucky if it owns a garden to grow potatoes and vegetables.
Alina
is standing in front of her parents' house, one of the oldest in Sânandrei,
wearing fur boots and jeans. She talks about why she wanted to get away from
home four years ago, just after she had turned 22. She talks about her father,
who drank and beat his wife, and sometimes abused his daughter, too. Alina had
no job and no money.
Through
a friend's new boyfriend, she heard about the possibilities available in
Germany. She learned that a prostitute could easily earn €900 ($1,170) a month
there.
Alina
began thinking about the idea. Anything seemed better than Sânandrei. "I
thought I'd have my own room, a bathroom and not too many customers," she
says. In the summer of 2009, she and her friend got into the boyfriend's car
and drove through Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic until they reached
the German capital -- not the trendy Mitte neighborhood in the heart of the
city, but near Schönefeld airport, where the name of the establishment alone
said something about the owner: Airport Muschis ("Airport Pussies").
The brothel specialized in flat-rate sex. For €100 ($129), a customer could
have sex for as long and as often as he wanted.
It
all went very quickly, says Alina. There were other Romanians there who knew
the man who had brought them there. She was told to hand over her clothes and
was given revealing lingerie to wear instead. Only a few hours after her
arrival, she was expected to greet her first customers. She says that when she
wasn't nice enough to the clients, the Romanians reduced her wages.
The
Berlin customers paid their fee at the entrance. Many took drugs to improve
sexual performance and could last all night. A line often formed outside
Alina's room. She says that she eventually stopped counting how many men got
into her bed. "I blocked it out," she says. "There were so many,
every day."
Locked Up
Alina
says that she and the other women were required to pay the pimps €800 a week.
She shared a bed in a sleeping room with three other women. There was no other
furniture. All she saw of Germany was the Esso gas station around the corner,
where she was allowed to go to buy cigarettes and snacks, but only in the
company of a guard. The rest of the time, says Alina, she was kept locked up in
the club.
Prosecutors
learned that the women in the club had to offer vaginal, oral and anal sex, and
serve several men at the same time in so-called gangbang sessions. The men
didn't always use condoms. "I was not allowed to say no to anything,"
says Alina. During menstruation, she would insert sponges into her vagina so
that the customers wouldn't notice.
She
says that she was hardly ever beaten, nor were the other women. "They said
that they knew enough people in Romania who knew where our families lived. That
was enough," says Alina. When she occasionally called her mother on her
mobile phone, she would lie and tell her how nice it was in Germany. A pimp
once paid Alina €600, and she managed to send the money to her family.
Alina's
story is not unusual in Germany. Aid organizations and experts estimate that
there are up to 200,000 working prostitutes in the country. According to
various studies, including one by the European Network for HIV/STI Prevention
and Health Promotion among Migrant Sex Workers (TAMPEP), 65 to 80 percent of
the girls and women come from abroad. Most are from Romania and Bulgaria.
The
police can do little for women like Alina. The pimps were prepared for raids,
says Alina, and they used to boast that they knew police officers. "They
knew when a raid was about to happen," says Alina, which is why she never
dared to confide in a police officer.
The
pimps told the girls exactly what to tell the police. They should say that they
were surfing the web back home in Bulgaria or Romania and discovered that it
was possible to make good money by working in a German brothel. Then, they had
simply bought themselves a bus ticket and turned up at the club one day,
entirely on their own.
Web of Lies
It
seems likely that every law enforcement officer who works in a red-light
environment hears this same web of lies over and over again. The purpose of the
fiction is to cover up all indications of human trafficking, in which women are
brought to Germany and exploited there. It becomes a statement that transforms
women like Alina into autonomous prostitutes, businesswomen who have chosen
their profession freely and to whom Germany now wishes to offer good working
conditions in the sex sector of the service industry.
That's
the 'respectable whore' image politicians seem in thrall of: free to do as they
like, covered under the social insurance system, doing work they enjoy and
holding an account at the local savings bank. Social scientists have a name for
them: "migrant sex workers," ambitious service providers who are
taking advantage of opportunities they now enjoy in an increasingly unified
Europe.
In
2001, German parliament, the Bundestag, with the votes of the Social Democratic
Party/Green Party governing coalition in power at the time, passed a
prostitution law intended to improve working conditions for prostitutes. Under
the new law, women could sue for their wages and contribute to health,
unemployment and pension insurance programs. The goal of the legislation was to
make prostitution a profession like that of a bank teller or dental assistant,
accepted instead of ostracized.
The
female propagandists of the autonomous sex trade were very pleased with
themselves when the law was passed. Then Family Minister Christine Bergmann
(SPD) was seen raising a glass of champagne with Kerstin Müller, Green Party
parliamentary floor leader at the time, next to Berlin brothel operator
Felicitas Weigmann, now Felicitas Schirow. They were three women toasting the
fact that men in Germany could now go to brothels without any scruples.
Today
many police officers, women's organizations and politicians familiar with
prostitution are convinced that the well-meaning law is in fact little more
than a subsidy program for pimps and makes the market more attractive to human
traffickers.
Strengthening the Rights of Women
When
the prostitution law was enacted, the German civil code was also amended. The
phrase "promotion of prostitution," a criminal offence, was replaced
with "exploitation of prostitutes." Procurement is a punishable
offence when it is "exploitative" or "dirigiste." Police
and public prosecutors are frustrated, because these elements of an offence are
very difficult to prove. A pimp can be considered exploitative, for example, if
he collects more than half of a prostitute's earnings, which is rarely possible
to prove. In 2000, 151 people were convicted of procurement, while in 2011 it
was only 32.
The
aim of the law's initiators was in fact to strengthen the rights of the women,
and not those of the pimps. They had hoped that brothel operators would finally
take advantage of the opportunity to "provide good working conditions
without being subject to prosecution," as an appraisal of the law for the
Federal Ministry for Families reads.
Before
the new law, prostitution itself was not punished, but it was considered
immoral. The authorities tolerated brothels, euphemistically referring to them
as "commercial room rental." Today, just over 11 years after
prostitution was upgraded under the 2001 law, there are between 3,000 and 3,500
red-light establishments, according to estimates by the industry association
Erotik Gewerbe Deutschland (UEGD). The Ver.di public services union estimates
that prostitution accounts for about €14.5 billion in annual revenues.
There
are an estimated 500 brothels in Berlin, 70 in the smaller northwestern city of
Osnabrück and 270 in the small southwestern state of Saarland, on the French
border. Many Frenchmen frequent brothels in Saarland. Berlin's Sauna Club
Artemis, located near the airport, attracts many customers from Great Britain
and Italy.
Travel
agencies offer tours to German brothels lasting up to eight days. The outings
are "legal" and "safe," writes one provider on its
homepage. Prospective customers are promised up to 100 "totally nude
women" wearing nothing but heels. Customers are also picked up at the
airport and taken to the clubs in a BMW 5 Series.
Flat-Rate Horror
In addition to so-called
nudist or sauna clubs, where the male customers wear a towel while the women
are naked, large brothels have also become established. They advertise their
services at all-inclusive rates. When the Pussy Club opened near Stuttgart in
2009, the management advertised the club as follows: "Sex with all women
as long as you want, as often as you want and the way you want. Sex. Anal sex.
Oral sex without a condom. Three-ways. Group sex. Gang bangs." The price:
€70 during the day and €100 in the evening.
According
to the police, about 1,700 customers took advantage of the offer on the opening
weekend. Buses arrived from far away and local newspapers reported that up to
700 men stood in line outside the brothel. Afterwards, customers wrote in
Internet chat rooms about the supposedly unsatisfactory service, complaining
that the women were no longer as fit for use after a few hours.
The
business has become tougher, says Nuremberg social worker Andrea Weppert, who
has worked with prostitutes for more than 20 years, during which the total
number of prostitutes has tripled. According to Weppert, more than half of the
women have no permanent residence, but instead travel from place to place, so
that they can earn more money by being new to a particular city.
Today
"a high percentage of prostitutes don't go home after work, but rather
remain at their place of work around the clock," a former prostitute using
the pseudonym Doris Winter wrote in a contribution to the academic series
"The Prostitution Law." "The women usually live in the rooms
where they work," she added.
In
Nuremberg, such rooms cost between €50 and €80 a day, says social worker
Weppert, and the price can go up to €160 in brothels with a lot of customers.
Working conditions for prostitutes have "worsened in recent years,"
says Weppert. In Germany on the whole, she adds, "significantly more
services are provided under riskier conditions and for less money than 10 years
ago."
Dropping Prices
Despite
the worsening conditions, women are flocking to Germany, the largest
prostitution market in the European Union -- a fact that even brothel owners
confirm. Holger Rettig of the UEGD says that the influx of women from Romania
and Bulgaria has increased dramatically since the two countries joined the EU.
"This has led to a drop in prices," says Rettig, who notes that the
prostitution business is characterized by "a radical market economy rather
than a social market economy."
Munich
Police Chief Wilhelm Schmidbauer deplores the "explosive increase in human
trafficking from Romania and Bulgaria," but adds that he lacks access to
the necessary tools to investigate. He is often prohibited from using telephone
surveillance. The result, says Schmidbauer, "is that we have practically
no cases involving human trafficking. We can't prove anything."
This
makes it difficult to track down those who bring fresh product from the most
remote corners of Europe for Germany's brothels, product like Sina. She told
the psychologists in the office of the women's information center in Stuttgart
about her path to German flat-rate brothels. In Corhana, her native village
near Romania's border with the Republic of Moldova, most houses have no running
water. Sina and the other village girls used to fetch water from the well every
day. It was like a scene out of "Cinderella." All the girls dreamed
that a man would come one day to rescue them from their gloomy lives.
The
man, who eventually drove up to the village well in his big BMW, was named
Marian. For Sina it was love at first sight. He told her that there was work in
Germany, and her parents signed a form allowing her, as a minor, to leave the
country. On the trip to Schifferstadt in the southwestern state of
Rhineland-Palatinate, he gave Sina alcohol and slept with her.
Marian
delivered her to the "No Limit," a flat-rate brothel. Sina was only
16, and she allegedly served up to 30 customers a day. She was occasionally
paid a few hundred euros. Marian, worried about police raids, eventually sent
her back to Romania. But she returned and continued to work as a prostitute.
She hoped that a customer would fall in love with her and rescue her.
'No Measurable Improvements'
Has
Germany's prostitution law improved the situation of women like Sina? Five
years after it was introduced, the Family Ministry evaluated what the new
legislation had achieved. The report states that the objectives were "only
partially achieved," and that deregulation had "not brought about any
measurable actual improvement in the social coverage of prostitutes."
Neither working conditions nor the ability to exit the profession had improved.
Finally, there was "no solid proof to date" that the law had reduced
crime.
Hardly
a single court had heard a case involving a prostitute suing for her wages.
Only 1 percent of the women surveyed said that they had signed an employment
contract as a prostitute. The fact that the Ver.di union had developed a
"sample employment contract in the field of sexual services" didn't
change matters. In a poll conducted by Ver.di, a brothel operator said that she
valued the prostitution law because it reduced the likelihood of raids. In
fact, she said, the law was more advantageous for brothel operators than
prostitutes.
To
operate a mobile snack bar in Germany, one has to be in compliance with the DIN
10500/1 standard for "Vending Vehicles for Perishable Food," which
states, for example, that soap dispensers and disposable towels are required. A
brothel operator is not subject to any such restrictions. All he or she has to
do is report to authorities when the brothel is opened.
Prostitutes
still avoid registering with authorities. In Hamburg, with its famous
Reeperbahn red-light district, only 153 women are in compliance with
regulations and have registered with the city's tax office. The government
wants prostitutes to pay taxes. Does it have to establish rules for the
profession in return?
The
odd role the government assumes in the sex trade is in evidence among street
hookers in Bonn. Every evening, prostitutes have to buy a tax ticket from a
machine, valid until 6 a.m. the next day. The ticket costs €6.
A Big Mac for Sex
In
the northern part of Cologne, where drug-addicted prostitutes work along
Geestemünder Strasse not far from the Ford plant, no taxes are levied. As part
of a social project, so-called "working stalls" -- essentially walled
off parking spots for car sex -- are built into a space under a shed roof.
Although there are no signs plainly indicating that the facility is for
prostitution, a speed limit of 10 kilometers per hour is posted for the fenced
area, and drivers are required to move in a counter-clockwise direction.
On
a cold spring evening, about 20 women are standing along the edge of the area.
Some have brought along camping chairs while others are sitting in repurposed
bus shelters. When a john has agreed on a price with one of the women, he takes
her to one of the stalls. There are eight of the stalls under the shed roof, as
well as a separate room for cyclists and pedestrians, with a concrete floor and
a park bench. There is an alarm button in each stall, and a Catholic women's
social service group monitors the area every evening.
Alia,
a 23-year-old in a blonde wig, has squeezed herself into a corsage and she is
trying to cover up the alcohol on her breath with a mint. Referring to herself
and the other street prostitutes, Alia says: "People who work here have a
real problem."
Alia's
path to Geestemünder Strasse began when she dropped out of school and moved in
with a boyfriend, who sent her out to turn tricks. She began working as a
prostitute because of "financial difficulties and love," she says,
and soon marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines and alcohol came into the mix.
"There is no prostitution without coercion and distress," she says.
She has been walking the streets for three years. "A woman who is doing
well doesn't work like this," she says.
The
going rate for oral sex and intercourse used to be €40 on Geestemünder Strasse.
But when the nearby city of Dortmund closed its streetwalking area, more women
came to Cologne, says Alia. "There are more and more women now, and they
drop their prices so that they'll make something at all," she complains.
Bulgarian and Romanian women sometimes charge less than €10, she says.
"One woman here will even do it for a Big Mac."
Germany's Human Trafficking Problem
But women from Eastern
Europe hardly work on Geestemünder Strasse. They have been driven away by
regular police passport checks, which were in fact intended to find and protect
victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution. Now the girls work the
street in the southern part of Cologne, but this still brings down prices in
the northern neighborhood.
In
2007 Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic Congresswoman from New York and founder of
the Human Trafficking Caucus in the United States Congress, wrote about the
consequences of the legalization of prostitution in and around the gambling
mecca of Las Vegas. "Once upon a time," she wrote, "there was
the naive belief that legalized prostitution would improve life for
prostitutes, eliminate prostitution in areas where it remained illegal and
remove organized crime from the business. Like all fairy tales, this turns out
to be sheer fantasy."
German
law enforcement officers working in red-light districts complain that they are
hardly able to gain access to brothels anymore. Germany has become a
"center for the sexual exploitation of young women from Eastern Europe, as
well as a sphere of activity for organized crime groups from around the
world," says Manfred Paulus, a retired chief detective from the southern
city of Ulm. He used to work as a vice detective and now warns women in
Bulgaria and Belarus against being lured to Germany.
Statistically
speaking, Germany has almost no problem with prostitution and human
trafficking. According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), there were
636 reported cases of "human trafficking for the purpose of sexual
exploitation" in 2011, or almost a third less than 10 years earlier.
Thirteen of the victims were under 14, and another 77 were under 18.
There
are many women from EU countries "whose situation suggests they are the
victims of human trafficking, but it is difficult to provide proof that would
hold up in court," reads the BKA report. Everything depends on the women's
testimony, the authors write, but there is "little willingness to cooperate
with the police and assistance agencies, especially in the case of presumed
victims from Romania and Bulgaria." And when women do dare to say
something, their statements are "often withdrawn."
Declining Convictions
A
study by the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law
concluded that official figures on human trafficking say "little about the
actual scope of the offence."
According
to a report on human trafficking recently presented by European Commissioner
for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström, there are more than 23,600 victims in the
EU, and two-thirds of them are exploited sexually. Malmström, from Sweden, sees
indications that criminal gangs are expanding their operations. Nevertheless,
she says, the number of convictions is declining, because police are
overwhelmed in their efforts to combat trafficking. She urges Germany to do
more about the problem.
But
what if the German prostitution law actually helps human traffickers? Has the
law in fact fostered prostitution and, along with it, human trafficking?
Axel
Dreher, a professor of international and development politics at the University
of Heidelberg, has attempted to answer these questions, using data from 150
countries. The numbers were imprecise, as are all statistics relating to trafficking
and prostitution, but he was able to identify a trend: Where prostitution is
legal, there is more human trafficking than elsewhere.
Most
women who come to Germany to become prostitutes are not kidnapped on the street
-- and most do not seriously believe that they'll be working in a German
bakery. More commonly, they are women like Sina, who fall in love with a man
and follow him to Germany, or like Alina, who know that they are going to
become prostitutes. But they often don't know how bad it can get -- and they
are unaware that they will hardly be able to keep any of the money they earn.
Some
cases are even more disturbing. In December, German TV audiences were shocked
by the show "Wegwerfmädchen" ("Disposable Girls"), part of
the "Tatort" crime series, filmed in the northern German city of
Hanover. It depicts pimps throwing two severely injured young women into the
trash after a sex orgy. Just a few days after the episode aired, Munich police
found a whimpering, scantily clad girl in a small park.
The Isar Dungeon
The
18-year-old Romanian had fled from a brothel. She told the officers that three
men and two women had approached her on the street in her native village. The
strangers had promised her a job as a nanny. When they arrived in Munich, she
said, they blindfolded her and took her to a basement cell with a door that
could only be opened with a security code.
Another
girl was sitting on a bunk bed in the dark room, she said, and there was the
sound of running water behind the walls. The police assume that the hiding
place was in an empty factory near the Isar River, which flows through Munich.
The men raped her and, when she refused to work in a brothel, they beat her,
she said.
The
officers were dubious at first, but the girl had remembered the pimps' names.
They were arrested and are now in custody. Because they refuse to answer
questions, the eerie dungeon still hasn't been found and the Romanian woman is
now in the witness protection program.
Sometimes
girls are sent by their own families, like Cora from Moldova. The 20-year-old
digs her hands into the pockets of her hoodie, and she is wearing plush
slippers with big eyes sewn to them. Cora lives in a hostel run by a Romanian
assistance center for victims of human traffickers. When girls in Moldova are
15 or 16, says Cora's psychologist, their brothers and fathers often say to
them: "Whore, go out and make some money."
Cora's
brothers took their attractive and well-behaved sister to a disco in the
nearest city. Her only duty there was to serve drinks, but she met a man there
with contacts in Romania. "He said that I could make a lot more money in
the discos there." Cora went with him, first to Romania and then to
Germany.
'Process of Emancipation'
After
being raped for an entire day in Nuremberg, she says, she knew what she had to
do. She worked in a brothel on Frauentormauer, one of Germany's oldest
red-light districts. She received the men in her room, allegedly for up to 18
hours a day. She says that police officers also came to the brothel -- as
customers. "They didn't notice anything. Or else they didn't care."
The
brothel was very busy on Christmas Eve 2012. Cora says that her pimp demanded
that she work a 24-hour shift, and that he stabbed her in the face with a knife
when she refused. The wound was bleeding so profusely that she was allowed to
go to the hospital. A customer whose mobile phone number she knew helped her
flee to Romania, where Cora filed charges against her tormentor. The pimp
called her recently, she says, and threatened to track her down.
Despite
stories like these, politicians in Berlin feel no significant pressure to do
anything. This is partly because, in the debate over prostitution, an
ideologically correct position carries more weight than the deplorable
realities. For example, when the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences held a
conference on prostitution in Germany a year ago, an attendee said that
prostitution, "as a recognized sex trade, is undergoing a process of
emancipation and professionalization."
Such
statements are shocking to Rahel Gugel, a law professor. "That's absurd.
It has nothing to do with reality," she says. A professor of law in social
work at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University, Gugel wrote her
dissertation on prostitution law and has worked for an aid organization.
Proponents
of legalization argue that everyone has the right to engage in whatever
profession he or she chooses. Some feminists even praise prostitutes for their
emancipation, because, they say, women should be able to do what they want with
their bodies. In practice, however, it becomes clear how blurred the boundaries
are between voluntary and forced prostitution. Did women like Alina and Cora
become prostitutes voluntarily, and did they make autonomous decisions?
"It is politically correct in Germany to respect the decisions of
individual women," says lawyer Gugel. "But if you want to protect
women, this isn't the way to do it."
Berlin's Erroneous Approach
According to Gugel, many
women are in emotional or economic predicaments. There is evidence that a
higher-than-average number of prostitutes were abused or neglected as children.
Surveys have shown that many can be considered traumatized. Prostitutes suffer
from depression, anxiety disorders and addiction at a much higher rate than the
general population. Most prostitutes have been raped, many of them repeatedly.
In surveys, most women say that they would get out of prostitution immediately
if they could.
Of
course, there are also those women who decide that they would rather sell their
bodies than stock supermarket shelves. But there is every indication that they
are a minority, albeit one that is vocally represented by a few female brothel
owners and prostitution lobbyists like Felicitas Schirow.
German
law takes a fundamentally erroneous approach, says law professor Gugel. To
protect women, she explains, prostitution needs to be limited and the customers
punished. Hers is a lone voice in Germany.
But
not elsewhere in Europe. Some countries that once pursued a path similar to
Germany's are turning away and following the example set by the Swedes. Two
years before Germany passed its prostitution law, the Swedes took the opposite
approach. Activist Kajsa Ekis Ekman is fighting to convince the rest of Europe
to emulate her country. Since publishing a book in which she described the
lives of prostitutes, Ekman has been traveling from one European city to the
next, as a sort of ambassador in the fight against human trafficking.
In
mid-April, Ekman's campaign took her to KOFRA, a women's center in Munich.
Ekman is blond, blue-eyed, petite and energetic. She sits on a narrow wooden
chair and is so intent on talking that the cup of coffee in front of her gets
cold -- as if there weren't enough time for all the arguments that are now
important to make.
As
a student in Barcelona, Ekman shared an apartment with a woman who worked as a
prostitute. She witnessed how pimps dominate their employees. "I've been
involved ever since I experienced how my roommate was selling her body,"
she says. Back in Sweden, she was astonished by a public debate over free love
and the self-determination of prostitutes. "What I had seen was
different," says Ekman.
Punishing the Clients, Not the Prostitutes
In
1999, when Sweden made it illegal to buy sexual services, its European
neighbors could hardly believe it. For the first time, it was the customers and
not the prostitutes who were being punished.
"Prostitution
now flourishes in obscurity," wrote the influential German newspaper Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, saying that it was a "defeat for the women's
movement in Sweden," and speculating that "dogmatic feminism" was
at work. Can a society that wants to be free of prudery punish men who visit
prostitutes? It can, says Ekman, citing the successes in her country, where
fewer and fewer men are paying for sex and where those who do are more and more
ashamed of it. "Before our law came into effect, one in eight men in
Sweden had visited a prostitute," she says, and notes that that number has
since declined to one in 12.
Of
course, prostitution still exists in Sweden, but street prostitution has
declined by half. The total number of prostitutes has dropped from an estimated
2,500 to about 1,000 to 1,500. Pimps bring women from Eastern Europe into the
country in minivans and they often camp out on the outskirts of cities, but
prostitution is no longer a big business. Critics counter that prostitution in
apartments and via the Internet has increased, and some men are now going to
brothels in the Baltic countries or Eastern Europe instead.
The
Swedish law isn't based on the prostitute's right to make autonomous decisions,
but on the equal status of men and women, which is enshrined in both the
Swedish and German constitutions. The argument, in greatly simplified terms, is
that prostitution is exploitation, and that there is always an imbalance in
power. The fact that men can buy women for sex, the Swedes argue, cements a
perception of women that is detrimental to equal rights and all women.
'Pimp My Bordello'
Sweden
punishes the customers, pimps and human traffickers, not the prostitutes. This
approach is intended to stifle demand for sex for money and make the business
unprofitable for traffickers and exploiters. Two years ago, the Swedes
increased the maximum penalty for johns from six to 12 months in prison.
Although
the police are not always especially assiduous about pursuing punters, they
have arrested more than 3,700 men since 1999. In most cases, the men were only
forced to pay fines. There are also debates in Sweden over whether the
restrictive law is the right approach, but it enjoys considerable support among
the population. Ten years after the law was enacted, more than 70 percent of
Swedes said they supported punishing the men who pay for sex instead of the
prostitutes they pay.
In
Germany, on the other hand, the situation is such that the RTL II television
channel broadcasts a show in which a "Pimp my bordello" team drives
around the country to visit "German brothels in trouble" and boost
the sex business with good advice. It is efforts like this that prompted Alice
Schwarzer, publisher of the feminist journal EMMA, to envision, "as
a near-term goal" for Germany, "a social debate that culminates in
the condemnation of prostitution instead of, as is the case today, its
acceptance and even promotion."
Pierrette
Pape believes that there are consequences to the way prostitution is viewed in
various countries. "Nowadays, a little boy in Sweden grows up with the
fact that buying sex is a crime. A little boy in the Netherlands grows up with
the knowledge that women sit in display windows and can be ordered like
mass-produced goods." Pape is the spokeswoman of the European Women's
Lobby in Brussels, an umbrella group for 2,000 European women's organizations.
Pape
finds it "surprising" that Germany is not seriously reviewing its
policies related to human trafficking. "The debate has begun throughout
Europe, and we hope that German politicians and aid organizations will pay more
attention to human rights in the future than they have until now."
Several
European countries now follow the Swedish model. In Iceland, which has adopted
similar legislation, politicians are even considering a ban on online
pornography. Since 2009, Norway has also punished the customers of prostitutes.
In Barcelona, it is illegal to employ the services of a street prostitute.
The French Approach
Under
a Finnish law enacted in 2006, men can be punished if they were customers of a
prostitute who works for a pimp or is a victim of human trafficking. But it has
proved to be impossible to prove that the men knew that this was the case. The
Finnish Justice Ministry is now preparing a report on whether Finland should
adopt the Swedish model.
Many
in France also want to emulate Sweden. Shortly before taking office, the
minister responsible for women's rights, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, made a bold
announcement. "My goal is to see prostitution disappear," she said.
Politicians and sociologists derided the idea as "utopian," and
prostitutes protested in the streets of Lyon and Paris. Vallaud-Belkacem's
draft law calls for up to six months in prison and a €3,000 fine for clients.
But it will probably take some time before she can prevail within the
government.
And
in Germany? Politicians in Berlin argue over minimal changes to the
prostitution law and then end up doing nothing. In 2007, then-Family Minister
Ursula von der Leyen, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian
Democratic Union (CDU), wanted to make brothels subject to government approval,
and fellow CDU member Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who was interior minister of
the state of Saarland at the time (and who is now governor of the state),
supported her. But the two politicians failed to secure a majority within their
party and nothing happened.
In
2008, the Conference of Equality and Women's Ministers tried to introduce a
rule that would make brothel operators subject to a reliability test. They
consulted with their colleagues in the Conference of Interior Ministers, but
nothing happened.
Standing Pat
In 2009, female
politicians from the CDU, the SDP, the business-friendly Free Democratic Party
(FDP) and the Green Party in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg called
for an initiative in the Bundesrat, the legislative body that represents the
German states, against "inhuman flat-rate services." But no changes
were made to the law.
The
Netherlands chose the path of legal deregulation two years before Germany. Both
the Dutch justice minister and the police concede that there have been no
palpable improvements for prostitutes since then. They are generally in poorer
health than before, and increasing numbers are addicted to drugs. The police
estimate that 50 to 90 percent of prostitutes do not practice the profession
voluntarily.
Social
Democrat Lodewijk Asscher believes that the legalization of prostitution was
"a national mistake." The Dutch government now plans to tighten the
law to combat a rise in human trafficking and forced prostitution.
The
Germans aren't there yet. The Greens, who played such an instrumental role by
supporting the prostitution law 12 years ago, have no regrets. A spokesperson
for Kerstin Müller, the Green Party parliamentary floor leader at the time,
says that she focuses on other issues today. Irmingard Schewe-Gerigk, who was
also a leading Green Party parliamentarian at the time the law was passed,
says: "The law was good. It's just that we should have implemented it more
thoroughly." Interestingly enough, Schewe-Gerigk is now the chairman of
the women's rights organization Terre des Femmes, which aims to achieve "a
society without prostitution."
The
third pioneer of the new law at the time, Volker Beck, also continues to
support it today. Beck, his party's former legal policy spokesman, does call
for new assistance programs and exit programs. But he says that Sweden cannot
be a model for Germany. "A ban doesn't improve anything, because then it
will just happen in places that are difficult to monitor," Beck says.
Besides, he adds, "criminal gangs will take over the business" -- as
if upstanding businesspeople were the ones running it today.
'Realm of Illegality'
A
few of his fellow Greens disagree. "A large segment of the industry is
already operating in the realm of illegality today," says Thekla Walker
from Stuttgart. The chair of her party's state organization, Walker has sought
to change her party's approach to prostitution.
"The
autonomous prostitute we envisioned when the prostitution law was enacted in
2001, who negotiates on equal terms with her client and can support herself
with her income, is the exception," reads a motion Walker introduced
during a party convention last month. The current laws, it continues, do not
protect women from exploitation, but grants them "merely the freedom to
allow themselves to be exploited." The Greens, Walker wrote, cannot turn a
blind eye to the "catastrophic living and working conditions of many
prostitutes."
But
they did. Walker withdrew the motion because it stood no chance of securing a
majority, though the party has said it would take a closer look to see if the
law requires improvements.
In
Germany, those who speak out against legalization are considered "prudish
and moralizing," says law professor Gugel. Besides, she adds, she doesn't
have the feeling "that politicians have much interest in the
subject."
Family
Minister Kristina Schröder, though, did in fact set out to crack down on human
trafficking and forced prostitution. "Despite very intensive efforts, it
hasn't been possible to achieve unanimity among the four ministries
involved," Schröder's ministry said in a statement. Her desire to regulate
brothels more heavily failed in the face of opposition by Justice Minister
Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. Schnarrenberger believes that reforming the
law is unnecessary and repeats the old argument, namely that the German law
brings women out of illegality while the Swedish law forces them into the dark.
Given
such disagreement, it would be a miracle if the government reached a decision
soon to protect victims of human trafficking more effectively. Instead, women
will continue to have to fend for themselves.
Completely Legal
Alina
from Sânandrei managed to flee from the Airport Muschis brothel. After a raid,
she and 10 other women ran to a Turkish restaurant in the neighborhood. The
owner's brother, who was a customer, hid the women and rented a bus at his own
expense. Then he tried to drive them to Romania. The pimps tried to stop the
bus, but the women were able to escape.
Alina
now lives in her parent's house again. She hasn't told them about what
happened. She is working, but she doesn't want to say what she does. The pay,
she says, is enough for her bus ticket, clothes and a little makeup.
Alina
sometimes visits the AIDrom, a counseling center for victims of human
trafficking in the western Romanian city of Timisoara, where she speaks with
psychologist Georgiana Palcu, who is trying to find her a training position as
a hairdresser or a cook. Palcu says that the conversations with young women who
have returned from Germany are "endless and difficult." She
encourages them to be optimistic.
But
Palcu has no illusions. Even if a girl could find a training position, she
probably wouldn't take the job, because such positions offer no more than €200
for a 40-hour workweek. As a result, says Palcu, many of those who returned
from Germany after being mistreated there are working as prostitutes again.
"What can I tell them?" she asks. "This is reality. You can't
live on €200."
The
Airport Muschis brothel in Schönefeld no longer exists. It's been replaced by
Club Erotica, which does not offer flat-rates. But johns still have plenty of
choice in the area. A few kilometers away in Schöneberg, the King George has
switched to flat-rate pricing..... For €99, clients can enjoy sex and drinks
until the establishment closes.